“I’m going to bed on time tonight,” I told Mr. T around 8:30 p.m. Tuesday. “I’ve gotta do my 3-miler early in the morning.”
At 11, I turned off House Hunters International.
Oops.
I figured I’d be okay, but when I woke up at 2, I knew I was in trouble. I have a hard time falling asleep when I get up in the middle of the night. I opened the window, shuffled to the bathroom and then back to bed. I layed on my right side for a while. Then, tried the left side. Back to the right.
Ugh.
Finally, I remembered a tip I saw on TV or read in a magazine or somewhere that basically said if you can’t sleep, you should get up and do something, and watching The Rachel Zoe Project on TiVo doesn’t count. So, I pictured Laundry Everest on the couch in downstairs.
If I get up, I have to fold clothes all those clothes. And, we don’t have TiVo in that room.
Just thinking about it made me tired and the next thing I knew, my ears were picking up the radio news at 6. Then, a 9-minute snooze-button siesta during which I held a foggy internal debate about whether or not I wanted to get out of bed. Running won.
My brain, however, refused to accept defeat and fought back by making everything take three times longer than it should. I wanted to hit the pavement by 6:15 at least, but I’d only made it downstairs by 6:26. I still had to map out my route, eat something, get my Zune, put on my shoes and stretch.
The cold banana tasted nasty mixed with toothpaste. My headphones weren’t in my big blue Dooney & Bourke where they usually are, nor were they in the minivan or underneath the heap of bills and catalogs and random paper crap on the end of the kitchen island. (I had to use backups. Boo.) I couldn’t decide on a good 3-mile neighborhood route on MapMyRun.com either, and at 6:30, the thought to abandon the morning run and try again later flitted in and out of my mind.
If I don’t go now, I’ll never get to go.
Finally, at 6:35, I was jogging away from the house. But the pattern continued with my music. I had to put the MP3 player on shuffle because I didn’t have time to make a playlist. Of course, all of the songs it kept choosing for me were slow and dreary. Not even a single Gwen Stefani title for the entire 45 minutes. Really? Yet ballads for Phantom of the Opera showed up over and over again.
Oh, the drama!