I'm an old man.

Yes, it’s true. I’m an old man. I came to this realization when I looked at the clock one night and discovered that I had been going to bed at 8:30pm for the past week – not including weekends, of course. As unsettling as this realization was for me, I have now come to terms with it. In fact, I’m not the only one in the house that goes to bed at this hour. I would say three out of four of us go to bed at this hour every night. I also don’t feel quite so bad about it due to the fact that I have been waking up at 5:15am every morning…by choice. I feel as though something in the Belizean air has made me crazy because not only am I waking up at 5:15am by choice, but I am doing so to go running. As some of you may know, my exercise routine over the past year and a half has been quite nonexistent despite the brand new state of the art gym which opened up last year at Providence College - of which I visited 1.5 times. But alas, I have found something deep inside myself that has allowed me to wake up and run, sometimes even to be accompanied by one or two of my roommates which always makes the run more enjoyable. I have found two major aspects of my morning runs to serve as motivation for the following morning when I hear the nasty sound of my alarm clock. The first one is the time of morning. When I wake up and slowly get myself out of bed it is still dark – which I think makes getting out of bed that much harder. However, by the time I get changed, lace up my sneakers, and head up stairs to wake my roommates and start stretching, the sun begins to peak over the horizon. The sky turns the most magnificent shades of blue, purple, pink and orange. As I run on the street alongside the Caribbean Sea I watch the sun continue to rise. It is absolutely beautiful and allows me to experience an amazing sense of peace (I have posted pictures of yesterday’s sunrise online – the pictures don’t do it justice but you will get the idea). The other part of running that has kept me going each morning is that I have been able to use this time for reflection and prayer. Throughout the first few weeks of being in Belize I had realized that I was getting so wrapped up in the excitement of my new life that I had neglected to allow for time to just be in silence with myself and with God – some time to be alone. I have found my time while running to be exactly this, a time to be in silence to think and pray – without music from my iPod, without conversation with others – just the noise of the morning and the thoughts in my head. This is what has allowed me to wake up at the crack of dawn, put on my shoes, and hit the streets of PG running. It’s been a beautiful thing.