Deadline day

Ever since I was little (or littler - still only 5'7") I've tended to wake up in the early hours.

I think it's from my parents getting me and my sister u, dressed and into the car by 6:45 so my dad could get to the factory where he worked, and my mom then had the car so she could get to work.

When we eventually got a video (to the younger readers, that's a recordable hard drive made out of weird plastic tape, to the Yanks, it's a VCR) I remember me and my sister being excited to get back home as my mom would have recorded TV-AM while we were out.

Not that I was an Anne Diamond fan, but it included a 5 minute episode of Popeye or something similar at about 7:20.

When I got a morning paper round, I was always at the newsagents by 6am. Often I was there before the papers had arrived.

Even at uni, I got up early – albeit nearer 8am, rather than midday like everyone else in our freshers flat.

The moral is, I'm an early riser. My alarm goes off at 5:42 (no idea when or why I got so specific) and I'm usually in work before 7:30.

So, you'd think I'd be used to the sound of my alarm in the morning.

Not today.

It had a different noise.

And it went off at 4:30.

Now you might think 'big deal, just turn it off and go back to sleep'. Sadly my brain doesn't work like that. Once I'm awake, I'm awake. It's a pain, but I've gotta live with it.

So when I hit the 'dismiss' button (no idea why it's not called 'off', but what do I know about mobile phone design?) I mentally prepared myself for an hour of trying to get back to sleep, knowing full well it wouldn't work.

After about 20 mins of trying to bury my head in a way that made it dark enough to trick myself it might be time to sleep, but not too hot that I feel like I'm in a furnace, it suddenly dawned on me to check why my phone went off so early.

Annoyingly, it had locked itself so I had to fiddle around with the touchscreen keyboard thingy whilst still not entirely conscious, but after a herculean effort (and several fat finger mistakes) I was in.

Turns out today is the deadline for the ill or injured forms to be returned for next years London marathon - how organised am I putting that on there?

And also what the hell was I thinking setting the reminder for 4:30? Was I giving myself extra time so I could nip into London to hand-deliver it?

Anyway, it was a moot point as I'd sent it almost straight after I got it a couple of weeks ago.

So now, having given up on trying to get back to sleep, I spent the rest of my pre-alarm time running through the things I want/need to do to get to the end of The Mall next April.

I'm sure my list is pretty comprehensive by now, but the problem is to do most - if not all - of the stuff on there requires my to get past the first one - sort out knee.

Only three more knee class things to go then I get the verdict from the physio then I can actually think about running and might have something to blog about other than my morning ritual!