I have not been good at training this time around. I am really looking forward to the race and I want to get back into running shape, but I am having a hard time putting it into practice. I think there are two big things that have been getting in my way.
First of all, I haven’t been sleeping very well lately. Actually, that’s exactly what the problem is. I’ve been having a hard time falling asleep. Once I do, I’m sleeping just fine. Thankfully, my ostomy has been allowing me to do so without having to wake up and empty in the middle of the night.
The falling asleep part has always been my problem. I have trouble turning my brain off, for one thing. As you probably know, I tend to stretch myself pretty thin with everything that I am involved in, and once I lay down to go asleep, I just lay there and think about everything that I still need to do and how I need to go about doing it and all of these lists form in my head. Sure enough, I’ll look at the clock and an hour has already gone by. But this time, it seems a little different. It’s not so much worrying that’s keeping me up as much as just not being sleepy. Trust me, I’m plenty tired, but not necessarily sleepy. So I end up getting out of bed so I don’t disturb my husband with my tossing and turning and I’ll usually go watch a little TV or read for a little while until I am sufficiently wound down.
So of course, this has been keeping me up later than I like to be and it makes it a lot harder to get up early in the morning and go for a run. I have really fallen behind on doing weekday workouts, even if they just involve getting up a little early and doing some stretching in my living room. It’s been sporadic, at best.
But today, I did actually go for a run. I was just planning on doing a short 5K kind of run, but about a mile into it, I started dealing with really bad cramps. These were rib-area cramps, so the kind that basically make it impossible to breathe. I ended up cutting it to 2.5 miles and the last mile and a half was pretty slow.
It made me realize that I have not been good at staying hydrated lately. I’m still consciously drinking water, but not enough. I know that I need to be better at hydrating simply for my every day health, much less if I am going to keep up this running.
So I have some work to do. It includes drinking lots of water and getting myself back onto a better sleep schedule. I can’t keep staying up as late as I have been and expect to be able to wake up early enough to go for a run. I’m not sure what else I can do at this point to help myself fall asleep at the right time.
All in all, I’m just feeling tired. Not Crohn’s kind of tired, just worn a little thin. I suppose I need to work on that, too.