Wednesday, December 19, 2007

What is this "Salt" of which you speak?

Ok from the title of the post alot of people are probably thinking I'm on a low sodium diet....not the case ( please pass me another hunk of bacon , and a side of home fries) What I'm talking about is Rocksalt, that stuff they throw on the roads to melt ice...well apparently Waterbury has never heard of the stuff. Yesterday Temps hit the balmy high of 35 degrees (break out the shorts!) so most of the ice/snow banks expereinced a little meltage unfortunately as the sun set and temps dipped below freezing.....the melted ice/snow refroze to form....BLACK ICE.....the scourge of all New England Winter Driving. As I left my house for Newington I decided to take the "less hilly" route and get on I-84 in Waterbury....as I drove down East Main street and saw cars crawling and struggling for traction, I decided to scrap the spin class in Newington , there'll be other nights..so instead I finished some Christmas Shopping and went to the Waterbury YMCA....I will tell you this...even the main roads were still slick....as I BSed with one of the lifeguards she told me how she passed at least 2 accidents on the same strech of road. Now if I were a public works official wouldn't ice related spinouts and wrecks wouldn't that set off bells and whistles of gee maybe we should throw down a little sand and rock salt just to give a tiny bit of traction....of course not ....the body shop's need business besides those little teeney boppers with the low rider civics need to HTFU...at least that seemed to be the Mentality of DOT. Anyhoo after an equally semi-slick ride home I sat down and crashed for the night. Here are the Workout stats

Ran 52 min. on the treadmill for a distance of about 6.25 miles
Swam 3000 yards...main set 5x 100 on 1:25 held about 1:19-1:20

so my workout wasn't exactly the greatest but I can only do so much on the treadmill. This weekend temps will go above freezing so I should be able to crank out a good 15 mile run and possible (gasp) an outdoor ride.....we'll see how the weather plays out.

The sliding Subaru Driver
R.D.

3 comments:

Angry Runner said...

I'm torn between writing a letter to the editor or calling up the street department and bitching someone out. I'm sure your town's roads are squeaky clean, as they usually are. For all of the taxes i pay to that shithole...i swear...

Bob Almighty said...

sadly Wolcott didn't even live up to it reputation, although they di chuck some sand down for the aM commute.

rocketpants said...

Black ice...not fun. I didn't discover how great salt on roads really was until life in MA. I grew up with just sand in Idaho...and while salt is hard on cars...it makes it SO easy to get around in the winter.