The Battle Between Sleep and Exercise

The battle between sleep and exercise is epic. It’s constant, it’s mean, it’s stressful, it’s wrong. I’m not saying you need to give up sleeping for exercise. no no no. I’m saying, given that you get a decent night’s sleep and you like to work out in the morning because really, who has the time or energy to workout after work? Yet somehow, when that alarm goes off, you think of 100, no 1000 reasons for not getting out of bed at that moment. Oh, I’ll just snooze once, I’ll fee better. Oh, I’ll just close my eyes for a minute, really what’s the difference between 5:30 and 5:45AM? It’s a blogroll of reasons… inevitably if you don’t get up when you planned, your morning schedule will be screwed up. Something will have to get cut- either the length of your work out, your shower, or your sit-down hot breakfast. AHHHH!

The worst part is, after you get out of bed, wash your face, put your contacts in, throw on some running clothes, lace up your sneakers, and plug in your headphones to your iphone, ipod, mp3, etc. it’s as if you just chugged a cup of coffee. The energy is there, somewhere underneath the cobwebs.

You take a deep breath, you lock the door behind you, you hit the pavement, walking at first to loosen up, then taking off on a jog, music up, cool breeze, and the day still dark. Somehow over the next 20, 30, 40, 60, however many minutes you choose to devote to running, you go from sleepiness to frustration with your pace to anger with your soreness to gasping for breath to slowing down to speeding up and finally, at long last, to a great big smile. That’s right, you got up early, you went for a run, you’re back and you have time to shower, cook breakfast, sit down and eat it and still be out the door to make it to work on time. If the rest of the day is a failure, it doesn’t matter, because you accomplished more before 8AM then most people do by Noon. Congratulations!

Well, as you can probably guess, I got up early this morning. I fought with myself and in the end, my extra pudge convinced me that I needed to get up. I went for a jog, got in about 1.5 miles. It hurt, but as usual, in the end I was ecstatic that I got up and the shower and breakfast made it all worth it! So just remember, push through the sleeping in and exercise!