Marking Time

I can hardly contain myself at this point.

Every couple hours, I check my countdown clock to see how much time I've got left before the marathon starts. I find myself thinking things like, "Six days from right now, hopefully I'll be at the 10-mile mark." There's a nervous energy surrounding me, and it's got me completely wired.

As a result, I had some trouble getting to sleep last night, which meant I had some trouble getting up this morning. I was still up in time, but then I had to rush through my shower, and I didn't get the full breakfast I should have forced myself to sit down and eat.  This week, more than ever, it's important that I develop some sort of routine in all the things I do, especially with anything related to running.

I'm going to start searching for tips on making myself get out of bed on time. I've tried all sorts of things in the past, most of which just annoyed my roommates. I think it's mostly a question of motivation. Maybe I need to have a better reason to get up early than "to have more time." You see, when I first wake up, my brain is not very good at making arguments.

"Get up," says my brain.

"Why?" replies the body.

"Because you want to run and get ready for work with plenty of time."

"I can sleep another hour and still do all of that," says the body sleepily.

Brain thinks for a moment. "But you said you wanted more time in the morning."

"For what?"

"Well, for whatever you want to do."

"In that case, what I really want to do is sleep for one more hour. Goodnight brain."

And I've bested myself again. It also doesn't help that there's a 30 degree swing from day to night temperature outside which leaves the bedroom cold every morning. It's not easy to throw off the nice, warm covers when you know it's going to be uncomfortably chilly.

For the rest of this week, then, my focus will be on the fact that if I oversleep on Sunday, all my training (and the money I spent) will have been wasted. Therefore, I must train my body that the snooze button is not an option. As a "reward" of sorts, I'll have an extra hour in the morning which I can use to write my blog post, and then get started on my day's work. The earlier I start, the earlier I'm done. And that should be worth waking up for.

When I actually did get out of bed today, I headed to the gym for my weekly 5K, but true to the taper, I didn't push it too hard. In fact, I kept at a 7:30 pace the entire way. The down side was that it was a little more uncomfortable than normal. My legs felt stiff and a little weary early on, and even though I wasn't all that winded at the end, I didn't have the drive to do my normal follow-up work in the gym.

I think there are a couple reasons here. The first, I've already mentioned. If I don't make myself get up, I lose a lot of momentum early on. The second is that I had a rehearsal in a tepee yesterday (of all things), and I sat cross-legged for the better part of four hours. Not a great plan in general, and certainly not after a 9+ mile run. Finally, I didn't stretch out beforehand, and this is really the key to feeling good at the end of the run. It's something I've been bad about during this training season, and I'm going to try and focus on it more in the weeks and months ahead. Longer stretching, better warm-ups, stronger workouts.

In addition to all of that, I'm just impatient. Eleven weeks of work is all coming down to this Sunday, and I'm ready for it to be here already!! I'm excited for the expo that goes along with the race as well. I'm always interested in new running gear and gadgets. I'm looking for a good mapping and timing system. I know Nike has one, as does Adidas, but I'm not 100% sold on either one. I hope there are some good options at the show.

I'm also really excited for the swag bag. They've listed out a few of the things that are included already, and I'm pretty pumped about them. Once I've got everything, I'll take pictures and put it up. Hey, if you're going to spend $100 or more for a race, you really should get some cool stuff out of it.

I could go on and on about the things that have me pumped this week, but then I'd have nothing to write about for the next five days, so I won't go too far into it now. Suffice it to say that this is as excited as I have been about physical activity since high school, and I'm counting the minutes until then.

And watching the weather. Isolated thunderstorms, 74/59.

I'm not worried yet.

Today's Run:
Indoors / Treadmill
3.1 Miles
23 Minutes, 15 Seconds