Night Fever
Waking up at 4:30am on Sunday, I thought to myself: Why do I continue to wake before sunrise weekend after weekend before the sun is even out? Well, the answer is obvious of course – I love running. I love racing. I am not a morning person, though. I have trained my body through the years to accept the fact that most races are going to be held in the morning, whether I like it or not.
For a couple of months now, I have been tracking my performance level on training runs and…surprise, surprise - I am a far faster runner in the evening than in the morning. By 35-55 seconds faster. That is HUGE! Mind you, this conclusion is only drawn on morning runs verses evening runs for the month. Perhaps I could take my experiment a step further and run a month only in the morning and then another month only in the evening. But that is getting far too technical for the likes of me and I do still want to have fun while I run…So the stats are what they are for now.
This weekend I will be participating in my 2nd evening race. The Davis Moo-nLight Half Marathon and I am very excited to say the least. An evening race! Hooray for night owls like myself! Of course there is the concern of the anticipation of having all day to wait to race (not to mention how to properly fuel) but I am confident that I will run a darn good race regardless if whether I PR or not! A strange statement to make I know, because don’t we all want to PR every race? Well naturally, but having just ran The Jungle Half Marathon this weekend past, my goal is to enjoy the excitement the evening will bring at the Davis Moo-nlight Half. Okay, and I am currently trying to qualify for Half Fanatics as well, but other than that I hold no expectations.
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| Katie and I at 6 something in the freakin' morning pre Jungle Half. Wide eyed and bushy tailed right? ;P |
Is it just me, or should there be more night races that cater to grumpy morning birds like myself or for those who just run better at night? Here are but a few races I have found that are held at night, in no particular order. Please add to the list, as I want to know as many as possible that are out there available for me to run. Who knows, maybe next year I will make it a goal to run every evening race available -Wouldn’t that be fun!
What about you - Are you a better runner in the morning or in the evening? Or perhaps both you lucky ducky you!
Happy moonlight running!
That IS interesting! You're doing RnRLV right? I am too....
ReplyDeleteThere should definitely be more evening and night races. I don't trust anyone who's at their peak before 10:00 a.m.
ReplyDeleteI hope to run RnRLV and go to the summit as well...We shall see.
ReplyDeleteJess - Your too funny! :)
I can't wait to hear about the Davis run, I was really curious about it! I'm definitely faster in the morning though. As soon as any food gets in my belly, I feel heavy. and as the day progresses, I'm always either too hungry for a hard run, or too full for a hard run...no happy medium
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing your blog on LinkedIn's running lovers. I'm not a morning person either. I prefer to sleep in and run in the evenings after work. That's interesting that you run faster in the evenings. I wonder if there is research on that? But I think I run faster PM's too.
ReplyDelete