Ahhh Boston Training

You know, whenever I get a marathon on the calendar, I sort of look forward to the training and everything that swirls around it.  I enjoy planning the runs and running a bit longer and spending the time with my running group.  I like all of it.  This is my first marathon to train for however, where I also have busy children.  So trying to balance 20 milers with swim meets that start at 8:00 AM is more of a challenge than in years past, and there is a chance that I may learn a hard lesson during this season of marathon training.  Family First!!!


Anyway, today I got to sleep in until 6:00 AM.  Now I say that, but here is the rub.  I heard the TV at 5:00AM and I wondered fitfully what it was, but did not move from my slumber.  When I did drag myself from the bed, I realized that it was my 6 year old.  He had gotten up and begun puttering about the house in the middle of the night and when I found him he told me that he had watched Puss in Boots, THE MOVIE, two times (from the DVR, which he knows how to work) .  TWO TIMES.  He was watching an episode of Good Eats with Alton Brown when I found him.   Who does this???!!!  I thought about it and I realized who does this:  a 6 year old creature who cannot quite tell time and does not have a time telling device in his room and has not been instructed that there is a clock in the corner of the guide function of the television.  He just knew that he woke up and was not allowed to wake up Mommy and Daddy (because you can be SURE that I taught him that early on), so he thought he would watch some TV.

Well, let me tell you, I marched straight out and bought a digital clock that I set beside his bed, and we had a tutorial about 6:00 AM.  No one gets out of bed or turns on a television or lights until the digital clock says 6 AM.  That is the new rule.  I did not know we needed it, but apparently we do.  So we have had a lot of discussion and practice and hopefully we will have a full night's sleep tonight.   I think what I experienced early this morning is maybe the hardest part of parenting: the things you have to catch on the fly, the unexpected stuff that you have to think through while you are tired.  I hope our discussion worked and tomorrow will be a brighter day.

Today, our 6 year old was the walking dead.  He had watched Puss in Boots TWICE when I found him at 5:00 AM, so that means he was up at 2 AM.  Aaaah, Lovers, 2 AM is only for the sleeping.  And 2 AM wakeup means 1:00 PM nap time, no matter how incensed you are that six is too old for naps.

Anyway, because of the unfortunate earlier than intended wake up for me and an 18 mile run to boot, I was a train wreck of sleep deprivation.  I climbed into bed when the children went down for a nap and slept for THREE HOURS.  Oh Goodness, I will never be able to go to sleep tonight.  Somehow, everyone tiptoed around me and let me sleep for way too long.  I guess that after we get over this early morning hump with my 6 year old, I will have to teach him how to only let Mummy have one sleep cycle of approximately 1.5 hours so that we can preserve the 8 hour night.

Trail run tomorrow and Superbowl swim.  It is going to be a fabulous day

Iris and Will are Cooler than Me

You know, I get it.  I'm 38 and I don't do a lot of cool things anymore outside of making creative lunches for my kids and trying not sound sound redundant in the reports that I write for work.  Though many times their lunches are not creative and my reports are quite redundant.  Those two previous sentences may be the most boring things that have ever typed from the ends of my fingers.  Good grief!!

Anyway, last night my husband was keen to attend a lecture given by two hikers who had crossed The Continental Divide.  The Continental Divide Trail goes from Mexico to Canada, crosses 5 states and is only 70 percent completed.  So 30 percent of the time, you are just wandering about with a compass hoping for the best.  The lecture started at 7:30 and my husband and I wanted to make a night of it and grab a quick dinner beforehand and I will just let you know that I planned an outfit.  That is how excited I was about my evening.

So, I had gotten a babysitter a week in advance and planned my whole day around having everything perfect so that our new babysitter had the minimum of work to do when she arrived at the house.  I needed her to focus all her efforts on bedtime to that the children would be asleep by the time we got home.  I threatened everyone within an inch of their lives if they did not go straight to bed and I hopped into the car with my most fabulous scarf, boots and a silver cross body bag.  Dinner went well until our first call from the babysitter.  She told the boys to go to bed and they said they did not want to go.  This seemed to me a solvable problem as she was bigger and had more authority, but I will stop all this as I am boring myself and will just say to you that we had received five phone calls by the time we arrived at the much anticipated lecture and I was so worn down that I just felt like we needed to go home.  Nothing like sitting through an event that you had really looked forward to attending while the phone buzzes with calls from the babysitter and your ability to listen and involve yourself is tainted if not ruined.

Anyway, while I am clearly not cool even if I was wearing a great scarf and a fabulous cross body bag, Iris and Will, the speakers were so cool that I could feel the breeze in the back row where we had to sit so that frequent calls from the babysitter did not annoy the VERY SERIOUS hikers who were in attendance.  Literally, we were the only people there without previously earned trail names.  Trail names are things you earn on serious hikes and mine would be "Bitter Mummy" just so you know.

