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I have been tracking my mornings since February. Body battery, sleep score, whether I moved, whether I posted, whether I wound down. I have a spreadsheet. I have a Garmin Smart Watch. I have five months of data that I did not expect to be this interesting.
Here is what the data actually taught me.
Morning movement does not guarantee a better day. But it guarantees a better me. The floor of who I am — my capacity, my patience, my energy at 2 p.m. when a first grader is melting down for the fourth time — is higher on the days I moved in the morning. Not because the movement fixed anything. Because it reminded me what I'm capable of before the day had a chance to tell me otherwise.
I thought the barrier was time. Ten minutes felt impossible when I was staring at the ceiling at 5:47 a.m. But it was never the ten minutes. It was believing I had them. That's a tier 2 intervention. And I say that as someone who designs tier 2 interventions for six-year-olds for a living — the belief has to come before the behavior, every time. Efficacy is a driving factor in education. That’s a blog post for Future Kreisa.
What a teacher should know: morning movement is not a luxury. It is the foundation that makes everything else in the day more possible. Starting the day with your body before the demands of the classroom changes the capacity you bring to every hour that follows.
The Wake Up Call is still going. It shifted from a challenge to an identity somewhere around week six — and I didn't even notice it happen until I looked back at the data and realized I had stopped counting the days.
Back to my mornings — there's always another one worth waking up for.