Spring Running in Exeter: Mud, Salt, Wind, and One Perfect Week

Spring in Exeter is the weirdest season to run in. You'd think winter would be the hard part, and it is in a different way, but at least winter is honest. Winter tells you what it is. You layer up, you watch for ice, you accept it. Spring lies to you.

Last week I wore a base layer, wind shell, and gloves on a 34-degree morning. Three days later the thermometer said 62 and I was running in shorts like a person who'd forgotten the last four months had happened. That is not an anomaly. That is spring here.

A few things that make running in Exeter particularly strange this time of year:

Mud season is real. Not a cute metaphor, a real thing. Henderson-Swasey Town Forest turns into a running joke for about three weeks in late March and April. You can do it if you don't mind losing a shoe. Some people don't mind. Most of us relocate to pavement until the ground firms up, which is its own problem because the pavement has just spent a winter getting worked over by frost heaves and plows, and the potholes on parts of Front Street could swallow a compact car.

Then there's the salt. The roads got treated heavily through the winter and the residue sits there into April. Your black running shoes come home gray. It gets in the creases of your joints if you're sweating. I'm not a chemist but I don't think inhaling road salt particulate is part of a healthy training plan.

The wind is its own deal. Exeter sits close enough to the coast that you get these raw, searching winds off the Atlantic for a lot of April. You'll do an out-and-back along the rail trail and somehow it's into the wind both ways, which I'm told is physically impossible but has happened to me enough times that I no longer fully trust physics.

But. (There is a but.)

The moment it turns, it turns. One day in the second half of April you step outside and the air smells different. The mud has started to crust over. The sun feels like it means it. You do five miles and come back thinking wait, when did I get a tan line. The Squamscott smells more alive than dead for the first time since October. Every runner you pass nods at you with the slightly unhinged look of someone who has remembered that this is actually a great place to live.

The other thing worth mentioning is that Boston is mid-April, which means anyone training for it around here has been slogging through this exact weather all winter and spring. If you see someone running in a trash-bag poncho on a 38-degree rainy Saturday in March, that's why. They aren't crazy. They're peaking.

Gear-wise, my actual advice for April here is to stop trusting the morning. Check the forecast for the hour you'll be running, not the hour you'll be leaving the house. Keep a second layer in the car. Assume wet and hope for dry. Accept that on a few runs you will be cold when you didn't need to be or hot when you couldn't take anything off, and this is just the tax you pay to live somewhere with four real seasons.

One more thing and then I'll stop. Blackflies are coming. Usually second or third week of May around here, sometimes late April if it has been warm. They will ruin your runs in the woods for about a month. Treat your cap. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Spring running in Exeter is frustrating and bad and also, somehow, the best stretch of the year. If you're new here, you'll figure it out. If you've been here a while, you already know.