TIART: Summer Gear

I got up for the second day in a row at 6:15 for a 6:30 am run. It's summer, the kids are out of school. My office is out of my home and my main client doesn't even open their office until 8:30 am which means that the majority of the people are wandering in sometime between 9-9:30 am. What am I doing up so early? Oh yeah, I get to go run before it gets blazing hot outside and my shoes start melting as I run and I end up with an inverted sunburn from the reflection off the pavement. My gadget and gear for running in the summer is a two-fold plan.

The first is the alarm clock. Years ago my wife and I put the alarm clock on the other side of the room. The theory being that if we have it in a place where we have to physically get out of bed and hit the snooze button, we would stay up. This was a theory that worked excellent for the first day and then we discovered that it really didn't make any difference. My sleep induced semi-conscious state didn't have any qualms about hitting snooze and crawling back into bed. My daughters' room is across the hall from ours. Their alarm clock goes off at 6:30 am every morning. Generally by 6:45 I am tired of listening to their music and since they aren't turning it off, I will walk across the hall, turn off their alarm and go back to bed. The alarm clock is just the first part of the plan.

My second part is having a running partner. This is a new portion of my plan. A neighbor down the street has a roofing company and I have a roof in need of some fixes. My patchwork quilt look isn't cutting it anymore. I found out that he runs on a semi-consistent basis but lacked the motivation to get out the door. He's giving me a deal on a re-roofing, I get a running partner for a few runs during the week. It's a fair trade off. I ran yesterday and wasn't planning on another run until Friday, but he called and wanted to go today, so I obliged. I figure in a week or two the novelty will wear off and I'll have to come up with a third part of the plan.