For the Love of Exercise
Cumulative sleep deprivation is really, really heinous. And not just because you almost put formula in the coffee maker (hey, they're both powders, right?).

Three months post-pardum, I am (I think) presently at the point where my body's done shedding the eighty pounds I gained over the entirety of my pregnancy. I'm now about ten pounds off from before all this started. This is still ten pounds heavy enough to make half my wardrobe inaccessible. Which irritates me. Plus, as I've mentioned before, I have learned to enjoy exercise. I love running, I love dancing, I love fencing. I am eager to get back to these things. So eager, in fact, that while the baby was napping one evening, I took myself out to jog, where I discovered that... I am not ready to jog again.

I learned a while ago that if I'm breathing easily, I'm not working hard enough... but if I'm nauseated, I've passed the happy place. The beautiful middle ground is where you're fighting the world to breathe and everything's a white fire and all your joints are singing defiance and praise and you feel alive and fierce: a feeling I can't get from merely walking or other lower impact forms of exercise.

It used to be that this middle ground was pretty broad. I could hit it ten minutes into whatever I was doing and it would stretch for... oh, fifteen minutes sometimes before I started crossing over into nausea. And in that fifteen minutes, you can jog/dance/fence a lot before you have to stop and blow and walk to get your wind back.

Now the space between "I'm panting" and "The world's gone white and I'm going to throw up" is about... oh... two minutes. Less.

It's the lack of sleep. The more broken my sleep is the day before, the narrower that band gets, until on days when I've slept only a few one-hour increments, just walking makes me dizzy.

I am frustrated. I miss exercise badly--my kind of exercise, not the boring stuff. But I am resigned to the fact that until I start sleeping for longer than two or three hours at a time, I'm not going to be able to do it safely.

This babycare thing? Is the most grueling physical marathon I've ever done. The baby is only occasionally sleeping four hours straight now, and I never know which night she'll choose to do it. But the first week that she does it consistently? You will know. BECAUSE I WILL DANCE AND SING AND DRAW TRIUMPHANT PICTURES.

*fallsover*


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