Someone's out to kill me

At least that's what it feels like these days.  I'm tired, so freaking tired.  But then again, what else is new?  This is the hardest part about training for me, the constant fatigue.  Every endurance athlete knows that the harder you train the more sleep you need to recover and rebound from the hard workouts.  Makes perfect sense, right?  All I need to do is add some extra hours to my schedule for sleeping and Bob's your uncle, problem solved.

Two problems with this hypothesis.

1. Where exactly am I supposed to get the extra time from?  As it is I have already had to start apportioning more time during the day just to training, including waking before 4:30AM several days a week to fit in everything.  Then I get home from work between 5 and 6 and it's out for an hour or so workout.  By the time that's all set, shower up, and grab some dinner, it's past 9 and I'm falling asleep on the couch.  Thank FSM for DVRs or I'd never see an entire TV show again.

And that would be a crime

2. Even without any training taking up time I sleep like shit.  This is nothing new.  I can easily knock off 10 hours sleeping and wake up exhausted.  I don't think I have slept through an entire night in over a decade.  This is hard to explain to people but imagine that every day of your life from the moment you get out of bed to the time you fall asleep that night you are tired.  And not just the "oh no, I haven't had my morning coffee yet" type of tired, I mean the "damn, I only got 3 hours of sleep last night" type of tired.  All day.  Every day.

The only good part about being tired all the time is that I have learned to adapt to it and can cope.  The bad part is when I start falling asleep at my desk.  I know making Visio diagrams is widely exciting but it's not exactly stimulating enough to keep me energized.  The big increase in training that I have been doing has certainly added to my sleep debt and has made me a tired old man.  As a matter of fact, it's 8:30 in the morning and I'm ready to call it a day and head back to bed.  Oh well, at least it's Friday and I have the weekend to look forward to.  Yeah!  Saturday's schedule should give me some time to rest after I wake up early, run for 90 minutes, Take Jackson to his baseball pictures/parade/first game, then bang out another 90 minutes, and finally get ready and head out to a soccer game with the boys that night.  I just might be able to squeeze in a three minute nap in there.  Or I can eat lunch, tough call.

Interesting side note: the best sleep I have gotten in years happened a few weeks ago.  I worked overnight from about 10PM to 5AM and arrived home at 6.  Then I went out and did a 40 minute run before finally getting to bed around 8.  Four hours later I awoke feeling better than I have in maybe my entire life.  I had crashed so hard that I never even heard the phone going off right by my ear.  It was the greatest feeling ever and I felt refreshed the entire day.  From only 4 hours of sleep!  I'm thinking I should do that all the time.