I'll Think About it in the Morning...

This week, I managed to do something consistently that I've never been able to manage before...I've been running in the MORNING! Three days this week. Now, you have to understand, this is an enormous feat for me. E-N-O-R-M-O-U-S! Ask my husband, ask my friends, ask my family. I am not a morning person. And that's really putting it mildly. I love sleep. I hate waking up from a good sleep. I get up at the very last second I possibly can in order to get ready for work and still be on time. Literally, to the nanosecond. I am terrible at math but can calculate with utter precision how much longer I can sleep in the morning and still be on time. The snooze button is my best friend, much to the chagrin of my husband and any roommate I've ever had. I can't just pop out of bed when my alarm goes off. I have to slowly be cajoled out of sleep until I can drag myself out of the sweet, sweet slumber and get my day going.

People have tried to give me tricks like, "Put the alarm clock on the other side of the room so you have to get out of bed to turn it off." Doesn't work. I just slide right back in to my warm bed without even opening my eyes. I'm not a night person either. I go to bed between 9:30 and 10:30 most nights. I'm a sleep person. Over the years I've tried and tried to become a morning person. I actually love mornings, I just wish they weren't so damn early. I love the dawn light, the birds chirping, the silence of no cars on the road. It's so peaceful and pleasant. It's just too early! Even if I went to bed at 8:00 p.m., I'd still sleep until 9:00 a.m. if I could. I just love sleep that much. Hey, did I mention I love sleeping?

But over the weekend, I was feeling blue because my motivation level for exercise and healthy eating was nil. And when I'm not working out and eating well consistently, I feel like crap and even less likely to want to do those things. It's a vicious little cycle. So come Sunday, I was feeling bloated and cranky and we were about to be invaded by the (insert ominous music here) HEAT DOME. It was about to get hot. Real hot. And living in the Midwest that also means humid. But Sunday night I somehow got my motivation back and was determined to have a healthy week. So what could I do? I couldn't run when I got home from work because the heat index was 100 degrees with 1 million percent humidity. If I tried to run in that they would have found my sweaty carcass by the river. So I decided I would run in the morning, no matter what. I have also been blowing off Weight Watchers and made a vow to pay the piper and weigh in on Monday and start tracking again.

I laid out my running clothes that night (the less I have to think in the morning, the better off I am) and woke up at 6:00 a.m. Monday morning. Bleary eyed, I put on my nicely laid out clothes, brushed my teeth and stepped outside into what I thought was fog but, once I blinked, realized that my contact lenses had fogged up because it was already so hot and humid. I'm not kidding. My effing contacts actually fogged up. Nice. This was going to be interesting. I powered through, though. Got home, sweated through my shower and started my day. I actually finally stopped sweating about half way through my train ride to work. Then I did the same thing on Wednesday and then again on Friday. The nice thing about Friday's run was that it had rained and temperature (not the humidity, mind you) dropped and it was down right pleasant. The whole week the temperatures were in the high 90s with heat indexes in the 100s so 75 degrees at 6:30 a.m. actually felt a little chilly.

I saw a good friend today and we chatted for a little and she asked me why I had so much energy. I told her about my morning running and healthy eating all week and I realized at that moment just how great I felt. My stomach is flatter, I'm not at all tired, and I'm chipper. Even at work. Even after waking up before I absolutely had to. What is this world coming to?

Kool with a Kay

What do you hope you are still doing at age 70 that you do now? Now, don't get dirty on me, but yes, I hope I'm still doing that too.

I completed the Batavia Windmill Whirl 5K on Friday, July 8 and was...drumroll please...dead last again. That's okay, though. As my darling husband says, "You were still ahead of everyone who didn't do it." Yes, yes I was. Thank God for him. I did this race by myself and he stuck with me and kept me out of my head until the race started and was smiling at the finish line when I ambled in.

My biggest supporter and darling husband.

During the run, I met Kay. She was at the end of the pack with me, alternating walking and running like I was. She was 69 years old and had just walked a half marathon a couple of weeks before the Batavia 5K. I was using a coaching app on my phone (Runkeeper.com) that helped me keep pace. I had my phone strapped to my arm and every three minutes, Miss Cool Voice on the app would remind me to either walk or run. Kay was enthralled by my talking arm and asked if she could "keep up" with me. "Of course!" I said. It would be nice not to be alone and she was a doll. I put "keep up" in quotes for a reason, read on.

She couldn't jog for the whole three minutes but could walk much faster than I could so we pretty much stayed together the whole time. An older gentleman passed us and encouraged us to keep it up. "He's 70, one year older than me," Kay said. We chatted while we jogged/walked and she told me about the races she does with her daughter. Kay walks, her daughter runs. And she said something that really stuck with me. "Keep this up [training and doing races] because when you're my age, everything is so much harder to do and if you stick with this, it won't be." I kept picturing myself at her age and the two alternatives I could be: active and participating in things like 5K's, meeting new people and dispensing wisdom to the youngsters or inactive with God-knows-what kind of medical issues, sitting around in a moomoo dispensing wisdom to my cats. I'll take door number one, thankyouverymuch.

Finished!

As we got closer to Mile 2, Kay asked if I minded if she walked ahead. Of course I didn't mind. So she walked ahead and I continued my slow three minutes walking, three minutes jogging. She smoked me in the last mile and I had to smile thinking of her asking me if she could keep up with me. When I finally crossed the finish line, not only was my darling husband there snapping photos like I just finished an Ironman (love him so much), Kay was waiting for me with a big hug and thanks for helping her to get through the race. "I helped you?" I laughed. "You're the one who helped me!" In more ways than she knows.