Morning Runs

Did you know that some people consider the time before 6am the morning, and not the middle of the night?  Crazy, right?  Regardless of what time "Morning" starts, I'm not a morning person.  Getting out of bed is tragically difficult for me.  In highschool, I had be in the building by 7:30 at the latest.  It took 15 minutes to drive there if I drove there like a reckless teenager.  I usually woke up between 7:15 and 7:20.  Caroline and I trade weekend days for sleeping in, and if any of the boys get up before 7, we are VERY annoyed.  

I've avoided morning training as much as I could since I started running a couple years ago.  My old point of view was:

Running a long time sucks.  Mornings suck.  Running a really long time in the morning REALLY sucks. 

But now that I'm taking my marathon training seriously, and I'm going to have to add in swimming and biking, I have a few reasons to run early.   Four reasons to be exact.

My weekday runs are starting to go past an hour, so if I'm going to work, train, and still have time to see these boys and my ridiculously supportive wife while they are awake, I have to run while they are asleep.  This means starting before sunrise, or as I call it: 5am in the night.  

Three days this week I drug myself out of bed after on of my alarms went off. (I'm not sure which one, since I have them set for 5:00, 5:02, 5:03, and 5:04)  Once I get past the anger that it's still dark, things start to slowly improve.  I crawl into the running clothes I've laid out, and scrounge around in the kitchen for some kind of food I wont want to throw up 4 miles in. By the time I make it outside, I'm feeling fairly awake, and off I go.  I really like running in the city before everyone else gets up.   The traffic is minimal, and I get to explore areas that are usually too congested to run.  I've found myself running faster than I anticipated, and now I'm optimistic about my marathon goal time.

I have evolved into the next stage of runner: that super annoying guy that owns spandex (for races) and runs before others wake up to make them feel guilty for sleeping in.  I'm trying to combat the doucheyness by not posting about my runs on facebook, although I did put this blog on facebook, so I guess I'm failing at that.  Oh well.