Today’s photograph is a graph of my sleep patterns, last night.  What was very unusual about last night, is shown by that large, light pink bar in the middle of the graph.  That light pink bar represents the time that I was awake during the night.  I was awake for about an hour, from 2.40am to 3.40am.

Last night, I had what amounted to two, very short nights of sleep, separated by that one hour of being awake.  My total amount of deep sleep, light sleep and REM sleep, wasn’t that far off a normal night for me, but I didn’t feel normal when I woke up.

When I woke up, I felt incredibly tired.  Unfortunately, I had to work today, so I couldn’t just roll over and go back to sleep.  Luckily, I only had to work until noon today, so this meant I could do my short, Zone 2 run in the afternoon.  

My thirty five minute run was terrible.  My legs were absolutely dead and it felt like hard work, just to run at an easy pace.  My pace was about 30 seconds per mile slower than yesterday and my run could not have been more different from the great run that I wrote about.

I am pretty sure that the poor night of sleep, was a significant factor in how I felt on the run.  This is because sleep is the number one, best way to recover from exercise.  During sleep, growth hormones are released into the body, which help repair tissue damaged by exercise.  The lack of sleep wasn’t the only factor that impacted my run, as I was coming off a good amount of exercise over the weekend, but it certainly didn’t help.

I have another hard bike session tomorrow, so hopefully I will get a better night of sleep, when I head off to bed tonight.