It’s that time of year again – finals. Classes start to wind down, there’s talk of some sort of test in the near future, finally you sit through that last lecture… and then there’s what my roommate and I have taken to calling the “Gilmore Girls” period, where it’s really too early to start studying but you don’t have any homework, so you bake cookies and watch an entire season of Gilmore Girls in a 3-day period.

And then your first final is a few days away, and you have to buckle down and hit the books. Or…. you could hit the pavement. It seems counter-intuitive but I definitely believe that taking 1-2 hours to do my run helps me to be more productive for the rest of my time spent awake :)

1. Running forces me to get up early. I don’t know why, but if I have a run scheduled I feel like I have to get up at a reasonable hour. With no classes during finals week, it would be tempting to sleep in.
2. Running wakes me up. It’s hard to be sleepy on a 8 mile tempo run.
3. Running gets me focused. When I come back from a run I feel like I can do anything, even convert a context-free language to Greibach Normal Form or whatever nonsense they’re teaching us at this learning institution. I am slightly weirded out by the fact that I once solved an algorithms homework problem on a run. That was just weird.
4. Running is a stress-buster. Last year at this time (that’s BR, Before Running) I was freaking out – I had finals! I had papers! I had notes to rewrite and problems to redo and hair to tear out. This year I’m a lot more chill. I can’t prove the cause and effect but there’s a definite correlation.

I’m extremely excited because I managed to get exempted from my hardest final – I worked hard in the class all semester and the professor decided to give people with solid A’s a break and let them skip the 4 day long take-home test. :D Wish me luck on the last few.

Also, thank you to EVERYONE who has been commenting – I am so excited about Comments4Cans. Please continue to comment! Remember, for every 5 comments I will donate 1 can to the hungry of Charlottesville! Every comment counts.

Tomorrow I’m meeting up with a fellow runner who will be in town for the day – I’m taking her on a tour of my town! I’ll definitely take pictures of our excursion!