sing me to sleep...

You know you’re getting old when you start remarking to your colleagues that you’ve just had two really good nights’ sleep in a row. They were good enough not to laugh in my face, but I could see what they were really thinking. It’s true though: I’ve had a stinking cold for the last week, with a couple of restless nights. It was brilliant to go to bed early on Tuesday night and on Wednesday night and to have 8 hours of almost unbroken rest before heading into work. How often does that happen? Not often enough that I didn’t feel the need to talk about it at work the next day, that’s for sure.

I like sleeping. I don’t do anywhere as near as much of it as I would like, but it’s one of life’s pleasures, isn’t it? A good, long sleep in a comfortable bed and with no particular place to be in the morning: bliss. How often does that happen in a year? I think that one of the saddest things about getting older and having a job is that, even when you don’t have to be in the office, your body is still conditioned to wake up at the crack of dawn and you just seem to lose the ability to lie in bed for hours on end. My teenage self is disgusted with me.

I don’t even really get to lie-in at the weekends any more, either. And the worst part about that is that it’s entirely self-inflicted: parkrun on a Saturday and a long run on a Sunday. What with marathon training and all, it’s small wonder that I now spend most of my weekend afternoons asleep on the sofa. I don’t even think I can blame my MS, dammit. Tiredness and fatigue are completely different things, and I’m lucky enough to only get the former very occasionally (and when I do, it’s like the power-switch has been pulled and my body just shuts down rather than gently drifts up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire).

I like to think that I’m a night-owl and will happily burn the midnight oil on any day of the week, just pottering about, reading a book or listening to some music. This is now plainly a fantasy. This might have been true once-upon-a-time, but it definitely isn’t true now. I usually make it to 10pm, but even that’s not guaranteed these days, as the eyes start to sag on the sofa almost the moment I’ve finished my tea.

Still, the one good thing about getting older is that I pretty much don’t give a shit what anyone else might think about this. So much for getting old disgracefully.

red squirrel in the morning....

Whatever happened to lie-ins?

I ask because I was having a conversation with someone this morning who has teenage sons, and she was saying that she finds it almost impossible to get them out of bed. Yesterday, her nineteen year-old didn’t actually surface before 7pm… which is a pretty heroic effort if you ask me. She was remarkably phlegmatic about it too, it has to be said. She just shrugged her shoulders and said they could do what they liked.  He'd been up all night on the internet, apparently.  I bet he had.

I’m not expecting to be able to go back to being a teenager and to just lounge around in bed until lunchtime and beyond… but I don’t really seem to get any kind of a lie-in anymore and that makes me feel a little sad for days gone by. Apart from anything else, those few extra hours sleep at the weekend just help you recharge your batteries for another week at work...and that mostly seems to have disappeared from my life.

It’s all my own fault too. You see, the thing is that I’ve picked up activities at the weekend that require actually getting out of bed and leaving the house. No one's making me get up to do this stuff: they're activities that I volunteered to do, so there's no one to blame but myself.  If you had suggested to the teenage me that I would voluntarily be getting up at 7:15 on a Saturday morning to get up and ready for a 5km run at 9am, then I would have laughed in your face. If you were to then add that I would be doing more or less the same thing on a Sunday morning too, only this time it was a ten mile run, then I probably told myself to get a grip and then burst into tears.

Whisper it quielty, but I suppose it’s actually quite nice to be up early and to have been for a run and still have the best part of the day in front of you…. It’s just that thinking like that is so old, isn’t it? You wouldn’t catch all that many young people thinking like that.

I’m old and I get up early in the morning. If you'll forgive me, I feel like I need to mourn the passing of my youth.

only sleeping...

I spent much of my bank holiday weekend snoozing on a chair in front of the cricket. Well, I suppose that’s not entirely true: I spent much of my bank holiday weekend either out exercising, or snoozing on a chair in front of the cricket.  As well as all the snoozing, I managed to squeeze in a parkrun (5km), a swim and another run of a little over 6 miles with my running club.  That's not too shabby in a three day weekend that also included a Eurovision party (don't ask).

It’s been four weeks now since London, and that parkrun on Saturday was the first run since where I didn’t still feel the marathon in my legs… it was also the first in several weeks where I consciously tried to work my way back up though the gears to shake marathon pace out of my system. 23:37 is still  quite a bit slower than I want to be running, but it’s a good five minutes faster than I have been running parkrun for the last few months.

As for the snoozing….. well, one of the most common, “invisible” symptoms of multiple sclerosis is fatigue. It’s “invisible” because it’s not really something that anyone else can see, and yet for lots of people, it can be devastating. Can you imagine not being able to summon the energy to even get out of bed, never mind to leave the house? Can you imagine needing a blue disabled badge for your car before you can even contemplate a trip to the supermarket? Can you imagine then being abused by people for parking in that disabled space just because they can’t see anything wrong with you?

