Friday, May 07, 1999
THE PREPARATION
Rest easy: You'll rise and shine to the occasion
BY MIKE DeCOURCY
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Rob Slater does not know how long, how deeply or how restfully he will sleep the night before the Flying Pig Marathon. For a change, though, he knows precisely where he will sleep.
“I've never slept in my own bed before a marathon,” Slater said. “I've always gone out of town, slept in a hotel room, and I probably never expected to sleep very well.”
With all the concern a runner reserves for how much to train and how best to eat in preparation for such an astonishing physical challenge as a marathon, sleep becomes a matter that can be overlooked.
There are differing views on the subject, although basically they fall into two categories: do whatever is necessary to get a decent night's sleep on the eve of the race, or get as much sleep as possible two nights before the race because, hey, who can sleep when there are more than 26 miles to run after the alarm clock rings?
The 7 a.m. start of the Flying Pig race makes that debate somewhat moot. Many of the marathoners will be waking up at 5 a.m. or earlier to get ready for the race, which means they'll have to sleep even faster than they run.
“I wouldn't worry too much if I didn't sleep well the night before,” Slater said. “I guess if I'd gone several nights without sleeping well, I might be concerned. But in general ... it seems like you get kind of wound up, excited, and it's not the kind of thing where being sleepy is really going to be a factor.”
Slater has run six times at the Boston Marathon. That race has a later start than most — noon — and its point-to-point course requires that runners take a bus to the starting line in Hopkinton.
In one of his Boston runs, Slater took a later bus, “around eight or nine,” and then leaned up against a tree and dozed off as he waited for the start. He figured it showed he was relaxed, if nothing else.
“There's not a lot of kind of technical skills necessary in running a marathon,” Slater said. “You don't have to be mentally sharp, like if you're a football player and you don't execute the right move during a play, you screw things up for the whole team. You pretty much pick the pace you're going to run, and that should be determined well in advance, and deviating from that plan on race day is generally a bad idea.”
Bob Roncker, who owns a running shop that bears his name in O'Bryonville, recalled that when he was a high school miler and went to the prom the night before a meet, he pulled off one of his best races ever on two hours' sleep.
Entered in an invitational on the same track a week later, he figured he could improve his time tremendously by getting proper rest. He to bed at 9 p.m. He called the next day's “sluggish.” The stop watch called him 15 seconds slower than the previous week.
“The night before the race is really not that important, because you're so keyed up, getting ready for the race,” said Dave Ackerman of Milford, a veteran of 13 marathons. “And with the Pig, it starts so early, you're not going to get a restful sleep.
“It's more important to be off your feet as soon as possible the day before, but the actual sleep is not that important. It's mostly about laying down, taking all that weight off your feet.”
Because runners taper off their training mileage in the week before a marathon in order to conserve energy, they find it tempting to use what is not spent on running on other physical tasks. That can be counterproductive.
“A lot of people will use that extra energy to paint their house, vacuum — so they're not really doing the taper,” Ackerman said. “A lot of the foreign runners talk about that a lot. They get together, they run, they rest, they eat, they go to bed. They're constantly recovering, because they don't do anything else.”
Ackerman will try in the three to four days before a marathon to sleep for between eight and 10 hours to be properly rested for the race.
“There's just so many things going through your mind,” Ackerman said. “You've been training four to six months for one race. It's not like a 5-K, where if it doesn't go well, you can just hop in the next week.
“There are so many things that can go wrong: What happens if a shoe comes untied, you have to go to the bathroom, a cramp comes too early? That can be kind of ominous as you lay in bed thinking about the following morning.”
Flying Pig Marathon Guide
