A Sign

Everything was in place for the perfect reason NOT to go water running: waking up and staring at the alarm clock at 5:30 not wanting to get up; finally getting up and having to clear snow off the car to head to the gym; and the kicker - arriving fifteen minutes late and seeing lots of people milling about like they're waiting to have the doors unlocked or something. Turned out they were.
Never in my years of going to that gym have the doors ever been locked at 6 a.m. Many other regulars concurred with me. There is always a night custodian who opens the doors on Fridays at 5:30 even, to let the masters in to swim. All I had to do was go home. What else could have been done? Can't run on the road with my shin bugging me and too late anyways to get dressed and hit the trails. Then again, it was too late to go back to bed once I got home anyways. If I'm going to be tired during the day it might as well be because I did some kind of exercise, not because I got up early and did nothing.
I went back to the car and sat for two minutes too long because someone arrived with a key. Damn it! The only consolation was I had to cut the water running down to forty-five, yes that's right, forty-five minutes instead of my planned one hour. Had I come to the gym on time there is no way I would have sat for twenty-odd minutes waiting. Was it a sign that I should have gone home, or one that I was to strengthen my mental stamina? I guess it's the latter as I made it through the workout feeling like I could do anything I put my mind to after staring at the walls for that amount of time. Of course, maybe I shouldn't have showed up because of the mental scarring of seeing the aqua-sizers show up for their 7 a.m. class....