It is still summer. It is still hot. Going outside feels like opening a sauna. This can only mean one thing: college football is back. In just one week, Saturdays will once again revolve around kickoff times, especially here in the South. And nothing sounds better than finishing a full day of football with the 6:30 primetime game. At least until you remember the Sunday morning long run waiting on the other side of it.
I want to stay up and finish the game, but I am already doing the math on how many hours of sleep I can get before the alarm goes off. It is a calculation I will make almost every Saturday night for the next few months.
Before football even starts, my Saturday mornings are usually spent on the soccer field, either helping coach Ellis or watching Dean play. It is one of my favorite parts of fall. The mornings are busy, but in a good way. There is usually a lot of running around, attempting to keep everyone where they need to be, and plenty of time standing outside in the same heat I complain about all week during my own runs.
From there, the rest of Saturday usually revolves around football. On South Alabama home weekends, we head to the stadium. When Alabama plays, we are usually figuring out which side of the family we are watching with and where we need to be by kickoff. We try to split it by halves, but either way, the game becomes another reason for everyone to get together.
That is part of what I enjoy about this time of year. Soccer in the morning, family and football in the afternoon, and maybe a South Alabama game mixed in somewhere. By the time the 6:30 game rolls around, I have already had a full day of things I actually wanted to do. And somehow I am still ready to watch one more game, even with the long run waiting for me Sunday morning.
The big game of the day is typically scheduled for 6:30, but we all know it never really kicks off at 6:30. By the time the teams run out and the ball is actually kicked, it is getting closer to 7. Throw in the never-ending commercials and halftime, and you are looking at a game ending somewhere around 11.
That is when the math starts.
If I am asleep by 11:30, that still gives me around six hours of sleep. Six hours is enough. Probably. And if it is not, I can push the run back an hour. Except pushing it back means more heat and more time away from the family. Maybe I can just run faster. Nothing makes a long run more enjoyable than deciding beforehand that you need to hurry through it because you stayed up watching football.
I feel like I end up spending just as much time trying to justify staying up for the game as I do actually watching it. I should go to bed now, but the game is close. There are only eight minutes left on the clock, but I know that is actually around 30 minutes. And if the game actually has an exciting ending, forget it. I might be in bed by 11:30, but my brain is not ready to go to sleep.
Then there is Saturday’s other challenge: food. I love food, especially the kind of food that comes with college football Saturdays. Wings, chips, pizza, dips, and basically nothing you would write into a long-run fueling plan.
My mom makes hot wings for every Alabama football game. Alabama has lost with the wings, so I am not saying they are magic. But the one time she did not make them, they lost too. At that point, why take chances? I am certainly not going to be the one to suggest skipping them because I have a long run the next morning.
The problem is those wings taste a lot better on Saturday night than they feel three miles into a ten-mile run. In the moment, Sunday morning still feels far enough away to not worry about it too much.
No matter what choices I made Saturday night, the alarm is still going off early Sunday morning. And if I stayed up to see that final play, that alarm can be a menace.
The person who decided five to six hours of sleep would be plenty is nowhere to be found. That guy lived with no sense of consequence. Sunday-morning me pays for those decisions.
Suddenly, pushing the run back another hour sounds much more reasonable. So does cutting a couple of miles. So does going back to sleep and pretending the training plan says Monday.
But I still get up, get dressed, and head out the door. The first mile may be closer to sleepwalking than running, but eventually things start working again. The legs loosen up, the brain turns on, and I slowly stop questioning each decision I made the night before.
Sunday mornings during football season are usually quiet. Part of that is because I am out early, but I like to assume the rest of the neighborhood also made the decision to stay up for the late game and simply chose sleep over sunrise.
Some mornings the run feels surprisingly good. Other mornings, those wings and lack of sleep make their presence known. Either way, after a few miles I usually stop thinking about how little sleep I got and start thinking about whatever happened Saturday. By the time I finish, whatever regret I had when the alarm went off has mostly disappeared.
Which is probably the problem.
By Sunday afternoon, the long run is done, and the lack of sleep has mostly been forgotten. I have convinced myself the whole thing worked out just fine. Then I look at next Saturday’s schedule and begin making the exact same calculations all over again.
College football is back. And with it comes my annual tradition of pretending six hours of sleep is plenty before a Sunday long run.