I don't want to jinx myself, but...

(shhh)

... I've gotten back into my gym schedule.

I have made it to the gym 5 days Monday through Friday, which means I've hit my attendance goal. I'm not half-assing it either, people. I made a commitment to myself that I'd kick the cardio up to an hour per session. I need to do that until this weight comes off. Yes, I'm in great shape and I am seeing muscle definition I haven't seen in years, but these lbs and love handles aren't going to go away just because I asked nicely. Glaring at them isn't helping either, in case you were thinking of trying that.

I have been struck every day by the irony that the more sleep I have to sacrifice to accomplish this, the more energy I seem to have. I don't have the gym scheduled for weekends. That eliminates the dilemma of what to do when I'm on daylights and have to work Saturday and Sunday, 8a-8p, the exact hours the gym is open. Last weekend, by 2pm, I sat down in a chair at work and felt like I slipped into a coma. More like, swan dived with a half gainer, into a coma. For 45 minutes, it was all I could do to even keep my eyes open. This... during a weekend where I was "catching up on my sleep", getting a whopping 7 hours each night.

These days I grudgingly haul my ass out of bed at 4:15am (after whining, hitting snooze twice, and finally getting woken up by the dog, who has my schedule down cold and always comes in to give me just a single cold-nosed poke on my cheek). The difference in my energy levels is palpable. And the brain fog - on those days I put in some sweat equity, my brain actually works! I have visions of a little bristle-eared janitor guy inside my brain, his ass crack hanging out of his loose green Dickies work pants, busily sucking cobwebs out of the far crevices of my brain with an industrial-strength Shop Vac. I'm thinking he does this during cardio because I have my music blaring and he doesn't want to disturb me with the Shop Vac - nice of him.

With all of this knowledge, you'd think I'd be lying there at 4am, trying to Jedi mind-trick my alarm to go off so I can get my endorphin hit. Well, if you think that, sorry, you're smoking crack mistaken. I still have to talk myself into it. Get my gym clothes on the moment I get up. Turn on all the lights in the living room and wake my brain up; after all, those brain-spiders had a few hours to rebuild their cobwebs. I give myself a deadline to leave the house, otherwise I will sit and drink coffee and watch the news until it's time to get ready for work. I remind myself repeatedly how much better the commute to work is from the gym than from home. There's an elaborate mind game that goes on, every day. That's not to say it's not becoming a habit, because I feel like it is. However, I've been practicing the other habit for years now. A few months of doing something that's slightly inconvenient and kind of physically hard is no match for half a lifetime of lazy and gluttonous.

It's a fight every day, and not even close to a fair fight. However, this week, I won.