Week Ten - Day Two

BIKE: Mike
TIME THERE: 26 min.
TIME BACK: 28 min.
WEATHER: a few clouds, 1C, 9km/hr wind there; a few clouds, 7C, 24km/hr wind back
WHAT I WORE: yoga pants, turtleneck, waterproof shell, double gloves, scarf
NOTES:
Towards the end of the day, my supervisor plodded into my room. "Lauren!" he said, "I need energy! Do something to energize me." Without hesitation, I began flailing my arms and legs around to the rhythm of my own made-up uptempo tune. He laughed, then nodded appreciatively. It seemed to do the trick - for the moment, anyway.

Despite the awesomeness of the people I work with, and the genuine caring I feel for my clients, there's just something about work lately that has been exhausting. So far I've chalked it up to basically being sick since Thanksgiving - almost a solid month straight of oscillating between feeling under the weather and full-on sick - but it seems everyone at work is feeling tired these days. It's not just me, so it can't be explained away by my perpetual illness. What is going on?

The weather is remarkably mild for November. With the change to daylight savings time over the weekend, I get to bike to and from work while it's light out. There has been a higher than usual rate of cancellations and no-shows with clients, so my days aren't as client-load-heavy as usual. There just doesn't seem to be any reason for this exhaustion. And yet, despite that lack of reason, I find myself wanting to catch naps at my desk in the mere minutes of respite I have between clients. I find myself wanting to eat more, and definitely eat more sugar, just to keep awake. My eyes want to close so badly that I've been prone to unnecessarily long blinks - those blinks that last just a second too long because of the effort it takes to open my eyes again once they've known the pleasure of being shut.

Who knows what's going on with the energy level at work? I don't. What I do know is that the time I feel most awake is when I'm biking, even if I don't always feel like doing it (as was the case today). Sometimes my legs ache, I'm coughing up a lung, my throat hurts to swallow, I feel tired to the core, and I just want to rest. Even on those days, my self-powered commute proves to be a highlight. Crazy, perhaps, but true.