Welcome to January in the Northern Hemisphere.

Many of you are likely in the midst of the polar vortex, a relatively new term for “cold front.” You are probably procrastinating on checking your weather app this morning for fear of seeing a single-digit number and wind chills pushing real feels below zero. For a decent chunk of that “many of you”—particularly readers in the south and Texas—these may be the coldest temperatures you’ve been subjected to in years, if not ever.

Here at the Lap Count, we don’t want to lie to you about the reality that running in the extreme cold can be deeply unpleasant. Despite what the influencer community wants to sell you, no amount of biohacking or “staying hard” can truly distract from the reality that training at this time of year really sucks.

Even gloved, your fingers will hurt. Even wool-socked, your toes will go numb. Your nose hairs will become known to you in a way they previously weren’t, as your breath condenses and freezes around them like booge-ry stalactites. With snow in the picture, your footing will falter, and if you aren’t careful, you’ll limp saggily like a golden retriever with hip dysplasia after your easy six-miler. Should you attempt a workout or faster paces, your muscles, no matter how clothed, may rebel—nope, sorry, not happenin’.

This isn’t to say running in the extreme cold is impossible (just ask any Midwesterner heading out for an easy hour wearing shorts and a hoodie.) Nor that it’s equally miserable for everyone — we will inevitably receive at least one email from a tundra-based reader this week who delights in shoveling out lane 1 and ripping 400s. But for the rest of us mere mortals with normal human biology and wavering resolve, we’re looking at the spring marathon on the calendar creeping closer by the day and starting to panic.

But the training block isn’t a total loss: with a few key adjustments, we can get through a few miserable weeks with the tips of our extremities intact and our resolve unbroken.

Dress for success.

There are basically two schools of thought when it comes to winter running apparel.

One is to spend as much money as possible on new performance apparel and footwear — realistically, you should have at least $300 worth of products on each section of your body: head, shoulders, knees, and toes. This is actually an instance where you can buy your way out of discomfort! The more you resemble an astronaut or some sort of space blanket-wrapped spring roll, the warmer you’re likely to feel. And the placebo effect of hi-tech, performance-jargon terminology being hawked by apparel manufacturers everywhere can’t be discounted.

Then there’s the old school approach: layering and repurposing gear designed for other activities. Heavy gray sweats from your dad’s 1970s PE class will get dug out of the closet. The mud caked onto summer’s gardening gloves is now insulation. For an outer shell, you’re going to want to battle the wind with the loudest, most plasticky swishy jacket around. Then wrap every exposed or under-layered area with anything made out of wool, even if your skin gets scratched raw and you gain 20 points of sweat-weight over the run. Cap it all off with two-to-seven heavy socks over any protruding piece and you might stand a chance.

If the footing is bad due to ice or snow, and you don’t already own Yaktrax, you can approximate them and winterize an old pair of trainers with metal screws.

Adapt, evolve, overcome.

Sure, you can tell yourself you’ll hit the same mile splits regardless of the weather from the comfort of your couch, but two steps into your warmup will have you conjuring elaborate conversion equations like Albert Einstein to justify why last week’s 5:30s are this week’s 6:00s.

In these conditions, completion is the goal. And that doesn’t even mean completing the full workout as written or anything close to it—some days, it means clocking eight minutes of semi-hard running and calling it a tempo. But hey, you got out the door and came home having logged some sort of elevated effort.

The key is not worrying about what the Strava stats look like—but who are we kidding, you’re not nearly that comfortable with your self-worth and fitness. So as a compromise, just make sure that your running log is full of dramatic and elaborate descriptions of just how awful the conditions were so your coach and the three other people who read your entries know what a hardo you are.

Bring the training indoors.

Of course, if you’re considering doing anything outlined thus far in this section… you could always just run on the treadmill or indoors some other way.

That’s right. The one trick that you’re conditioned to think is somehow weak or insufficient: running in a climate-controlled setting when it sucks ass outdoors. For every one Canadian pounding out miles on a Toronto bike path, there are five indoor warriors sweatily completing their threshold work in a 67º basement to a playlist of mid-2010s EDM hits.

The treadmill catches a lot of flack. It’s boring. It’s horrible. It’s not real running. To all of these, we say: “hogwash!” Plenty of outdoor runs are boring or horrible, too. And there are thousands of athletes walking around citing PRs set on BU’s indoor track or on the roads of Valencia—are those places any more “real,” the miles logged within their confines any more legit than the “ground” covered on the treadmill? We’ll leave that one for the philosophers.

Toughen up.

Despite all the well-crafted wisdom and canny training hacks we’ve offered, some old-timers will still insist that aversion to winter running is a moral failing. And maybe they’re not entirely wrong.

When conditions are comically bad, sometimes the best approach is to lean into it and embrace the absurdity of it all. Wind chill registering at -15ºF? Well that’s unfortunate. Better run a fartlek with every “on” into the headwind at 6 in the morning while Joker-style laughing at the fact that you’re simultaneously hitting max heart rate and risking frostbite. Refuel with a glass of raw eggs and then go out for your double. Perhaps the reason why Minnesotans from Joe Klecker to Dakotah Popehn make up such a strong contingent of U.S. teams is truly because they’re built different and they train different.

As with all pontifications on running philosophy and performance, feel free to cherrypick which pieces of advice are perfect additions to your training regimen and which are unhelpful nonsense. At the end of the day – or week, or season – anything that gets you through the tough times without losing your mind along the way can’t be all bad, right?

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