Friday, December 23, 2011

ZZZZZZZZ: Or the Lack Thereof

What happens when your body decides that it only needs to sleep for three hours? What do you do when you are awake five hours before the alarm goes off and six hours to your workout? You blog, of course.
I'm not entirely sure what's going on with my sleeping schedule, but I can't sleep for the life of me. I'm usually a good sleeper-I know I'm lucky that way-but for some reason, this last week I can't sleep. Maybe I'm too excited about Santa coming.
Quite often, people who are totally blind, or only have a bit of light perception, have difficulties sleeping. The inability to process light confuses the chemicals in the brain and they are either not produced or too much is produced. Hence, causing sleeping pattern issues. Normally, I do not have these sort of difficulties and even though I've tried to turn my schedule around, I keep popping awake around 3 or 4 AM for no reason; regardless of when I went to bed.
Seriously though, not sleeping definitely impacts your workout, but that can't stop me today. I have today and tomorrow to get through to finish out this week's practices and I am going to do it. I had scheduled to practice transitions for the first time today. I really want to get my body used to going from the bike into a run because apparently, your legs can feel "cooked" after cycling. The sooner I learn to push through that, the better. I'm not sure if that will stay on today's agenda as I'd like to do that when I'm feeling really good, but then again, why not do it tired? Races will happen whether you've slept or not, and if it's your first race of the season or your first race ever, sleep is highly unlikely due to excitement. So, I suppose practicing transitions on about only three hours of sleep may be beneficial in the long run.
If I can do these things tired then imagine how well I'll do with a good night's sleep?
This all sounds a bit crazy, but training needs to happen when you want to reach the level that I do. Sure, you shouldn't over do it, but you also need to push and I think today may be a "push through it" kind of day. That's okay. As that old saying goes:
"Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger."
Or, as a coach used to say to me quite often when training for team Canada:
"suck it up buttercup."
I will be sucking it up. :)

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