How I love sleeping

As someone who usually gets up in the 5-5:30am range (and a few times this week in the 4-4:30 range) you'd think maybe I wasn't such a fan of sleeping. Not true. I fully compensate by being in bed between 8-8:30 more often than not, and actually, almost ashamed to admit it, but on Sunday night I went to bed at 7:15. I think my 2-year old nephew goes to bed later than that. And I was asleep within minutes.

I hate staying up late at night. Really, I am almost physically incapable of it. It is a trend that developed a little later in life for me, but really it has always been more of a tendency of mine. When I first went away to college I remember that in choosing who our roommates would be one of the questions we had to answer was what time we went to bed at night. Throughout high school on weekdays I was usually in bed between 9-9:30 - you know, much later than I do now - but I think the earliest box you could check off was before 11:30. That first semester my classes either started at 8am or 9:30am, depending on the day, and I remember how my friends in the 9:30 class hated having to be up so early, where I was happy on those days that I got to sleep in. It sure beat having to get to high school by 7:15 in order to get a parking space. My friends only occasionally gave me a hard time about being in bed before Conan even started, and my roommate and I eventually got our neighbors used to not being quite so loud and/or participatory when they watched wrestling late at night.

However, when given the opportunity, I sure did love to sleep in. In keeping with the college theme I'll recall how I had two separate semesters in which I only had classes on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, which of course left me 4-day weekends, and plenty of sleep. Not parties, as I was not into that kind of thing, just lots and lots of sleep in between usual basketball games. I guess I kind of miss waking up at 11 on Monday mornings. Although in the general college population I was an amateur at sleeping in. I remember coming home from basketball games at maybe 4pm on Saturday afternoons and running into people in the dorm elevator who had just gotten up. Seriously? Wow.

My definition of sleeping in has changed quite a bit. Given my current training schedule, I usually have one day a week where I just let myself sleep as much as I need to. That day happens to be today, since I don't have to swim (my pool by far is easiest to deal with first thing in the morning) and don't have a large volume of training to get in. I guess I could sleep in on the weekends and start my training later, but for some reason I have a thing about getting the long training days started early in the morning so I have a big chunk of the day afterward to just relax and not have anything else to worry about. So last night I went to bed at about 8:15 and after a brief period of being awake at about 5:30 this morning since that is what time I usually get up, I finally rolled over at 7:15. Yes, my definition of sleeping in has definitely changed. I consider that to be a huge success and I feel a whole lot better for it.

Lots of sleeping means that you get in a lot of dreaming too. And lately, I seem to be dreaming about food. In a pretty comical way, actually. Given that I am in the process of trying to lose a pretty substantial amount of weight and am not eating a lot of deliciously indulgent things, apparently my subconscious is fixated on those things. Plus, I keep waking up in the middle of the night incredibly hungry. But I almost woke up laughing when two nights ago I awakened from a dream in which I was eating ice cream. But, it wasn't just that I was eating ice cream. I was eating ice cream out of a container the size of a huge trash barrel - you know, one of those big ones you'd find in your school cafeteria - and it had peanut butter cups and Oreos and who knows what else. Kind of like the way-beyond-gotta-have-it-size Cold Stone Creamery concoction. Think I might have been a little hungry?