"That's not snow...it's concrete!"

Friday, March 11, 2011

It’s never a good thing to hear snowplows around 1 a.m. and every hour after that until its time to get up in the morning. The call cancelling school came around 6:30 a.m., so I knew it had to be bad. Mayfield is already over the limit and any further snow days will have to be made up at the end of the year…something they couldn’t possibly want to do. Since Holly’s van was still at Dan’s getting fixed, I was planning on driving her to work in Beachwood and she didn’t need to get there until 9 a.m. It was 7 a.m. and that would leave me with plenty of time to shovel the drive…right?

I opened the garage door, watching for daylight to start shining in as it went up. When it was up over a foot and all I could see was snow…I figured Holly would be late and I’d be later.

I grabbed my pushing shovel and tried to make my path down the middle of our double drive, as I always did. I went about six inches and stopped. To coin a phrase of a friend about shoveling this stuff, “it was like shoveling cement.” I reached for my throwing shovel and began my attack.

I suppose the most annoying thing about sticky snow is that it likes to stick to your shovel. That’s a great thing because you get to pick it up and move it twice…which was what I really wanted to do. I spent the next two hours shoveling only to find that the half I’d shoveled had two inches of new snow on it before I’d finished the second half. I shoveled this and then drove Holly to work. When I returned after a couple of hours, I had another three inches to deal with. I moved that and decided there was no point in doing anything else until the snow stopped falling.

After calling clients from home and rescheduling them for next week, I decided to put in some time on the trainer. I’d already burned a ton of calories and wanted to pile on some more. I managed an hour, took a shower and headed back out for my last push before having to go pick up Holly. There was another couple of inches and I’m guessing that we ended up somewhere in the 15-inch neighborhood and that I’d spent three hours shoveling…easily the toughest day of the winter.

Bike duration: 60 minutes. Shoveling duration: Infinity…plus one minute.
Training Heart Rate: 130 bpm biking. 150 bpm shoveling snow.
Calories burned during workout: 900 biking. 2,100 shoveling snow.