Ice Mornings: The Forty-Minute Shuffle
A couple lessons back I called rain or shine non-negotiable, and that holds. Ice is the one condition I'll actually modify for, and it's worth a whole lesson on why, and on what an ice morning actually looks like, because it isn't the same walk. It's a different skill worth experimenting with.
What makes ice its own thing
Rain is annoying. Cold is annoying. Both are survivable with the right layer and a bad attitude. Ice is a fall risk, full stop, and falls are what I spend most of my working hours dealing with in other people's bodies. I'm not going to talk you into treating that casually just to keep a perfect attendance streak.
So here's the arrangement. We still show up. We just don't walk the same loop the same way.
What changes on an ice morning
We shorten it. The full loop is a mile and a half. On solid ice we might do a third of that, or just the flat stretch near the trailhead, or some mornings we just walk the parking area back and forth for twenty minutes and call it good. Nobody's tracking mileage. I've told you that before and I mean it here more than anywhere.
We shuffle, not stride. This is the actual technique, and it's the same thing I tell patients recovering from a fall or a surgery. Small steps. Feet under you, not out in front. Keep your center of gravity low and centered instead of reaching forward with your leg the way you normally would. It looks a little penguin-ish. That's fine. Speed isn't what I'm selling.
Posture matters more here than anywhere else in the loop. Shoulders down, not hunched up around your ears bracing for a fall, chin level, eyes on the ground about six feet ahead of you, not straight down at your feet and not off looking at the mountains. You need to see what's coming without losing where you are right now.
Traction devices help. Poles help more. If you've got the little slip-on cleats for your shoes, wear them on genuinely icy mornings. If you've got trekking poles or even just a solid walking stick, bring it. Two points of contact instead of two feet is a real difference when the ground's unpredictable.
We keep our hands free. Pockets are for warm mornings. On ice, hands out a little, ready to catch yourself or catch someone else. I'll say this plainly because I don't think it's obvious: if someone near you starts to go down, you reach for them, you don't just watch. Most of the time nobody needs the reach. Once in a while it matters a lot.
What doesn't change
We still show up together. That's the actual point of an ice morning, more than most mornings. Anyone can walk a nice loop on a sixty-degree April day by themselves. Showing up on a morning where the driveway's a skating rink and walking a slow, ugly forty minutes with someone else next to you, that's the group doing the thing I actually built it for.
I think about one January morning a lot. Solid ice, the whole loop, the kind where you could see your breath and the ground both. I'd said rain or shine, so I went, figuring I'd probably be standing out there by myself feeling a little foolish. Two people showed up. We shuffled the loop in about forty minutes, which on a normal day takes us maybe twenty-five. Nobody talked much because talking while shuffling on ice takes more concentration than you'd think. We just moved, carefully, together, and got back to the cars and stood there a minute before anyone said anything.
I count that as one of the better mornings we've had. Not because it was pleasant. It wasn't especially. But it's the clearest example I've got of the whole thing working the way I hoped it would when I started this. Two people didn't skip a bad morning because someone else was counting on them being there. That's the accountability part doing its actual job, not the theoretical version of it.
A note on judgment calls
I'll make the call on whether we're shortening or modifying the route, but you should feel free to make your own call too. If you get to the trailhead and it looks worse than you expected, you can turn around, walk the flat parking loop by yourself, and go home. That's not quitting. That's the same judgment I'm asking of myself every ice morning I decide whether to send us out at all. I'd rather you skip the hard stretch than push through it to prove something to me or the group. Nobody's watching a scoreboard here.
Before next time
If you don't already have some kind of traction for your shoes, this is worth picking up before the next cold snap. Cheap ones from any sporting goods aisle work fine. You don't need the expensive version for a flat loop in American Fork.