Heather Anne

Whenever I hear someone mention a time of day that occurs between, say, midnight and 7:00 in the morning, I always look up and expect to see the person using air quotes. The baby is teething, and I had to get up with him at “3:00.” Those hours are as relevant to my life as Atlantis is to my vacation plans. When people tell me they wake up at 4:30 a.m., I'm always: Oh, I’ve been to 4:30 a.m. — it’s just here, through the back of my wardrobe.

It turns out, though, that at least some of these mythical hours really do exist. I discovered one of them this morning when my alarm went off.

At 5:00 a.m. (on a Saturday) I flopped out of bed, layered up with the cleanest-smelling clothes from my floor, shouldered my messenger bag, and drove to Atlanta to watch my sister run her first-ever 10K.

Before the rest of the Eastern Standard Time Zone had even started queuing up at Starbucks, I was standing on the sidewalk of Fulton Street, between Turner Field and the parking lot that used to be Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. If I hadn’t been flinching against the wind, and had my fingers not lost all dexterity in the frigid morning air, I could have easily thrown a baseball and nailed the exact spot where Hank Aaron hit his 715th homerun.

I cheered and clapped for the other runners (mostly to keep the blood flowing to my limbs) but when I saw my sister crest the hill 200 meters from the finish line, I actually jumped in the air. “There she is,” I said to my dad and step-mom. “There she is. Look how strong she looks. YOU LOOK SO STRONG, SISTER! Oh, I’m so proud. JENN, I’M SO PROUD OF YOU!”

She smiled and waved both her hands, and then shrugged off her jacket and threw it at me. “My sister’s jacket! Beat cancer! Had a baby! Just ran her first 10K! Here’s her jacket!” I waved her turquoise running fleece around my head.

On the way to the car after the race, Jenn nudged me with her shoulder. “Thanks for waking up so early to come down here with me.”

“I wouldn’t have missed it,” I told her.

There was a sense of poetic justice about seeing her pay money to run six miles on a cold, autumn morning. When we were kids, I had to give Jenn my allowance to make her play with me. One dollar for board games. Two dollars for games that required her to sweat.

And that, unlike “3:30” in the morning, is an actual fact.