Monday, September 3, 2007

Stuck in the middle

Weeeeeeell it's 2:29 a.m. and I'm facing a dilemma that should not really be a dilemma and is entirely of my own making.

In 11 days and four and a half hours I'm running a half-marathon. That's at 7 a.m. Despite the fact that I sleep next to a future doctor who has taken to waking at 4 a.m. or earlier to go to surgical shifts, I haven't successfully woken up before 8 a.m. more than a handful of times since the last race I ran, which also was an early-morning affair.

Obviously, I can't sleep. The three-day weekend was a good one, but it screwed up my biorhythms or whatthehellever and now I can't sleep and now it's 2:35. And in 11 days I have to wake up before 6, probably closer to 5, and be lucid and loose enough to run half a marathon at 7.

How best to get on an appropriate sleep schedule?
  • Stay up all night tonight, plow through the day somehow and crash at 9 p.m.?
  • Go to sleep when I'm tired, wake up when I'm not, then go to sleep the next night way, way before I'm tired?
  • Do it in stages? A half-hour earlier each night?
I have no idea. It's frankly bewildering that I'm 27 years old and seemingly incapable of managing my time even in the most basic sense of when I should conveniently sleep.

Also, I have the meat sweats. That is, I ate a lot of meat tonight at a barbecue and it's making me sweat a little bit. And the house is plenty cool. Meat sweats. Yuck.

4 comments:

  1. what the heck is a meat sweat? how does that happen?

    So you're trying to decide if shocking your system into a normal sleep pattern is the proper way to prepare for a race in 2 weeks? Oh yeah, and you're no spring chicken either... such a shock to the system could take some time to adjust to.

    If it were me, I would try to ease into it, but switch to morning runs. Which is still kind of a shock but I think I'd adapt well enough with 2 weeks left.

    About the being awake enough to run a race in the morning... I think the jitters the night before and morning of the race will keep me lucid and limber for an early morning race.

    what do you prefer to eat before the race? bagels, corn flakes, bananas? might be a good idea to determine what you need pre-race... also the carb dinner the night before... also so I know if you're crashing at my place.

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  2. Oh my goodness - I totally had the same problem. The long weekend screwed my already bad sleeping schedule and the fact there has been a CSI or Law and Order marathon on just made it all the worst.

    So yeah, I went to bed at 6 am today. That is AFTER I watched Angel on TNT. Sick.

    Good luck with getting to bed at a normal-ish time tonight !

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  3. Wow, I had no idea you were up so late. I woke up just 1.5 hours after you wrote this! Between the two of us, our schedules really, really, really suck.

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  4. The first week of school I'm always in zombie zone - waking up at 3 a.m. and not being able to go back to sleep. I was the absolute first teacher there the first day of school - just after 6 a.m. Sick.

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