Day ???: I am lazy and Phoenix is hot

This, this right here is why I'm raising money for Chuka. The fact that without any sort of higher motivation or purpose, I would no sooner dream of waking up early to run. The fact that it's been a few days since I've written, and to be honest, my workouts in between (with the exception of one or two), haven't been all that swell. Why?

I hate working out in the summer.

You see, I'm an afternoon worker-outer. I enjoy sleeping in, going to work rested, and then coming home to a solid workout before dinner. That, to me, is athletic perfection. It's the perfect close to a productive day. The cherry on top of motivated excellence.

You know what's not? 100 degrees at 7:00 a.m., 150 million degrees at 5:30 p.m. Uuughh...

And beyond it being warm, I am a horrendously cranky person for the first 10 minutes after waking up. My alarm goes off, I could punch a small child. It's terrible, I know, I'm just so horrendously bitter about the whole experience!! And poor Nathan tries to make me happy, he really does, but then we start running and the guy can't figure out if I'm just motivated to finish or still angry (usually it's the first), it just makes for an unpleasant experience.

Say a prayer everyone. If we're going to get this thing done this fall, I've got to put my big girl panties on and actually get me out of bed in the morning. More importantly, and the underlying problem with my morning crankiness, I've got to get my head in tip-top mental shape. Of all the things I struggle with, this is the biggest root cause: I'm mentally lazy when it comes to pain, discomfort and general motivation through such things.

This week wasn't so good.

I believe that out of the last seven days, we've run/hiked three of them? Ouch. At this rate, the Grand Canyon is going to come out of nowhere and kick our butts! I don't know if it was all of the traveling we did on vacation, or the fact that I simply didn't get to bed early enough this week, but for whatever reason, I could not, simply COULD NOT manage to get going this week. Today was better.

We woke up much later than we had originally intended (totally my bad - didn't set the alarm), and once we got out there it was blazing. Our workout was a mixture of walking up our street / hiking up the hill by our house / running downhill back to la casa. I thought I had a solid lead on Nathan going in to the home stretch, but unfortunately it wasn't enough and his long legs beat out my little guys in the finishing sprint. Dang. I've got to work on those fast twitch muscles. The good news though was that we actually ran! Progress.

Well, that concludes my story for the day. I am lazy, Phoenix is hot, and I need your prayers (and support) to crank this party out in the Fall. If you haven't done so already, I encourage you to follow the link at the top of the blog and consider donating to the Chuka Children's Home. You can also learn more about Mars Hill and the folks that are keeping the Home running. Also, look for more information on them in upcoming posts.

Hey! Remind me tomorrow to tell you the story of our 16 mile hike on vacation, I think you'll really like it...