Or can it.
Ice.
It's like a road mated with an ice rink and made this
I was going away for the weekend with my wife and our great friends Jeff and Krista to a remote cabin in northern Idaho (a very charming cattle-ranch with guest cabins, they have a massive main guest lodge and also offer surprisingly exciting two-horse open sleigh rides, check them out at westernpleasureranch.com . Note: despite the inclusion of pleasure in the name, nothing kinky was going down...).
What the guest ranch also promised was solitude, snow, and an extensive amount of dirt roads. By dirt roads, of course, I'm referring to the glorified iceways that were now these backroads. With freezing rain over slush over ice slicks, I knew that this weekend would certainly have it in for my week's 90-minute long run, a key session that can't be missed.
Fortunately, it wasn't, thanks to this article I found when I basically google-searched 'How to Run in Winter.' The Screw Shoe: For Running on Packed Snow and Ice , is an article by Matt Carpenter about how to tame the boundary between man and beast by literally putting screws in your shoe. Rather than buying a product out there like Yak Trax, which I didn't have time for, I went ahead and followed the articles instructions.
Basically it was crazy easy. I took my recently retired pair of Asics road shoes - I always keep my most recent pair of retired running shoes, a practice which my wife has always questioned, and one which has never been defensible... until now! - and simply stopped by my local family-owned hardware store and picked up the recommended screws (hex-headed metal sheet screws, #8). I tried to find screws that were 3/8" long instead of the slightly longer 1/2", because I was worried about how thin the heels were on the forefoot of my running shoe, but 1/2" was all they had, so I grabbed thirty-six of them, 18 for each shoe. Cost was only just over $3.
Buster the ranch dog and I are best friends; he was kind enough to walk us to our cabin.
Then we headed out with our friends to the Guest Ranch. My packet of screws and my old pair of running shoes riding along, about to be joined with the certainty of a backwoods shotgun wedding. I wanted to use a power drill, but couldn't find the bit, so I actually screwed them in by hand, making up the pattern as I went along with the help of my friend Krista. Screwing them in by hand with a screwdriver was greatly assisted by: 1) I have a screwdriver with a ratcheting mechanism, diminishing the forearm burn, and 2) I brought along a micro screwdriver to stab in a pilot hole to guide the screw. Assembly was somewhat fun and straight-forward.
18 screws per shoe (I ended up taking out that central forefoot screw cause of some slight pressure). This pattern worked really well.
Taking a short practice run down the icy drive leading towards our cabin (as shown above), I had 100% no-slip action. Whatever the opposite of lubricant is, it must feel like this, because I felt like I was running in trail shoes on dry concrete. The grip was flawless, but I did have some pressure spots associated with a few of the forefoot screws. To combat this, I simply took the insole out of my identically sized Asics trail-running shoes and doubled-down in my screw shoes. Problem solved.
The next day I took off for my 90 minute run and could not have been happier with how these shoes worked. It was simply beautiful, running through the snowy north Idaho hill country with perfect grip over what would otherwise be sketchy-in-even-a-4x4-truck ice. The sensation was like when you go snorkeling for the first time and are breathing with your face underwater. Your mind is telling you that this is unnatural and not physically possible, but there you go swimming along. Looking ahead at the puddles of water over ice, my instincts said it was impassable, but I ran over everything with a completely natural, non-disrupted gait. The most beautiful part was the simple freedom of it; being out running effortlessly for miles in what would've otherwise been austere conditions. For only $3 of screws, a retired pair of shoes, and a bit of time to put the combine the two, the simplicity and perfect function of this system blew me away. While it probably won't work well for mixed concrete and ice runs (you'd probably only want to use these on pure ice, as they'd feel like track spikes running across asphalt), I highly, highly recommend these for winter running. Instead of being locked indoors on some godforsaken treadmill, you can go out into wilder country and enjoy scenes like these:
