This morning I rose early to meet a friend to run hills. We started with a 15 minute-ish warm up, and then I ran up a steep-ish hill nine times, the first three easy, the second three medium, and the last three hard. My friend divided her time between running a few hills with me and hanging out at the bottom of the hill on the sidewalk, using our discarded fleece hats as elbow pads while she did planks and some other stuff which I didn’t actually see because I was running up the hill with my back to her. She is the kind of friend who is up for anything. I thought we were texting about possibly having coffee together this morning, and then I was like “I’m not sure if it’s going to work because I am running hills from about 7:00-8:15.” And she was like “Ok, see you at about 7?” Except she runs maybe once a week (maybe) for about 30 minutes at a time. So I texted back “I am confused. Can I call u?” Texting is great, but not for everything. Anyway, she was totally down for the run, because she is just enthusiastic like that. It was great to have some company. The best part was when she joined me for my ninth and final repeat, which forced me to do everything I could to run faster than her. By the time 90 seconds were up, I had run at least one house distance farther than I had on any other repeat. Made me wish she had been doing every single one with me, because, honestly, I thought I was working hard, but apparently I had a few more gears I didn’t know about until there was some friendly competition.

We ran for a total of an hour and 15 minutes, which I am just going to call 7.5 miles, since I was Garmin-less. I don’t always run with it. You don’t always need that much information.

Speaking of information, there’s too much when it comes to babies and sleep. It’s like you have a baby and suddenly you’re in this zone of hanging out with other people who have or have had babies and all you talk about is SLEEP. How frequently? How much? How good? How did you finally get it?  It reminds me of how everyone was talking about sex when I was still a virgin.

So I was all about sleep training. Then I wasn’t. I read a few baby sleep books. I chucked the ones I didn’t like. I re-read the one I liked. I re-read it again. I got another one out from the library. It contradicted the first one. Our pediatrician contradicted both of them. Our friends who had premature twins said they sleep trained at eight months and now the kids sleep like champs. Which made me think, if their kids can sleep through the night, why shouldn’t our baby be able to? Which made me think we should sleep train again. And then I talked to my best friend who has three kids and she said the problem is I am talking to too many people and reading too many books and the only thing to do is to do what the baby needs, and every baby is different. Which only made me more confused because THE BABY CAN’T TALK. Sometimes I think I should just trust my intuition, but you develop intuition through experience (Isn’t that what Malcolm Gladwell said in “Blink”? Great book), and I have basically none. Anyway, we are back on board with sleep training.

I need to think of it like I think of my running, with an emphasis on consistency, consistency, consistency! And if you fall off the wagon (e.g. going on vacation, which is potentially hazardous to the maintenance of both training and sleep schedules), just get back on the first chance you get.