Holiday Lights

With about an hour and a half to kill after work yesterday, I decided to enjoy the relatively clean sidewalks downtown and go for a tour of the holiday light displays. With the arrival of snow, most of my usual paths are off-limits, so I dug into my memory for last year's best winter routes. I wanted 12km so I decided to 2 two loop of Macdonald Cartier to Portage Bridge. A victory lap on Parliament Hill in support of M-rah's 20 day challenge brought my total to just over 13km, pretty close to my estimates!
The run was great. I felt light and fast and best of all warm. Once the run was over, I heard on the radio that the weather was -15 degrees celsius with a windchill of -21. Phew, I didn't feel that cold! Good thing I had my trusty layers. The run itself was great with an average pace of 5:15m/km and a negative split which is always a good thing to have in training. (5:01, 5:17, 5:27, 5:24, 5:15, 5:38, 5:45, 4:41, 5:02, 4:58, 5:11, 5:16, 5:21)

I was a bit dissapointed by the holiday lights set up by the NCC, other years were really much more impressive. I guess the lights were not included in the stimulus packages from our governments. I tried to snatch a few pics with my cell phone, here are the best of them.
Parliament was nicely lit up with spotlights shaped like snowflakes:
Live at Burning Man in the mix.