This is my bed...and in it I slept this morning. It was glorious. (Photo by Paul Tenorio/The Washington Post)

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Sleep is a wonderful thing. A wooonndeerrrrrfullll thing. Can I over-emphasize this any more?

Let me try to explain my thinking here. Do you remember when you were a kid and it was like, I dunno, 8 p.m. and dark out and you were watching TV with about an hour till bedtime when suddenly you glance out the window and…snowflakes. Not just little snowflakes but really snowing snowflakes.

And you go to school in an area where even a half inch of snow means at least a two-hour delay, so right now you’re thinking…hey, I’ve got a pretty good chance of no school. And the snow keeps coming and coming and by 9 p.m. there’s four inches on the ground. And you know what that means. No SCHOOL! NO SCHOOL! SLEEEEEEEEP!

That’s kind of like what happened for me last night. I was sitting on the waterfront at Georgetown with my girlfriend (I didn’t feel like cooking dinner so we went to Georgetown and took a walk down by the water to find some food…by the way, a bit expensive) and I was talking about how much I wanted to watch the whole Vikings-Packers game on Monday Night Football.

“I’ll just have to go to practice tired tomorrow,” I said. “Because I want to watch that game.”

Suddenly, my pocket vibrated. Hmm, email. I pulled out my Blackberry and saw the subject line: “NO a.m. practice.” There was a problem with the filtration system at the pool and it wouldn’t be fixed until late this afternoon.

SNOW DAY!

This is not me complaining about the early wake ups. Honestly I’m fine getting in the pool whenever, and Jeff sent out a nice, extended swim workout at 8 this morning so whenever I finish my work for the day I’ll head over to a pool and try to knock it out. But the point was that I was going to get to sleep in. HA! SLEEP! Not to mention, it meant I could watch the whole Vikings-Packers game, which was very worth it.

Maybe this is lost on some of you, maybe it’s not, I’m not sure. But when you get no days of sleeping past 3:40 a.m. on weekdays you enjoy the idea of a pure 8-9 hours of ZZZ time.

So, this morning I slept…and I slept…and I slept…and it was glorious.

I dreamed of swimming, ironically, and sure, I woke up at 4:15 in a panic that I had missed my alarm. But it sure was nice to wake up and see it was light outside already.

Of course, like I said, Jeff did send an extended workout and I’m sure I’ll saunter over to Washington-Lee pool at some point this afternoon if I can. If I can’t carve out time to hit that pool I’ll definitely get a dry-land workout in, I have to check the hours on the Arlington pools during school days because I’m sure it’s different than the summer hours and I’ve got to knock out a couple stories first.

For now I’m feeling refreshed after nine hours of sleep and I’m going to enjoy the one day with a 9 a.m. wake up call. Tomorrow it’ll be back to 3:40 a.m. and it’ll be back to preparing for the October Open with the whole team.

I’ll be ready to go.

Washington Post reporter Paul Tenorio will train with a swim club over the next few months and chronicle his journey as he attempts to transform from regular guy/sports reporter to competitive swimmer — everything from his waistline to his best times.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 10:38 am and is filed under Diving Back In. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.