Boot Camp

I’ve gotten up at 4:30 a.m. three times a week for the last month. And the crazy thing is, it turns out that I enjoyed it. I might even do it again.

In case you’re not seriously jet-lagged, a club kid, or a new parent, here are some useful facts about 4:30 a.m.: It is really dark. Really cold. Really quiet. It’s really not a normal time to be rising for the day. Even Henry looks at me like, “WTF?”

Boot camp ended today, and I’m coming to terms with the fact that I think I have to admit that I’m a morning person. 4:30 is a little extreme, sure – but it feels incredible to be getting home wide-awake at 6 a.m. and hopping into the shower knowing I’ve already had a workout. It definitely helps to have people waiting on me, people I already know and like and respect, to motivate me to get there and work hard while I’m there, but I think it’s an awful lot easier than trying to stay up late to do it would be.

It’s definitely required changes in bedtime, but that wasn’t as hard as I expected. You’d think it would curtail evenings pretty significantly, and you’d be right, but I don’t tend to be that productive at night anyway. So I veg out a little less in front of the TV and laptop, you know? Not a bad thing.

This time of year, when the days are so gloriously lengthening, it’s pretty easy to sync up with the sun. I do suspect this would have been way harder in November. But I always thought of being a morning person as sort of abrasively dorky, like people who finished their term papers a month early, and I tried for a lot of years to work a night-person kind of style. It turns out, this is just a lot more me (abrasively dorky or not)… and I kind of like it.