I’m in a conundrum.

I love working out. I love to exercise. I love to get up early and attack the day. I love when I start the day with a serious sweat session, then some quiet me time, then a couple hours of creativity all before 10 am. That’s an ideal way to attack this silly thing called life. At least for me.

But… I have a real tough time getting out of bed in the morning. I go go go so fast during the day that sometimes I find that when I finally do slow down, it takes a little momentum to convince myself to get at it again.

And, despite the fact that I love to get up and at ’em in the morning, anyone who knows me well knows that I am an unpleasant morning person. The first fifteen minutes of the day for me are very rough- no matter what time it is or how much I’ve slept.

And unfortunately, I’m involved in a lot of late night activities. I do comedy and the day doesn’t even start for most comedy people until 5 or 6 pm. And if you really make the most of your night, you can get home at 3 am without realizing how late it is.

So that late night stuff is highly conflicting with my early morning desires to get up and about.

And causing me great frustration.

Mostly because, one my favorite things- exercising- is the first activity to go by the wayside. At the end of the day, the landlord is not impressed at how fast I ran my last race. He wants his rent check. And my car will not care how strong my biceps have gotten. It wants gas. Even my gym is not impressed at how dedicated I am to going if I can’t afford the small monthly fee. So I gotta get my ass to work no matter how much I accomplished beforehand.

I was talking to my friend about this conundrum. We have some ideas on how I can be accountable in the morning and how I can re-train my body to get up when I tell it to. I’m going to try to get up every single day at the same time no matter what time I got to bed. I’m going to have an accountability buddy who will be expecting a message from me at the same time every day.  And if  when I do this for 30 days in a row, I’m going to treat myself to something awesome. Then again after 60 days. Then again after 120. Though, admittedly, the most awesome thing I can accomplish in such discipline and dedication is how much work will get done and how happy my body and spirit will be for making the time for the things that are so important to me.

The challenge starts Monday, April 22. Mostly because I have an intense weekend planned AND because the 22 is a good day for me to start for my own personal reasons. It’s a good day for a “Screw you, world. I own this” attitude.

I’ll keep you updated on my progress.

If anyone has any tips or tricks for getting up effectively in the morning, I would be very grateful to hear them.