Talking Headways Podcast: Running to Work

This week we’re joined by bridge engineer Daniel Baxter to talk about his almost daily running commute. We chat about bridges, the gear you need for running in cold weather, staying safe on the roads, and the benefits of running to work. Check out Daniel’s specially curated Spotify playlist.

Scroll down below the audio player for an edited excerpt of our conversation, or click here for an unedited, AI-generated transcript of the entire conversation.

Jeff Wood: There’s also a weather aspect of this, too, that’s interesting, especially since you’re in Minneapolis. Here in the Bay Area, I don’t think people would worry about layers and balaclavas and things like that too much. But you have, specifically in the winter, you have a particular issue with cold climate that happens.

Daniel Baxter: Yeah, I don’t have the source of the statistic, but I remember reading somewhere that, like, Minneapolis is the major city in the country that has the largest swing between the average cold temperature and the average high temperature between the winter and the summer.

So there is a really wide temperature range here. I think as far as just the cold weather goes, I’ve just figured it out gradually by trial and error. I’m just, personally, I’m someone that likes to stick to routines, so I think as I started to do this, as it got colder, I didn’t want that to be the reason that, oh, I’ve gotta stop. So I just kept figuring out what works with adding layers, and then if things went okay at a given cold temperature, then if it was even colder than that, I’d be like, okay, I think this will work — plus one additional layer. I think the coldest that I’ve run to the office was at -23º.

And that required a lot more layers than usual. Like one strategy I use is that if it’s below zero, I just try not to have any exposed skin. And there’s products, like, one of them — seems like it’s intended for like people working in the Arctic — called the Cold Avenger, which is this face mask thing you put on that kind of creates a pool of warm air in front of your mouth.

And so like, between that and no exposed skin, I found that actually those low zero temps really aren’t so terrible.

Jeff Wood: Your wife and your colleagues at work seem to worry about you, though, at temperatures that drop below, I guess -23º, because they wouldn’t let you go one day.

Daniel Baxter: Yeah. I wanted to see how all of this gear would work. This was back in 2019 when it was, I think it was gonna be -28º. And like, the polar vortex had been making the rounds and the news. And the afternoon before a couple of, actually, my sort of senior manager tech people in the company had called me up because they knew I like to do this and they were like, please don’t run tomorrow.

And I was like, oh, okay. I’ll think about it. But then overnight when I was sleeping, my wife left out all these post-it notes in the bathroom saying, “please don’t run.” So I was like, okay, I guess I better not. Yeah. So I haven’t figured out like if everything works -28º, but I know it does at -23º.