At 6:05 on the third Monday of September, my alarm went off in total darkness, and I lay there doing math I resented: sunrise today, 6:58. Sunrise in December, 7:35. Fifty-three minutes of fake night between me and the real thing, stretching toward ninety by winter. For a coach who preaches “get outside within an hour of waking,” that gap has always been my quiet hypocrisy. This year I decided to stop negotiating with it. I gave my phone the boot from the bedroom, set up a sunrise alarm clock on the nightstand, and committed to thirty mornings of letting…
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Somewhere around the second week of September, without fail, a text lands in my phone from at least one client: “I don’t know what’s happening. I’m crashing at 8:30 p.m. and my 6 a.m. run feels like someone snuck weights into my shoes.” Every single year. For a long time I chalked it up to back-to-school chaos or the mental exhale that follows a busy summer. Then I started paying closer attention to the calendar instead of the client, and the pattern became impossible to miss. Here’s what’s actually going on: we are in the steepest daylight decline of the…
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I almost sent it back. The box sat in my hallway for three days — enormous, heavy, and radiating the kind of buyer’s remorse that creeps in when you’ve spent the equivalent of a car payment on what is essentially a very large, very bright nightlight. My partner gave me that look. You know the one. The “what has wellness Instagram done to you now” look. But I’d been reading studies on photobiomodulation for nearly a year, and after my track coach mentioned that two of her Olympic-bound athletes were using full-body red light panels daily, I decided it was…