Still getting up at 4:30 am every morning to work out.  Well, to be completely accurate, this week it’s been 4:40 am since Lady Aravan has been using the snooze button once every morning.  She’s in charge of the alarm.  At one time, it was my responsibility, but this last time that she said she wanted to get up in the mornings, I said, “Sure.  But you have to deal with the alarm.”

I did that because Lady Aravan has two stages of waking up.  The first is a half-conscious state, where she is aware that she is being awoken, but nothing else.  Her vocabulary consists of, “Nooooo,” “I’m so comfy,” “but I’m warrrrrmm,” and little else.  I found it very difficult to be in a groggy half-state of awareness myself and hear this without having to lay back down myself, because I too wanted to say no, be comfy, and remain warm.  Her second state is the actual fully-aware state, in which she remembers nothing of her half-awake antics.  Sometimes she would get mad at me for waking her up, but that was rare.

I decided to make her responsible for the alarm this time, so she couldn’t sleep through it (which she did before but not anymore), and I didn’t have to coax her out of bed.  I am an anti-morning person, to put it lightly.  So far, it has worked out amazingly well, better than it ever did when I was responsible for it.  We had one or two issues, always on Mondays when neither one of us wanted to get up, so we eventually made that our day off rather than Sunday.

Today, for some reason, we were both dragging serious ass.  Her shoulder is still bothering her (sounds like when going from an ab hold to plank yesterday) and we were both pretty sore from using different muscles than we’d been using lately.  I had also switched some of my strength exercises to change things up, so my chest and triceps were even more sore on top of that.  We moved slooooooow. 

We hadn’t really decided which exercise DVD to do today – having a workout program like Bob’s was nice because I was not required to use any brainpower besides looking for the right-colored box every morning – so we ended up doing Jillian’s Banish Fat etc etc for the second day in a row.  Lady Aravan then said what I was thinking, that it would be a much better warm-up to get under a blanket under the couch and wait for breakfast.  It was pretty touch-and-go for a bit; I wasn’t sure if we’d abandon the workout or not as we half-assed our way through warm-ups.

Now, I’m happy to say we persevered, but at the time it was a slightly resentful workout.  We were snarky, pointing out clear edit points and Sallemah’s lack of effort on several exercises, amazed at how these people would go from glistening with sweat to perfectly dry in 4 milliseconds.  Lady Aravan wisely didn’t do much of anything to aggravate her shoulder (hopefully), avoiding the plank stuff and doing other exercises instead.  It wasn’t fun, but we did it, so I suppose that counts for something.  We did go back and forth with each other at one point, when I said she was being negative about achieving a particular goal (she said she wasn’t going to make it, I said that was negative, she said it wasn’t because she was still going to try for it, I just maintained that saying she was going to fail ahead of time was just being negative) but we got over it without incident.

Long story short (too late!), it was a tough morning, but we did exercise, and exercise with Intention (I always thought Jillian said Attention, but I definitely think she says Intention in this DVD).  By the time it was over, our moods were improved and we gossiped the rest of the morning.  I’m happy about what we accomplished, and hope that I am not dragging nearly as badly tomorrow as I did today.