Clearly, given that I’ve just run a marathon, my fatigue is nowhere near those sorts of levels. Even so, sometimes it feels as though a switch has been flicked and I just run out of power and basically all I’m good for is sleep. This was one of those sorts of weekends. Energy output > Energy reserves = Power down.

Mind you, I can remember my dad coming home from work in the evening and falling asleep in front of the telly before dinner. We used to laugh at the way he would start snoring into the newspaper and would then be all grumpy when he woke up, denying that he had even been asleep in the first place. Given that he would have been about my age at the time, and I find myself doing more or less exactly the same thing now...I’m not laughing so much these days.

I suppose it’s entirely possible that the reason I find myself spending my bank holiday weekend afternoons snoozing is because I’m a 41 year old man sitting in a warm dapple of sunshine watching a game of cricket on the telly after lunch and nothing at all to do with my MS.

Yeah, let’s go with that.

I'm still yawning....

When I was a boy, I used to be a real early bird.  I'd frequently be the first person up in our house, and I'd spend the time quietly reading a book.  I loved to read, and in fact, I would usually fall asleep at the other end of the day with a book in my hand.  I still love to read, but somewhere along the way, the love of early mornings disappeared.

I was hardly unique as a teenager in spending most of the morning in bed whenever I could, but a pattern was set: I like to potter about doing nothing much until around midnight, and then I like to sleep for as long as I possibly can.  Of course, just as school used to harsh my lie-in buzz when I was a teenager, it's now work that tends to drag my sorry arse out of bed at around half past seven in the morning.

As I've got older and perhaps as my MS has reared it's ugly head, I tend to feel fatigue cumulatively: if I have a particularly busy week, then I really need to spend a few extra hours in bed over the weekend or I will pay a price in the form of an energy crash over the next few days.  I need to put some time into the bank, some money into the meter, some spoons into the drawer.... you get the picture.

My normal working pattern has been somewhat disrupted this week.  There's the cycling, of course, but in addition to that, I'm also working some strange hours.  I'm usually in the office from around 08:15 to about 18:00.  Because of a particular piece of work I'm doing at the moment, I've been forced to adjust my working hours to spend as much time as I can with a colleague who works 06:30 to 14:00.  Instead of getting up at around 07:00, I've been struggling out of bed at 05:45 and getting my gear together for the cycle to work.

Actually, the getting up is the hardest part of the whole thing. Once I'm out on my bike, I'm fine.  At the moment, at this time of day, it's dark when I start my commute and light by the time I arrive at the office.  It's pretty quiet and getting the blood pumping like this is a decent way to start the day.  I'm also quite enjoying those first few hours in the office when there's almost nobody else around and we can just make some coffee and get on with our work.

When Matt leaves the office at 14:00, I go back to my own desk and attend some meetings and deal with emails and things like that, not leaving until probably after 16:00.  It's a long day, and certainly one that I'm not used to working.  By about 15:00, I find that my brain stops working properly and I have this odd light-headed feeling and an ache around my neck and shoulders.... that's when my body is telling me that it's had enough.  This time last year, even during my normal working day, I was finding that my eyes were drooping terribly between about half two and half three.  This might have been due to the incredibly tedious meetings I was attending in overheated rooms, but I've since pretty much stopped drinking during the week, and that seems to have made me generally clearer eyed... even if I was only having the odd pint of a night, it really seems to have helped cutting that out.

Still, when I've been in the office since 06:30, it doesn't seem too unreasonable to shove off not long after 16:00.  They've more than had their pound of flesh by then, eh?

The ride home blows away most of the cobwebs, especially if it's raining, and by the time I've showered and made a cup of tea, I'm feeling set for the rest of the evening... although, to be fair, it's probably not as taxing playing Tomb Raider as it is trying to contribute intelligently to a meeting.

Hmm, actually.....

Anyway.  I do miss my later evenings, as by about 22:00, I'm absolutely beat and looking to hit the hay.  I do like to sleep, so that's okay too...although this worked less well for me last night when my wife bowled back in from her salsa class at about midnight and clanked about on the wooden floors with her dancing shoes on....

Yeah.  So, I have a feeling that I'm going to want to spend some quality time on Saturday morning asleep in my bed with no need to be anywhere.  That would be good.  Well, at least until I get up to go for a run, anyway.

Gotta go running.

*bang bang bang* Yee-haw!  1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4.
*bang bang bang* Yee-haw!  1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4.