« A charming home accessory | Main | F Market & Wharves »
Night owl seeks foolproof alarm clock
I am not a morning person. I have never been a morning person. In my kindergarten school photo, my hair is sticking out all over the place in a hilarious way that says "I just rolled out of bed," because I had.
In high school my best friend and I published an indie rawk zine and I would spend all night putting the thing together. I'd fall into to bed at 6am and sleep all day on weekends. And I spent many a late night writing emails to my penpals on Prodigy, trying to express my thoughts within P*'s 300-word limit, because each email over the monthly quota cost 25 cents extra.
In college my roommate and I would burn the midnight oil writing papers, perfecting the html on our goofy 1994 web sites, and IMing with internet friends. (Except back then it wasn't IM yet; it was talk or ytalk, and you had to log into a unix account to do it.) We even IMed each other. While sitting in the same room. At 4 in the morning.
And now, free of the obligations of academia, I still choose to stay up late, reading blogs, flicking through flickr, lurking at triathlon forums, generally wasting time until it feels like I should go to sleep.
So it seems unjust that I have found I LOVE to run early in the morning. It is glorious. There is no better way to start the day than by getting out of bed and stepping into cool, fresh air. Knowing that birds are tweeting and the urban campers are still asleep. Getting my workout in before work. Arriving at work feeling awake and refreshed. Relishing the fact that when I get home, I don't have to change and then head back out the door, which is always difficult.
Every day my alarm clock rings at 6am and I hit the snooze button. Ten to fifteen times. Maybe one in ten mornings I will actually drag my ass out from under the covers and put on my running shoes. Most often, I stay in bed until the last possible minute before I will be inexcusably late to work, feel guilty about sleeping in, and try to figure out if I can sneak my run in at lunch (which does offer its own rewards).
But then again, if it were easier, maybe it wouldn't feel so good.
August 31, 2005 10:06 AM
i will meet you for an early morning run any old time, ariel! i've found a new running love: trails. yet i'm cautious about running them alone in the morning b/c of said urban campers. give a hollar if you want to get an early morning trail run on the regular weekly sked!
Let me throw in a vote for early-morning shoeless beach running. (That's assuming, of course, that you have a beach available.)
I do the same thing all the time (and my alarm clocks goes off at 6 too). I agree, it always feels to good to run in the morning -- but with the cooler weather, my warm bed is so much nicer...
ahhhhh i miss my unix IRC client. *sob*
dave, dave. shoeless beach running sounds cold. and sandy. i'll take on the urban campers over the cold sand any ole day.