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