Donald Shampine

I get asked fairly often how I handle running in the winter. Honestly, I treat it like most runs and don’t dress much differently, aside from adding a hat and gloves. Cold really isn’t the issue for me. Ice is. I’ve tried trail shoes, and while they work well in snow, they aren’t very warm and they’re not effective on ice. We also tried a simple hack by drilling sheet metal screws into the bottom of our running shoes. That does help somewhat with traction on ice, but they don’t always stay in, and drilling into your shoes obviously shortens their lifespan. I’ve also tried several winter traction products over the years, but most fell short, either due to poor fit or a lack of stability. Eventually, I found a setup that works for me. I use Kahtoola EXOspikes for winter trail running and Kahtoola NANOspikes for icy road running and walking. Both are easy to put on and take off, and more importantly, they’ve given me increased confidence running through Michigan winters. Even with...

20,000 days…, that’s how long I have been alive as of today. 20,000 days, 480,000 hours, 28,800,000 minutes. It sounds like a long time when you look backward, but looking forward and measuring in days, it seems significantly less.   We measure our lives in years, and as we age, they pass us by faster and faster. I wonder if we started to measure our lives in days, would we live differently? Would we apologize faster? Would we move on quickly from unhealthy situations? Would we try something new sooner? Would we stop avoiding the hard?   In the early years of our lives, passing time seems like a reasonable thing to do. As a child, the summers seemed to last forever; now, as we get older, they dance past at an accelerated pace. And our time is finite, and we don’t know when the end comes. So, passing time, or worse, wasting time, should not be something we do lightly.   We are so afraid to talk about death and the fact that we will pass on from this world, that we of...