I’m trying a scientific approach to the whole sleepless nights thing. As an early Christmas present, my Mom bought me an iHome Zenergy Bedside Sleep Therapy Machine. I’m not sure it’s proving itself empirically but we’ll take a wait and see approach. It does create a nice 1960s lava lamp mood lighting effect in my bedroom and the white noise generator is either a seascape soundscape or possibly the music of the spheres. I’m willing to try just about anything though at this stage.
The pre-alarm dawning of light went off on the machine 9 minutes (?!) before the alarm proper (so many rules!). I sloughed off the covers and rolled out of bed, grabbing my running clothes. This is gonna make me sound incredibly out-of-touch with my fellow Americans but my phone’s weather app pegged it at 51 degrees this morning and it was pitch black (thanks, Winter Solstice!). I just couldn’t face that this morning… and I know that thinking 51 degrees is chilly makes me a Florida Man wimp given the arctic blasts endured by the rest of the country of late. But, hey, I lost all my baby-fat northeastern blood long ago; I went to college based on a weather channel report and then went west or south from there to find sunnier climes. It’s what I did, it’s now who I am.
Having said all of that, I also got up feeling really achy, stiff, and wonky. It could have been from the two-a-day runs I’ve been trying to get in in anticipation of the Savage Seven next week… and to address the inhalation of calories that come from my stuffing my face with my own version of runner’s Kryptonite: Peanut Butter. God, do I love that stuff. But it’s dangerous. Oh, so dangerous. Maybe kryptonite isn’t a good analogy as the green stuff isn’t really a temptation to Superman, it’s just deadly. Hmmmm… maybe peanut butter is like my brooding to Batman — oh, oh! It’s like money for Scrooge McDuck! If I were Scrooge McDuck and had a vault, I wouldn’t fill it with gold coins, I’d fill it with peanut butter. I believe there even was an episode of DuckTales that involved trading with some tribal elders for some bauble Uncle Scrooge had been searching for all his life… and it’s only through Mrs. Beakly’s offering of peanut butter to the rotund chief that closes the deal. I think because the aboriginal duck tribe people, the bigger the belly, the greater the status… and peanut butter was guaranteed by Mrs. B to add quite a few inches to the Chief’s waistline. And yet even with that story swimming about my noodle and KNOWING the peanut butter is really not going to help me resolve my body image issues, I just can’t resist it. It’s a siren’s call.
Point is, I’ve been trying to up my running to run away and off the peanut buttery goodness. But I don’t think that’s entirely to blame for the achy, stiffness of the morn or day. It’s partly my back is still killing me from the Space Coast Marathon photo debacle. And it’s just… one of those days. Maybe there’s a change in the weather coming. Or it’s already come as while it’s now hovering around the 50s at night, we were seeing low temperatures closer to the 70s when our highs were, ahem, higher than that. So a cold front has moved through and perhaps that is causing my arthritis-that-the-doctor-swears-isn’t-arthritis to act up.
Or maybe I’m just getting old. Yuck. Only way out of that funk is to book another race… so Pittsburgh in May 2017 it is! Or at least it will be as soon as a I find a discount code that still works. On the plus side, they have personalized bibs (up to 10 characters). And you know what’s 10 characters? FloridaMan.