My Journey With Health And Fitness – Surviving Snowmageddon 2022

Yesterday I did the usual get up early, have my breakfast and tea, read the paper and head down to the new gym to do my workout. I lasted about 3 seconds before coming back into the house. It was bloody freezing in the garage! Ok, I thought, this is a good day to take a little break. Little did I know it was about to get so much worse.

We knew snow was coming as they have been telling us for over a week. As the days passed they started saying things like artic cold and substantial precipitation. Hmm, they don’t usually get it right so when they were saying up to 15 cm (6 inches) I was pretty sure that we might see about 1/2 of that. WRONG!!!!! Instead we got 30 cm (a foot of snow) and it was cold, I mean really cold. As you can imagine, no workout again today (unless you include the amount of time I spent removing the snow from my truck which I had no intention of driving anywhere today).

So, what did we do to survive Snowmageddon 2022? First for those of you who don’t live in the Metro Vancouver area let me put this in perspective. We really don’t get a lot of snow here. As a matter of fact I think the last time we had this much slow was in 2008. It has pretty much shut down our airport, canceled numerous ferry routes and in several cities taken out the transit system. No, we don’t do this kind of weather well.

But you know what, there are things we do to just get through this. For example, my husband was out at around 6:30am this morning with the snowblower. He made sure the sidewalks on our end of the street were completely clear as well as several of the driveways. Despite not planning to leave the house I cleared off my truck and then finished my brother’s (while he had ventured out he did not clear the snow from the roof of his truck and to me that is a major safety issue). Because it is cold and ugly out I spent hours today decorating a gingerbread house for our Christmas Eve event. I am also about to take a nice bottle of wine over to our neighbour’s because she works at the airport and I am sure is having a really bad day. I was also fortunate that another volunteer who lives across from Keeva, the dog that I walk, was more than willing to cover my shifts until the roads clear up. Basically, we just hunker down and are waiting for the rain to start on Friday.

I’ve decided I am just going to have to live with the fact there will not really be workouts this week. Tomorrow I have no intention of even checking the temperature in my gym because they say with the windchill it will be -22C (7.6 below in Fahrenheit) so I think I will just put on my favourite jammies and slipper socks and drink tea.