creative solutions

My husband likes to go running in the morning to get in some exercise as a fresh start to the day. (Morning usually means 6:00 or 6:30.) He has graciously invited me on a few of his jaunts, but I do not have his stamina nor desire to go as far and fast as he would like to. But his invitations were welcoming to me as exercise that I could do with my husband before he left for work in the morning.

And so we had the dilemma: what can we do for exercise? We first thought of other sports--like frisbee or basketball. But at 6:00 in the morning it is too dark to see the ball (er, or frisbee). Then we decided we could run together every other morning and then Matt could do harder runs on the days we didn't run together. That got a bit jumbled, so we were back to Square One.

And then came the solution: last night it dawned on Matt that we got a jump rope for our wedding. So, in order to increase the intensity of his run but still maintain my pace, he could jumprope while I ran. We tried it out this morning, and it worked beautifully! Matt was even tired before I was. (And I still made him jumprope a bit more so I could snap this shot when we got back.)