My body has chosen its bedtime

Which seems to be 2 am.  I'm going to try to edge it closer to 1.

Anyway, after a sound sleep, I woke up at 6 am and totally wasted 40 minutes before I got on the treadmill.  I had to get out of bed, find my clothes, turn the music and TM on, and finish a sudoku puzzle, in order of increasing importance, not chronological.

1 hr in one go, no water breaks, and then I walked for a few more minutes to bring it up to 5 miles.  A nice thing about the consistency of the treadmill is how it differentiates different speeds.  When you stay at a certain exact pace for a while, it becomes very familiar, and much more unique.  A slight shift up or down feels momentous. Also, there are some paces which just don't feel right, which also intrigues me.  I started off at 4.2 mph, and it took me a while to warm up, but once I hit 2X minutes, I switched to 4.7 mph, which was still super easy but gave me more lift.  After a half hour, I went to 5.0 mph, which felt constrained, and so I hung out at 5.4 mph for a while and then 5.7 mph....I promised myself that I'd go back to 5.0 mph at some point (45 min? I don't remember now), but when I did, it felt so wrong, so clenched.  Up to 6.0 mph and I started to feel that outside ankle action and quickness of foot strike I'd felt earlier this week, and then it became important to feel my hips opening up more.  This happened at 6.8 or so mph.

Then, and only then, did I feel my pelvis suspended in midair and my legs swinging freely below it.  This is a wonderful sensation especially when I'm still breathing easy.  I think I've had dreams like this, of gliding up and down hills effortlessly.   Unfortunately, I cannot maintain this for long so it remains a treat, a few minutes here and there of near perfection before breathing starts to quicken.  Maybe I will be able to hold this perfect floating period for longer with practice.  And this is why I keep running.

Then I did Zwow #22 and though I resorted to the beginner versions of the exercises from time to time--OK, my burpees, which are the rest period in this workout (!!!), devolved into pushups from the knees and, honestly, the last exercise, a single-leg squat/twist combo, was impossible to grasp--by the time we got to it, I'd forgotten completely about it and was preparing to congratulate myself for another successfully completed routine.  And then my hopes were dashed into the ultimate chasm of prehistoric despair to darkness before cerebral cortexes.  It was pretty disappointing.  I decided to do single leg squats instead.

I feel my nap has been sufficiently primed today.

And HUGE THANKS to Gaz and D for sending me super duper passed-the-test earplugs!  I tried them for yesterday's nap and felt much more refreshed.  I think I've been curtailing my nap sleep cycle out of anxiety over the church bells, even though my nap has moved earlier than the bells.  But suppose a random person walked in and rang a few of them at a random time?  Not to mention funerals and that kind of thing.  See?  With the earplugs, I don't have to worry about this!