Anyway, Iris and Will met on Instagram two years ago, and Will had apparently already done the Appalachian Trail and the Pacific Coast Trail.  They quit their jobs and decided to take 6 months to do this hike. They assembled these massive boxes of food that they mailed to remote post offices to be picked up when they arrived.  They camped by the side of the road, got some sort of awful water poisoning from drinking out of reservoirs, hitchhiked to a doctor's office and then hitchhiked to a Walmart TWO HOURS AWAY to pick up antibiotics.  They talked about trail magic and people who helped them when they ran out of water.  Iris went through 6 pairs of shoes and even carried mascara in her pack. They hiked 80 miles most days, and had no cell phone reception and relied heavily on a compass. They went to sleep after the campfire burned out and slept late in their tents every morning. It was a tale of wonder which we did not get to hear the end of, because we had to leave and settle things with the babysitter and the children.  That is just the way it went.

Anyway, I did get up at 4:45 yesterday and take a spin class and then ran afterwards.  Today, I again got up at 4:45 and had a great swim!!  18 miler tomorrow to train for Boston!!!

Someone Looks Like Mummy Feels

Yes Mr. Sloan, I too feel the same!

Who got back in the saddle today??  This girl!!  I arrived at the pool at 5:25 AM only ten minutes late.  Many pats on the back have I given to myself.  Many times have I mentioned to various people in unrelated phone conversations that I worked out at 5:15 AM (which is the time that I should be in pool.  no need to mention that I am NEVER EVER punctual).

Things went pretty well following my early morning workout.  Everyone got to school on time and three year old G-Money and I got to story time at the library at a respectable time.  We checked out many books with ridiculous titles (Walter Kitty, for example). We ran many errands before I began to suffer the unavoidable consequences of the early morning workout.

Irritability and nap desperation hit me hard at about 2:00.  I was able to rest for a about half an hour before the frenetic firedrill of evening sports began swirling about us.  At 3:40 PM, I generally have to start running about the house rolling out orders like a drill sergeant while my children look at me in confusion as if it is the first time that they have every heard of a swim team.  It is ridiculous.  They ask me all sorts of questions, like "when does swim team start?", "where is swim team?" and "when will we be home?".  The answers to all of these questions are the same as they were in September when we started this mayhem, so it is a constant enigma that my children always respond to my innocuous "hop in the car for swim team, boys!" with suspicion.  Herding them into the car takes so much effort and stuffing of bags and snacks into the car that by the time I hit the driver's seat I am craving something that we Americans just can't have behind the wheel and it makes me feel terrible about everything.  After getting everyone to the pool, into the pool, goggles located, spare goggles located since the favorite goggles have been lost, and found place to sit, I am one spark short of a toaster.  The noise reverberating off the walls and the million times that I am splashed make life rather unbearable.

BUT, a great triumph that I had two hours to myself before the sun came up.  At 5:00 this morning, I was sane.

It Is Time

Who is up at 5AM??  This Girl!!!

Oh goodness, my three year old is halfway potty trained and I have a bit of free time in the evenings, and there are lots of goings on.  The biggest going on that I would say I am trying to incorporate into my life right now is the 5 AM workout.  Did I do it today?  No, I did not.  Am I going to do it tomorrow?  Not a bit.  However, I have done it the past 5 mornings, and it has been going on since September.

I usually take Mondays off from any sort of workout, and tomorrow, I have a day off so can work out a run in the middle of the day while the children are at school.  And, I will say that the 5AM workout puts a damper on life as I know it.  It is a re-envisioning of life.  It is going to bed at 8:45 and trying to figure out where your next nap is.

Sometimes I think that what the 5AM workout really means is that I am old or that I've given up.  Maybe in some way I was hanging on to the me in college that liked to stay up and watch David Letterman.  Those days might come back.  At present, however, there isn't really anything to stay up late for and there is A LOT to be said for riding to the gym and home from the gym in silence without my children yammering at me or each other for the entirety of the trip (I have great children; I really do).  I drink a solitary cup of coffee from the nespresso machine that I traded my neighbor for my juicer, and I put a bit of hot chocolate mix that I pilfered from my husbands camping food supply.  It is all rather lovely in the dark.

In fact, when I think in retrospect, what wasn't lovely was staying up rather late and being wailed out of bed by one of my two children tattling or fighting or sprinting into our bedroom and leaping into the middle of my deep morning sleep.  Staggering into the kitchen for coffee that I already wished was a stiffer sort of drink after the wake-up I had received and running about the house throwing the children into the car and hurling my messy self out the door in workout clothes was all more than slightly stressful.  This whole organized early morning workout works well for me.  I get back to the house and the children are up and drinking their Ovaltines.  I get nicely dressed and organized for school.

The fire drill of getting out of the house in the morning is not completely eradicated, but it is better I think.

I don't think that I will have to get up at 5AM forever.  I think, however, that right now, not schlepping children to the gym in the middle of the morning is the most productive thing I can do for the productivity of my days.  I am assuming that one day when my children are older and in school and have different activities that I don't have to be involved in intricately at all times I can work out with a later set of sleepers.  


Here is my 5AM schedule:

Sunday:  Trail Run - 6:20
Monday: day off
Tuesday: Spin and Run and weights
Wednesday: Swim
Thursday: Spin and Run and weights
Friday: Swim
Saturday: Long Run