You Getting Up in the Morning, or, in This Case, Me

I'll start with a few basics today:

• Calorie intake yesterday was about 2,000, including a healthy chicken fajita salad with iced team and only moderate chip-picking with my friend and ex-bro-in-law Pete at Jose's for lunch and a two-stop dinner (cottage cheese with apple sauce and Kashi at 6 and a vegan tofu-kielbasa quesadilla when I finished my weekly Kindle Nation newsletter at midnight). (Yes, I occasionally eat at midnight, but I try not to do it without a plan. More on that later).
• The scale is moving in the right direction, down from 257 to 256.2 today. (Yes, I have a scale that measures tenths and I do weigh myself every day. More on that later).
• Probably most important of these three items, in the long run -- I was back in the pool at 7:15 am and moved up from 12 laps to 14 laps, or 300 yards, with a slightly higher and thus more intensive ratio of breaststroke to backstroke.
  

The swimming feels great. It is taxing, and of course since I am already swimming more than I have swam, swimmed, or swum in over 25 years I notice that I am breathing heavily at the end of each two-lap segment. I take a little 60-to-90-second break between each segment and then start flailing my arms again. Each day, for now, I will try to add two laps to what i did the day before. We'll see how that goes.

I wondered if I would just be bored to death by the likelihood that I couldn't do enough to feel like I had done anything, but 12 laps and 14 laps on the first two days isn't a bad start. Those who've read my Boston Sports by the Numbers blog will not be surprised to learn that in my marathoning and coaching days I used to have a lot of fun paying attention to times, workout stats, interval clockings, and the like. Certainly swimming couldn't offer me that kind of juice. Then I noticed two guys in the lanes to my right this morning, consulting a printout after each segment and telling each other things like "dolphin down, butterfly back" and "19 strokes down, 15 back." So I started to realize that there might even be a future for a guy like me in the pool. They were doing 88 laps this morning, 1100 yards. I know 88 laps is a lot more than 14 laps, but somehow it didn't seem impossibly far away, today.

When I got out of the pool, showered, dressed, shot a couple of baskets at the outdoor hoop and walked to my car at 7:50 am, I felt terrific, maybe better than a heavyset 58-year-old guy has any right to feel before 8 o'clock in the morning. I had an impromptu breakfast with a pal and was doing productive work at my desk before 10.

Over breakfast, my pal and I talked about getting up in the morning. You'd think we would have it down by now. I've done it 21,535 times, and my pal has done it hundreds of times more than me. But my impression is that there is a constant need to re-train ourselves.

When my kids had to be at school at a certain hour, or I had to be at work at a certain hour, or both, it was relatively easy even if it was not always fun. But even then, there is a lot of difference between, say, rolling out of bed just in time to shower and get to work by punch-in time, and getting out of bed on my own time, early, with a plan to do one or two simple things aimed at getting my day and me off to a good start.

Meditation, swimming, running, coffee and a book on the deck, a walk around the neighborhood -- it can be any of a number of things, but for me and most others to whom I have spoken about such things, spontaneity is the enemy of success in such endeavors. Our brains are powerful, and most of us, when in bed, like to stay in bed.

When I have been most successful at using my mornings to get my day off to a great start, the key to success has been to make a plan -- "get up at 6:45 am and be in the pool by 7:15," for instance -- and allow myself no negotiation, or even any thinking, until I am inexorably on the path I have planned. In my own case, I actually pretend that I am being operated externally by remote control. (In my 12-step program, we call that "turning one's will over to a higher power.")

Maybe I am dumbing myself down, but the payoff is huge.

In my next post I'll try to come back to those "more on that laters" about midnight meals and daily weigh-ins.

Have a great day. I will.

(Thanks for the beautiful picture of the sleeping polar bear to my brothers and sisters at http://www.firstpeople.us!)