14 | April | 2011 | Spinach and Skittles

goodnight stars, goodnight air

goodnight noises everywhere

As a child Good Night Moon was my favorite book. And although I no longer have the soothing voice of my mother reading me a bedtime story, I am still a fan of the nightly routine of reading.

Usually turning the pages while in a horizontal position will send the message to my brain that it is time to go to sleep. However, as of late I have been having quite the issue getting my daily zzz’s. My body is exhausted, but my mind doesn’t want to play along.

At first I attributed it to eating dinner too late, which would ultimately result in my stomach not being settled enough for slumber. We started eating dinner earlier, but it didn’t make a lick of difference. Then I tried a variety of herbal teas, but they only resulted in me waking up multiple times to pee. Then I thought maybe increasing the intensity of my work outs might help. It didn’t. (The hubs tried to get me to take a sleeping pill, but those, and all p.m. medicines, affect me too much the following morning).

So every night I laid there, wide awake, tossing and turning, unable to get a good night’s rest. In fact, the two weeks leading up to Spring Break I only made it to the gym on Monday and skipped the rest of the week in favor of my snooze button.

But last night I got a good nights rest. So good, in fact, upon waking at 5:04 a.m. I reset my alarm for 6:30 and fell promptly back to sleep. This time snooze didn’t win out over the gym because of lack of sleep, it won because I was enjoying my sleep so much!

Ahhh it was glorious. And I think it was directly related to the 4 mile run I pounded out yesterday morning. Running just exhausts my entire body, and I don’t know why I don’t do it more often. Oh wait, it is because in the early morning hours I need to utilize the dreadmill, rather than the great outdoors.

But the gym doesn’t have to be completely boring. Here is a smattering of amusing things I’ve seen over the past few weeks:

Guy walking on the treadmill wearing very large and full backpacking gear.
Guy thinking he is singing in his head, when in reality he is mumbling and moaning the songs on his iPod. At first I thought a cat was in heat.
Very old lady in flashdance attire and flashy 80’s makeup
Guy crabwalking and doing other quite difficult moves on the treadmill. (I was actually quite impressed with his mad skills, I would have fallen off!)
Guy doing kickboxing? Zumba? Billy Blanks Tao Bo? (not positive what work out it was, but he was jumping back and forth and boxing and then jumping to face the opposite wall to do the same thing) in the stretching room to a DVD playing on his laptop. This one perplexed me the most, why didn’t he do the workout DVD at home?
And finally, the Czech President stealing a pen (I watch CNN while working out). I literally laughed out loud, and got quite a few looks, when I saw this.