“anyhow depressed and only half-awake”

I’m not by any means a morning person, but I can sympathize with Richard Hannay here, the narrator of this Buchan tale: if you must ruin part of the day with unpleasantness, why not morning which is already a grim prospect to face anyway?

Certainly, I’ve always thought I’m much more motivated and awake to do productive things like exercise or even work in the evenings–even as the motivation to write this post has gripped me at the eleventh hour–but there may be a point to Hannay’s reasoning.

Anyway, all this ruminating has arisen because I plan to join this year’s Terry Fox Run which has a 10am start. So yesterday I went for a run in the morning and will do so again tomorrow. (And running is comparable to an emergency or an attack, you ask? Well, to me, yes.) And this after years of deciding I would never be that person who woke up early to work out first thing.

While I still didn’t wake up early, per se, I did run first thing. Just goes to show that at any time your life you can decide to do something different.

I loathed having to screw myself up to emergencies late in the day. Such things should take place in the early morning. It was like going over the top in France; I didn’t mind it so much when it happened during a drizzling dawn, when one was anyhow depressed and only half-awake, but I abominated an attack in the cold-blooded daylight, or in the dusk when one wanted to relax.

John Buchan, The Three Hostages