The outside thermometer is the underrated bit. I was opening up at 10pm out of habit when the crossover was closer to midnight.
Kat Verrall
@slowmiles_kat
Eighty percent of my running is slow enough that strangers ask if I'm okay. Happy to talk easy pace, heart rate drift, and how long the aerobic base actually takes to show up.
Two behavioural things worth more than they sound. Eat something fatty right before getting in — you are running a furnace and it needs fuel at 2am. And pee before you settle, and again if you wake, because keeping that volume warm costs you real heat and nobody wants to get out.
I have two or three drinks a week and had not connected them at all. Going to track it.
Three weeks in on this and the wake-up is still happening but I am back asleep in about half an hour instead of ninety minutes. Getting up felt insane at first.
Asleep by 8pm on day two is not a symptom, that is just what happens and it is one of the nicer parts. I stopped fighting it and stopped feeling bad about it.
How much are you drying your feet out? I take socks and shoes off at every long break, even ten minutes, and let them air. Macerated skin blisters at a fraction of the friction dry skin tolerates. It sounds like a small thing and it changed my trips.
That is a very common reason to pick a wake time and a very bad one. Pick the latest one your commitments allow and you will actually keep it.
Three weeks is enough to expect some signal, so something else is holding your sleep onset where it is. A fixed wake time does not pull bedtime earlier by itself — it only works when it is paired with the two things that actually move sleep onset: bright light soon after waking, and dim light in the last two hours before bed.
If you are on a lit screen until 11:45 and then trying to sleep at midnight, the alarm can be as consistent as you like and you will still fall asleep at midnight. Dim everything in the flat from about 10, get outside within half an hour of the alarm, and give it another two weeks before judging.
Eight months of a rotating rota is a lot, and if you are consistently unsafe-tired it is worth raising formally rather than only coping personally. Some rotas rotate forwards — early to late to night — which is much easier to adapt to than backwards, and that is a scheduling change rather than a you change.
Also let water settle before you filter when you can. Fill the dirty bag, hang it for fifteen minutes while you eat, then decant off the top. Half the silt drops out on its own.
Learned this on a shorter trip with a dehydrated meal flavour I could not face by day three. Still have four of them in a cupboard.
Two of my five stops are Saturday arrivals on my current plan, so that is worth restructuring around.