My first gravel race is coming up this weekend, and it has 5am start time.
I’m not a big morning person, really more of a night owl and getting the logistics sorted out for this pretty much has me more worried than those other trivial details like training, nutrition, pacing etc. etc.
I normally have no problem showing up for earlier rides or racing in the morning but left to my own devices I will usually tend towards a later start.
This race will be out of town for me, I will be staying in a hotel nearby and I figure the absolute latest time I can wake up will be ~3-3:30AM to have enough time to eat, get prepared etc.
It’s not waking up specifically I’m worried about - it’s falling asleep. At the best of times I can find it a bit harder to fall asleep the night before a race, with my usual bedtime closer to midnight this could create a problem…
Just wondering how others would handle something like this. I have a relatively flexible schedule at work so I’m leaning towards shifting my schedule a bit earlier every day this week. To hopefully shift my body clock a bit earlier, hopefully without losing out on too much total amount of sleep.
I don’t worry about the night before the race too much. The prior night (Thursday for a saturday race) is the one where I prioritize sleep. My understanding is that 2 nights prior is just as critical (if not more so) as the night before the race. It’s typically easier to prioritize that night since you aren’t in race-eve scramble mode and usually don’t have the super early alarm. A nice byproduct of prioritzing the prior night is that I worry less about getting sleep on race-eve and that usually results in better sleep. Win/win. And I personally like to get up at least 2.5 hours before start time to get a good breakfast in and have at least 2 hours before the start. And just to get the body going. Those things are more important that the extra sleep in my experience. And I’m not a morning person either, but I still prefer to get up early for races.
I am a morning person. People hate me for being off the wall at 5 am. However sleep the night before is still a problem for me. What helps is to cut out as much caffeine during the day as I can.
This x1000. I’m a morning person and go to bed around 9:30. That said, in April I had my 2nd 100 mile race, targeting 6 hrs or an optimistic 5:30. The night before the race I woke up at like 1:30-2 am totally wired. I tried for almost an hour to get back to sleep. After an hour I hopped on my phone and started reading. I read COUNTLESS articles highlighting how common how that is the night before big events, particularly for like Olympians. Countless studies have been done on this and virtually everything I found mentioned that the days leading up to the race (nights 2-4 before) were more important than the night before the race, and the night before hardly had an impact, if any at all.
This was a huge relief to learn and confidently believe before the race. I went out and rocked a 5:12…
At this point the best thing you can do is just have all your gear and equipment ready so that you aren’t mentally stressing about anything. If you have that locked down then just try to get to bed a bit early and relax knowing that you are prepared. 3,4,5 hours sleep won’t make much of a difference. It’s your first gravel race! Have fun and try not to stress.
Man I wish I could experience my first “gravel race” again. I think I was changing tires in the parking lot minutes before the start hungover… but I finished!
I often struggle to sleep the night before an event or a race. I read somewhere that even elite athletes will have half a glass of red wine to try and help them sleep so you could try that.
I tend not to worry much now though for the exact same reasons as given above- I now understand that really it is the “night before the night before” that matters.
For sure I have done a few events where I have literally not slept for a single minute and just lay there waiting for the alarm clock to go off and I honestly don’t think it’s made much, if any, difference.
but I finished!