Challenges

I had it all planned out. I wasn't going to mention the C2 Holiday Challenge again until maybe Day 14. You know, mark the half way point with some insights and witty remarks.

But I'm tired today. I sat down and rowed for an hour yesterday: 12,634m. Nowhere near a personal best, but definitely a major accomplishment for me. My butt hurt about 50 minutes into it. Still, I planned two days of "easy" rows before my next long one. Maybe only 8,000m each, 5,000m if I was short on time. Keep building my cushion, keep buying days off at the end. Days off that I'll never take.

I woke up at 5:30a this morning. That's about an hour before I intended to. I know lots of people get up that early or earlier regularly. But not me. I like my eight hours of sleep and I don't go to bed at 9:30p. After waking enough to realize I wasn't going back to sleep, my first thought was "Ug. I do NOT want to row today."

So I lay there enjoying the snuggliness of my flannel sheets and down quilt. I lay there letting my thoughts wander, appreciating all that is so wonderful about my life - even at 5:30 in the morning. I lay there waiting for the heat to come on at 6:30a. We set our thermostats back at night: 56F upstairs, 58F downstairs, so it's chilly in the morning before the heat comes on.

Let me explain. We used to do 58F both upstairs and downstairs, but the thermostat is in our bedroom. And we got a down quilt last winter. We figured a mid-weight one would be perfect. We could use it early fall to late spring. But nooooo. Down is an amazing insulator. We roasted. Now I wear my summer jammies all winter long under that marvelous quilt, and change into my fleece ones when I get up. My nose gets cold, but I'm cozy warm underneath. It's like hibernating, and that's how I sleep best.

Given our insulation we needed our bedroom to be colder at night so we wouldn't swelter. We realized that our bedroom tends to be colder than the rest of the house in winter (warmer, unfortunately, in summer) as it has outside walls on three sides. We figure the kids' rooms stay a couple of degrees warmer than ours, and as each of us survived 58F as kids, ours can too.

So I lay there this morning waiting for the heat to come on. I watched dawn break and the sky brighten. I started making deals with myself about doing only a minimum 7,143m row, or maybe even only 5,000m. My body felt tired. And that's when I realized that the biggest challenge I could offer myself today was the challenge to take a day off, gracefully. And you know how I love a challenge...