Journey Back to Kona Day 155: Dreaming

I haven't blogged in 12 days, and my last blog was about needing an intervention. Last night I felt like I was up all night dreaming!  I literally had a broad range of dreams that were incredibly vivid. In my last dream I was as soldier during WWII and I was with other American soldiers, and suddenly, I was running around a building and there were Nazi soldiers everywhere.  I couldn't get away from them.  I was about to shoot a man when I was captured and forced to sit down with a group of people.  One of them was an old woman.  She said something to me and I slapped her across the face.  Suddenly, I apologized, and tried to explain that I didn't hit old women.  Weird.  I could probably try to remember the range of my dreams, but as I write this their already flowing back into the recesses of my brain.  They were so real, and every time I woke up from one, it felt like I hadn't slept.

I kind of had that intervention.  Somehow, I've been trying extra hard to take some semblance of control over my life again. I've been good about working out, to the extent that my fatigue levels have been rising.  Two nights ago that reached a crescendo when my wife told me that I looked tired.  That's always a sign that I'm fried.  She also told me, after I mentioned this the next day, that I had been grumpy.  Grumpy old man, that's not what I want to be!  Nevertheless, that's my signal to rest, and yesterday was a pretty mellow day, although I did get in a 40 minute bike that included 5 two minute hard repeats up the 7% hill that runs up my neighborhood.  According to my coach, older men need those VO2 workouts, and I'll particularly need them for the hilly St. George Ironman in May.

I did manage to do the best workout ever last week, pushing my granddaughter in a jogging stroller for 8 miles, and I'll say, 8 very hilly miles that included a 1 mile 6-8% climb.  I followed that up with a 5 1/2 mile stroller run two days later that included the same climb.  That was one of the reasons for my fatigue at the end of the week.  If I'm going to be ready for my upcoming races, I'm going to need to keep up my training.  However, that also means that I'm also going to need to to modulate and not let the physical and mental stresses get the best of me.  

I'm someone who tends to remember my dreams, although I rarely, if ever, write them down right away. That might be an interesting experiment sometime. I wonder what I would learn.  I bought a book over a year ago about dreams, started to read it and never finished.  Always something more to learn in life. Always something to dream about.