Have you ever noticed that on the first day of track practice, it always snows?

I don’t know why this weird phenomenon happens, but you can almost always count on it. Just when we thought it was spring... BAM! It snows.

Thankfully I was on vacation in California last week and didn’t have to experience the cold weather. I have a tan line on my arm to prove it.

During my high school spring sports career, we spent a lot of time in the cold.

In junior high, we would have to run the stairs in the high school when there was too much snow on the track. That was one of the worst workouts ever. When it finally did get warm enough to melt the snow, it would be too muddy to run the track. Then, by the time we had our first meet, we could hardly stay in our lanes!

There was one track that we always dreaded going to. The Cut Bank track was rubber and very nice. However, you could never count on the weather. One time, it snowed on us all morning, then by the end of the day, it was about 70 degrees and I had a sunburn. Cut Bank was a very weird weather pattern going on. You never knew which way the wind was going to blow either. Sometimes your 100-meter dash time was extremely fast, and other times your time looked like you walked the whole thing.

By the time high school rolled around, I was sick of running long distances in circles and switched to tennis. That caused a whole new set of problems. When there was snow on the court, we couldn’t shovel it off too quickly, or the courts would crack from the temperature change. We would go take a few layers off at each practice, trying to move the melting along. In the meantime, we had to practice in the gym. Let me tell you, tennis balls bounce quite differently on wood than they do on pavement. It took awhile to adjust when we finally got to practice outside.

Now, I don’t know if you have ever spent time in north central Montana, but there is one type of weather you can almost always count on. The forecast is usually windy, with a chance of more wind.

A 30 mile per hour wind tends to make tennis balls do weird things. We learned to compensate for wind. I remember during one specific match, someone hit the ball over the net, and it was so windy that the ball bounced back over the net without anyone touching it. I can’t remember who got the point on that play.

As golf, tennis, track, and softball start up in Lake County, I’m sure we can count on some bad weather. It seems to come with the territory.