All one of my readers were likely devastated that I was feeling sick last night and had to go to bed without a blog—or maybe she was more upset to be left without a partner for our nightly TV and chores. As head writer, editor-in-chief, and CEO of the DNF, I would like to publicly apologize to my wife for going to bed at 8:30 PM. In industry jargon, I believe we’d say we regret the error.
I wouldn’t have apologized last week, because it was Sleep Week™️! Brought to you by Netflix.
This is only partly a joke. Netflix did indeed sponsor a week of better sleep for me, but not on purpose; they rented out the parking lot at my office complex for a film shoot. Meanwhile, management gave us the option to work from home, and I took it, which meant I could sleep in and run at lunch.
This could not have come at a better time. After a down week that didn’t feel all that restorative, a chance to catch up on recovery felt like a godsend. Furthermore, my son has been fighting a series of daycare colds for the past month, and trying so very hard to share them with me, and I could feel my immune system starting to strain under the load.
It’s Tuesday, and I just wrote that I was sick last night, so you can see how well that worked. Like the Infrastructure Week that inspired its name, Sleep Week™️ was trying to fix a lot of long-standing issues in a short amount of time. In a perfect world, every week would be Sleep Week™️, but here we are.
In addition to recapping my training this week, I will submit to the mortifying ordeal of sharing my sleep stats. I’ll also compare my sleep to the same week last year, when I was training for the Rehoboth Beach Marathon. How does my perfect sleep scenario as a new dad compare to an average week of marathon training as a childless yuppie? We’re going to find out together!
Sunday: Fell asleep at 11:27 PM. 7 hours and 3 minutes of sleep, 1 hour and 10 minutes awake. Not a good start!
Ran 14 miles, including a nice stretch on the Union Transportation Trail. The few times I’ve run this trail, I’ve run it too fast because it’s such a pleasant place to run. The last couple miles coming home were tough.
Monday: Fell asleep at 9:40 PM. 8 hours and 20 minutes asleep, 14 minutes awake. That’s more like it!
Ran 7 miles and felt bad.
Tuesday: Fell asleep at 10:35 PM. 8 hours and 2 minutes asleep, 5 minutes awake. I get to bed later when blogging is on my to-do list, but this isn’t so bad! Garmin even logged it as Excellent, with “optimal sleep stages,” so maybe blogging is good for sleep!
I initially wrote that last bit as a joke, but if you think about blogging as journaling, then maybe it’s at least possible? These are exactly the results we’re looking for from Sleep Week™️!
Ran 7 miles and felt much better, but hungry. An unforeseen trade-off to running before lunch.
Wednesday: Fell asleep at 10:20 PM. 6 hours and 17 minutes asleep, 28 minutes awake. I had to wake up early just this once and go to the office to meet some colleagues who were visiting from out of town. I could have done better getting to bed, but the AL Wild Card Series started Tuesday night. The Yankees lost, so I lost twice.
Ran 6 miles with some hill sprints. Threw up on the warmup and felt bad enough on the cooldown that I didn’t log as many miles as I wanted. Maybe I lost three times?
Thursday: Fell asleep at 9:58 PM. 8 hours and 11 minutes asleep, 28 minutes awake. Back on track!
Ran 7 miles in between a work function, which included a big lunch, and daycare pickup. This did not feel great.
Friday: Fell asleep at 10:58 PM. 8 hours and 9 minutes asleep, 4 minutes awake.
Ran 8 miles, felt pretty good, and did some strides!
Saturday: Fell asleep at 9:52 PM. 7 hours and 57 minutes asleep, 1 hour and 48 minutes awake. Ouch. The wee hours were rough on me here. I forget why.
Ran 9 miles with 4 straight at tempo pace (6:02 average). This was huge considering my son was very hands-on on Saturday and I barely got the time away from him to run this workout. I even did some split squats and calf raises after the run. Like my strides on Friday, this was the first time I did these in a while. I wonder if getting a little extra sleep most nights this week gave me the strength I needed. I haven’t done the averages yet so I can’t be sure!
This Week: Average sleep onset was at 10:24 PM. I averaged 7 hours and 43 minutes asleep and 37 minutes awake. If I remove either outlier (Wednesday or Saturday), the averages move a bit, but it seems like I should plan to spend about 8 hours and 20 minutes trying to sleep to get about 8 hours of actual sleep. Add in the time it takes me to fall asleep and I’m looking at almost 9 hours in bed, which means if I want to get up at 5:00 or 5:30 in the morning I should be in bed by 8:00 or 8:30 the night before.
That doesn’t leave much time for baseball—or blogging!—but these insights are what Sleep Week™️ is all about!
When I wasn’t sleeping, I ran 58 miles, which is a new high since my son was born. I also got in a decent long run, a great tempo, some hills, and some extras that I had been neglecting for a while.
This Week (Last Year): This time last year, according to the data, my average sleep onset was 10:52 PM, I slept for an average of 8 hours and 18 minutes, and I spent just 6 minutes awake.
Saturday was an outlier; according to the data, my run that day started just 5 minutes after I woke up. I had a different watch last year, and it was worse than any other smartwatch I’ve owned at detecting wakefulness, so these stats may be skewed. Removing Saturday only skews them further, moving my bedtime to 10:26 PM and my average sleep to a whopping 8 hours and 30 minutes. If only!
Incredibly, I ran 58 miles this same week last year as I began my buildup to Rehoboth. I felt a lot better, though, and forgive me for throwing out all my analysis above, but I think it was because I hadn’t had a major break in training since 2021. My son broke that streak pretty hard.
Baby: My son may have momentarily toppled the bricks I was stacking, but he’s been stacking plenty of his own. He has just figured out crawling, which is leading to an explosion of new skills. He can move from sitting to crawling pretty easily, and prop himself up on objects, and he clearly has aspirations for climbing. Thankfully, that might take a while.
He is trying more new foods all the time, thanks to his mom, and her hard work is being rewarded by a voracious eater!
After cruising through a few months of slow and steady growth, our son has put the pedal to the floor again and dared us to come along for the ride. I’m in.
Just let me get some sleep first.
theDNF 
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