Do you ever have weekends when you feel like you can actually relax and have time to do everything you planned to do? For the longest time, I thought they were an urban myth, like blair witch or instant coffee that doesn’t make me want to puke. Turns out those weekends exist, though, and the secret to finding them seems to simply lie in getting my ass out of bed before noon.

This weekend, I decided I was not going to make any plans requiring any more than a five or ten minute advance notice. I fitted in shopping (more hours than I should have – sorry, credit card), quality time with the kitty, family skype time, coffee and magazine reading (the new issue of Runner’s World conveniently arrived in my letterbox on Saturday morning – a free issue from one of those coupons you can get in most event goodie bags), and a cookie baking extravaganza.

More importantly, I ran 3 times in the last 2 days, and 4 times in the last 3 days even, since I also ran a 5k on Friday morning before work.  Out of those 4 times, two of them were morning runs. I didn’t get a super long run in like I had expected (12k was the longest distance the watch recorded this weekend, and it included a couple of kilometers of walking). It didn’t matter, though. I’m still pretty happy to have gotten some kilometers under my belt. The hardest step is the one out of the door yadda yadda kind of thing, you know. My laundry pile has never had as many running clothes but I’ve also never felt so motivated about this whole marathon training thing.

I blame the sun. And also, I blame all this getting out of bed at the crack of dawn thing I’ve been doing. It dawned on me the other day (see what I did there? Hmm? Hmm?) that I have only slept past 9:30AM once this year (last weekend), and that one time was planned. I wanted the feeling of spending the whole morning in bed back again. And you know what was weird? I didn’t like it. I felt like I had just wasted a whole lot of time doing nothing. This is the same person that up until a couple of years ago would never get out of bed before 11 on a weekend, unless there was a very good reason to do so (and there were very strict criteria to define what “a very good reason” consisted of, excluding basically everything except for the apocalypse).

This Sunday, for example, I got out of bed at 6AM to run. There was no running event with a set time at stupid o’clock or anything, just me wanting to get a run in before the sun was too high up. I got to run before a lot of people were even out of bed and so the whole day was freed up to do other stuff. Turns out “other stuff” ended up including more running and I couldn’t resist another run in the evening, as dinner simmered away.

So this is awkward. It looks like all this running may have accidentally turned me into a morning person. I still dislike getting out of bed but a bulldozer no longer has to hit the walls of the bedroom for me to actually get up – especially if there’s running to be done. See you out there before 7AM sometimes. Apparently, it won’t kill me.