Not As Faithful As Some

Dearest Rachel –

Ever since before the weekend, I’ve been retiring early – earlier than used to be typical for me back in the day during my work farce days, and for which you used to tease me about now and then – and, for the most part, waking up early in turn. Sometimes, I’ve gotten up, as a sort of “proof of concept,” other times out of sheer necessity. Other times, I’ve either rolled over and gone back to sleep, or even slept right on into the point where the sun rose before me. I hardly need to tell you that I’m proud of those latter days, even as I’m forced to acknowledge that my body needed the rest at times.

Today didn’t feel like one of those days where the additional sleep felt merited. To be sure, waking up at 4:30 when there was no call for me to be up and about so early would offer more than sufficient justification for going back to bed. While the gym would have been open for half an hour already – and I know from experience that there are folks waiting outside its doors for the place to open every morning, so as to get their time in every day – I’m not as faithful with my exercise regimen as they are, by any means. If I were to nod off for a couple of hours, and wake up some time before seven or so to get myself over there, that would be more than satisfactory; indeed, the place would be that much less crowded by then, as the truly faithful ones would be leaving promptly at seven-thirty to make sure they were on their way to work at the appointed hour.

But since I don’t have appointed hours – and I’m not regulated by any other clock than the irregular one that my body runs on automatically – I could not bring myself to wake up at the time I expected to. By the time I woke up, those folks who would be leaving for their jobs would have already left; I barely made it to the place by eight.

It doesn’t help that it feels like it’s been a week since I’ve been there, even though I have record of having shown up on Monday. I think that, since all the weight machines were occupied when I got in that day, I dispensed with that part of my routine and just hopped onto the treadmill. It’s the one part that I actually record, after all (mostly because there’s no clear way that I’m aware of that would calculate calories burned on this or that weight machine). But it means it hardly felt like a full workout. Then again, my last time here on Friday was a complete bust, with my ankle screaming for mercy before I had even covered half a mile, forcing me to call it quits after finishing a single mile.

So yeah, there’s this feeling today that, while I certainly put in my time today, it was as much to make up for time not spent there in the recent past as it was to resume my routine in the first place. I haven’t been hewing to this self-improvement process nearly as much as I should be. And while there might be certain parts of this neglect that could be considered to be due to extenuating circumstances – my ankle, the road trip, and so forth – they all feel like just so many excuses at a certain point. Other people put their time in with so much more regularity; why can’t I?

Then again, when I got home from the gym today at about a quarter to ten, I wandered through the silent house… only to discover Daniel still fast asleep on the couch. It would seem that he’d lost track of time last night (I think I may have heard him knocking about when I was trying to get back to sleep between four and five; whether he’d been up all night, and what he might have been doing all that time, I leave to you to conclude, as this is an activity you were prone to, and seem to have passed the habit on to him) and didn’t get to bed until the wee hours of the morning. So maybe I shouldn’t be beating myself up about all this. At least I got out there today.

Still, I’ve got a long way to go before I get back to where I was last year at this time, and I’m not sure how to get there. I’m also starting to wonder if it’s worth it – between eating so much less and exercising so much more, that’s a lot less joy in the here and now for only the slimmest (heh) hope of a different kind of joy in the future. If it were guaranteed, that would be one thing, but as it stands, I’m a lot less confident.

In any event, honey, I hope you can keep an eye on me in the meantime while I deal with this, and continue to wish me luck. It looks like I’m going to need it.