It's Saturday morning, and my alarm goes off at 5:00 am. "Why the farts do I have to get up so dang early on a Saturday morning?!?!," is what I'm usually saying to myself when this happens. By 5:30, I've taken a shower, fed the dog, grabbed a Bubly and I'm out the door in the Jeep to go get a bus. Today is simply another example of why I get paid dozens of dollars a year to be a high school cross-country coach. It means early mornings and little sleep so we can make sure we get a run in before the Oklahoma sun begins its relentless pursuit of murdering us every August.
We started school last week, which means I slept fitfully at best. Honestly, I don’t sleep well most of the time these days. In high school, I would be dead to the world by 10:00 pm and sleep through anything. College wasn’t much different. My friends would stay up late, but I was out like someone concussed from falling out of a one-story window by 11:00 pm. Even when we went to a late movie, I would fall asleep in the theater. Some of that was genetics I guess, but most of it was because of running. When you’re running a bunch in high school and then running a whole heckuva bunch in college, you just crash. But that was then and this is now. Over time, our sleep habits begin to change. When you have kids, you stop sleeping, period. After our son was born in 2006 and our daughter in 2007, my wife and I didn’t sleep for three years straight until our youngest daughter was born in 2010. At that point, we had figured the parenting thing out, and we didn’t sleep until 2012. We shaved a whole year off of no sleep! Crushed it. Now that our kids are growing up, it’s a battle again to stay awake until they get home. It’s back to being unable to stay awake past 10:00, and these days, thanks to a bum knee, I’m not running much at all. Certainly not as much as I was in college and high school. Now, the problem is staying asleep! It’s a great night if I can get five or six hours of sleep straight through without waking up.
I recently finished an excellent book titled “Why We Sleep” by Matthew Walker. Mr. Walker goes into great detail about why sleep is essential to a healthy lifestyle and our longevity. He describes how our sleep patterns evolve, from the persistent waking up of a newborn to the deep sleep but late sleep of our teenage years to our difficulty sleeping soundly as we age. He also holds nothing back when describing what a perpetual lack of a good night’s sleep does to our ability to concentrate, retain information, drive, interact with others, and the toll it takes on our bodies. It's honestly a little scary.
While reading through “Why We Sleep,” I naturally thought about the high school runners on our team and how hard it is for them to get our recommended minimum of eight hours of sleep a night. During the summers and when XC starts in the fall, we discuss with our athletes the importance of fueling their bodies properly to complete workouts, working hard in the workout, and then sleeping enough to recover from the workout before doing it all again the next day. If the cycle is interrupted, so is their progress and improvement as runners. They struggle to eat well sometimes, but they are also teenagers. They can eat almost anything they want with somewhat minimal side effects. We know they work hard at practice because we see them do it nearly every day of the week. What is much harder to quantify is how much sleep they get at night, especially how well they sleep. Today's runners in our program are far more busy than I was as a high school athlete. They take more challenging classes, they have jobs, and I certainly was not going to run before school in the morning! Are you kidding me? But our kids do that four days a week and somehow still survive. My concern is always not that they are surviving but that they are thriving.
As we started school, their summer schedule was interrupted. For some of them, that’s a good thing. They stay up too late in the summer because they can get away with it, but their routine completely changes once school starts. Beginning tomorrow, we will have practice at 6:00 am three days a week, and 7:00 am one day a week. So, if a runner in our program is to get the recommended eight hours of sleep a night and they are getting up at 5:30 am to make practice by 6:00, they need to be in bed by 9:30 pm. Have you ever seen a teenager in high school go to bed at 9:30? They are genetically programmed to stay up late! Of all we ask our runners to do to be successful in this sport, going to be early is one of the easiest things they can do and one of the hardest things for them to do. It’s simple to go to bed, but it is by no means easy for a teenager in high school.
We know sleep is amazingly beneficial for our minds and bodies. It resets our brains, and sleep is when our body repairs itself from the work done during the day. Running for eight and ten miles daily is an incredibly destructive way to spend your time. The pounding the body takes to joints, bones, and muscles in a long run is astounding. Even more so when you consider the damage is done daily. The best way our body can adapt, grow stronger, and become more resilient to the work required to be an effective runner is through the restorative act of sleeping. Sleep helps athletes stay healthy and injury-free and gives them the energy they need to get not only through the next day of training but also an entire season’s worth of training. Knowing this and following through with it are two different things, especially when homework must be done, video games must be played, and snaps must be chatted. It’s a battle we almost all face every night. It’s hard to go to bed when there is so much else to do!
As a high school runner today, sleep is no less important than it was thirty years ago, but the number of distractions athletes face today is far greater. My advice to our runners is to stick to a routine. Try to go to bed at the same time every night. Start your bedtime routine at the same time nightly. Begin by getting off your phone and relaxing. Take a shower or at least wash your face and brush your teeth at the same time nightly. Make sure your room is dark and cold. Train your body to sleep just like train it to run fast. It won’t happen overnight, pun intended, but with practice, you will train yourself to hit the hay and fall asleep quickly, then get the full benefit of a good night’s sleep. I heard Coach Mike Smith, my best friend from NAU, say that high school runners who are simply willing to get off their phones and go to bed at a decent time have already surpassed half the runners in their state without taking a step. Sleeping is one of the best and easiest ways to become a better runner, but, as stated before, simple isn’t easy. So if you want to be a better runner…GO TO BED!
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