My Body Knows...

The way my big relay race usually works is that we have to be at the ferry terminal at a ridiculous hour, like 4am, so we don’t get much sleep the night before. Then the race is all night, so either you run all night and then finally get to bed at like 6am to sleep for a couple of hours before waking up to meet the team for the last couple of legs or you sleep for a couple of hours before meeting the team at 3am to start running the second half of the race. At some point you end up running a crazy long and hard leg so by the time you actually crawl into bed that night you’re so tired that you’re quite convinced that you’ll sleep for 12 hours straight. Except that I don’t. I sleep terribly. I don’t know why but somehow my body sleeps for a couple of hours and then I toss and turn all night.

Somehow my body knows that I ran my leg yesterday. It may not have been the real race, but my body is acting the same way. I burned a lot of energy yesterday and I figured that I would sleep great, like I always do after a good run. Plus I’m in my own bed. Nope. It’s 5am. I’m wide awake and I have been for hours. It feels just like the night after the actual race. Also, my toenail hurts. It never bugs me when I run here. It doesn’t bug me when I run a half marathon here, which I’ve done three times now. But it bugs me after every single relay race. It’s the same toe and sometimes the nail even falls off. It had only grown halfway back in for my wedding after I ran the race for the first time four months before. But it’s bugging me now.

Seriously, I ran the same route that I’ve run many times. It wasn’t even a a crazy distance. But my body knows.

Can I please go to sleep now???