A Detour On The Journey To Mythical Sleep

For more than a year, I have been refining my approach to sleep. Poor sleep has been a limiting factor in my performance not just on the bike, but in life! When I wrote about this last July, I was averaging 6 hours, 12 minutes per day. But that was the average only for the 4 weeks leading up to that post. My current 52-week average is 5:41. February and March were a mess: I endured 6 consecutive weeks with a daily average of less than 5:00.

My current 4-week average is 6:31. That’s not just more, it’s also qualitatively better. Garmin calculates a sleep score in which duration is factored alongside stress, movement (“tossing and turning”), and time spent in different stages of sleep. Did I get enough deep sleep and enough REM sleep, etc.? During the last 52 weeks, my average sleep score was 64 out of 100. During the last 4 weeks, it improved to 75.

I’m still fighting to find a consistent sleep schedule–in bed at the same time, then out of bed at the same time–which so many sleep experts recommend. Some recent advice resonated with me, though I have not yet tried it: hold yourself to a consistent wakeup time and your body will rapidly discover its optimal shutdown time.

Even without that fresh advice, my sleep stats have been trending in the right direction this summer. But summer is rapidly winding down, and that’s becoming a problem. Back on August 13, I slept so late into the afternoon that I missed a group ride and ended up with a fat zero for the day. That was an anomaly. However, recently I have had a lot of wakeup times in the 4-5 p.m. range. I don’t have much success going straight from the bed to the bike; give me at least an hour. So, most of my rides are starting between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m., and I can’t continue to get away with that. Today’s ride was my 32nd consecutive post-5 p.m. start. The last time I started earlier than 5 p.m. was way back on July 8! Sunset in West Bend will be at 7:29 on August 31 and at 6:59 on September 17. We’re losing daylight in chunks. I need to make a change.

I could continue to go to bed early in the morning–immediately after my shift on nights when I work–and then wake to an alarm set earlier in the afternoon. That would mean fewer hours of sleep overall or a return to biphasic sleep, which always was a compromise. What I will do instead, damn it, is stay up to ensure I get my chance to ride, then go to bed late in the afternoon and wake up again sometime around 10:45 p.m.! There are all sorts of problems with this, not the least of which is that I will be exposed to melatonin-suppressing sunlight shortly before I want to sleep.

But, yes, I’m going to risk the progress I have made with my sleep issues because right now it’s more important to me to hit this year’s cycling goals. And anyway, there is no real fix as long as I continue to work overnight. At worst, I’m trading adequate for inadequate. The Garmin Connect “Mythical Sleep” badge remains elusive.