Last week was my son’s first week at daycare, and my wife’s first week back at work, which meant new routines for all of us. For me, that meant an earlier wakeup to run and be ready in time for daycare drop-off.
Even when my wife took on drop-off duties, I still got up early. It felt good to start my day ahead of schedule, and to be available to help with the morning send-off, and to beat the summer heat. This was working great for me! I could have it all!
Or, I could have if I had slept enough. I didn’t change my bedtime to match my new morning alarm, and I paid dearly for it. Over the course of five days, I wrote a series of checks my body couldn’t cash and hit the weekend like Wile E Coyote hitting the bottom of an Arizona canyon. Yikes!
This is not my first time overtraining. It’s not even my first time overtraining since my son was born. But it sucks every time.
I’m writing this from my family vacation upstate, and I had aspirations of kick-starting my summer mileage once I got out here. Instead I’ve spent a lot of the first two days with my feet up and my nose in a John Scalzi book. I feel like a Victorian housewife convalescing in the countryside after a “nervous episode”.
And at the same time I feel so energized. Our new routine, though challenging—imagine being on an F1 pit crew for a six-month-old baby—was clicking. Work was clicking; I honestly wish I could write an explainer for the cool problem I’ve been tackling because I’m genuinely excited about it. I was so fired up to pour myself into summer. I still am. I just have to wait.
Fortunately, there are worse places to wait.
theDNF 
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