SkooshMagoo

This year there has been a lot of questions about what to wear on your feet when running in the snow and ice. This year in Kansas has been particularly nasty with snow fall and lots of cold weather to keep the snow around. Typically this weather leads to many people in the gym running on the treadmill. There are a few hearty souls who choose to run outside no matter what the weather conditions are. Running in cold weather is perfectly normal for most of us. The human body is an amazing animal capable of adapting to wildly changing conditions. Just look at Badwater for heat and the Yukon Artic Ultra for cold. If there’s land, there’s someone that will run on it.

The most important thing about running in any extreme temperature is what you wear. Running in extreme cold weather you have to think about keeping body heat in and getting moisture away from your body. There are a lot of fabrics out there that specialize in wicking, cotton is not one of those fabrics. Cotton, when it gets wet, will speed up the heat transfer from your body. While cotton is dry, it’ll do a fine job of keeping you warm, but what happens when we run? We sweat, and the cotton gets wet.

My personal favorite in winter time fabric is wool. There are many companies out there who make technical wool clothing from socks to shirts. I’m going to be lazy and keep this post specifically to socks, though there is a lot of literature about the differences between wool and synthetic fabrics and whose wool is better.

There are two groups of people when it comes to what you should wear on your feet in the winter. There’s the Gore-Tex/plasticbag/extrasocks/gaiters/etc… group and there’s the wool sock group. While the former is a great strategy for keeping water away from your feet, the solution is not full proof. By using a waterproof fabric like Gore-Tex, it makes it very hard for any water that’s in your shoe to escape. So if by chance you come across a stream that’s deeper than you thought or your foot falls through some ice, point is, you’ll get water at some point in your shoe. By adding a plastic bag, you do a very good job of keeping that outside water from getting to your feet, but you produce a lot of wetness inside the bag, that can’t go anywhere. In my opinion this will lead to athletes foot.

The strategy I recomend is to use a nice fast draining shoe and wear a nice pair of wool socks. I prefer to wear SmartWoll PhD Running Trail Mini socks. While wearing a good wool sock mixed with a fast draining shoe any water you get in the shoe, will initially be cold. But, within, seconds your natural body heat will warm up the water soaked into the sock. Any access water will drain from the shoe, and you’re left with a damp warm sock that will continue to warm your feet as you run. The longer you run you may notice that the sock will even dry out. But if it doesn’t that’s no problem, cause your foot stays warm the whole time.

I’ve done many of runs (10 mile+) in just one pair of wool socks in sub freezing temperatures, such that, at the end of the run my socks are soaked (just as if I were doing stream crossing in the spring/summer), but perfectly warm for the whole run.

My experiences with running has lead me to believe that dry feet, while ideal, can not be guaranteed (and in the case of Kansas, rarely achieved). It is much better to be prepared to be wet, then to hope you don’t get wet.