Earlybirds

Nick and I are planning to try out this new "get your exercise done in the morning before work so you can come home from work and sit like a lump for the rest of the night" thing. I suggested trying this for a few reasons:

1. I want to exercise. But every day after I get home from work, I have no desire to move after I have sat down on my couch, which is immediately after I walk into the apartment. This is when I tell myself that my total slightly-over-1.5-mile walk to and from work is adequate exercise. And then I proceed to eat half a (family-size) bag of Kettle Chips as an appetizer before dinner. So if I can get my exercise out of the way early in the day, I might actually do it.
   
   
2. It's almost summer. It's going to start getting warmer (yes it will Chicago, yes it will), which makes exercising after work even less appealing when compared to eating Kettle Chips on my couch, because exercising after work in this case means moving around (outrageous!) in over 85-degree weather. Maybe doing it early in the morning will be slightly more pleasant since it will be cooler outside.
   
   
3. I hate showering. I like being clean, but I just hate the process of showering. I always shower at night, and I always put it off for as long as possible until Nick basically pushes me into the bathroom. I should note here that I am the master of puttering around, so even after that, it might be a good 30 minutes before I'm actually showering. But then my hair doesn't have enough time to dry before bedtime, but by then I don't care and I go to sleep with wet hair, and then I get a headache from it. If I exercise in the morning, I will definitely feel compelled enough to shower and be clean afterwards, and then I'll have guaranteed dry hair by the time I go to bed.
   
   
4. Let's be honest. Bailey starts getting tired at 10pm and wakes up at 4am. Since she wakes me up anyway, I might as well get up and do something instead of grumpily try to get a couple more hours of sleep. Hopefully there will be less of this:
   
   
   
   
   And more of this:
   
   

   

   Taken with Nick's phone so it's a small picture. Enjoy the blue border.

   And yes, that is super cute and I like it even though it is equivalent to wearing a fur scarf in the middle of summer.
   
   I just hope Bailey doesn't shift her sleeping schedule to 8pm-2am. Knock on wood.

In order to distract myself from the fact that I'm now going to be exercising at the crack of dawn, I've decided to train to run a 10k. I have no intention of actually running in an organized 10k race, but I just want to see if I can run a 10k because I have never run more than 3.5 miles in one go in my life. Hope my lungs are up to the challenge.

First day of 5:30am exercising is tomorrow. We'll see how this goes...