We all have our peak time of day (or night). It’s that moment when you feel most awake–at your sharpest. For me, that time starts at about 9:00 AM. I’m usually an early riser (up by 5:00), so that’s about 4 hours after I get up. Not ideal for someone who likes to work out in the morning, but I get by.
This poses a particular challenge on race day as I have no control over the start time and, as you probably know, most races start early in the morning to avoid the later-day heat and to return the roads back to civilization as soon as possible. For a 7AM start, I’m up by 4, so at least I can get 3 waking hours in before the gun goes off.
My question is whether I can train myself to sleep in later, and run as well on less pre-race awake time? I’ve read that baseball players, playing mostly night games these days, are thrown off by the unroutine timelines of day games. Of course, one of the sources is Kerry Wood, who blames the day games at Wrigley Field for why “the Cubs always lose.” Um, yeah. Sure.
So if ballplayers can be trained to perform late at night, which is somewhat unnatural behavior for a diurnal species, perhaps runners can train themselves to perform at their best earlier, moving their peak time up in the day.
This somewhat dated article suggests it would be a fight against human nature. According to (albeit limited) study in this area, our peak exercise time is between 3 and 6 pm based on the normal rhythms of the day (and after a 2pm nap, which I could be down with). I’d love to test this theory, but with work and kids occupying most of my normal daytime hours (and most early evenings), it ain’t gonna happen.
For my next trail run later this month, I’m going to try shifting my sleep time up so that 4:30 AM feels more like 7:00 AM. Maybe then 8AM will feel more like noon and I’ll be closer to my peak? Worth a shot maybe.