Run before Sleeping

I read here and there that there is a quite common advice that it is not desirable to run before sleeping. The theory is that with one’s metabolism heated up, it would be quite difficult and time wasting to cool it back down to the level suitable for sleeping. The sleeping quality would be adversely affected and hence knocking one’s productivity etc down on the next day — starting a vicious cycle thereafter.

In the three years I had running training classes, all classes start in the evening and end around 10pm. Most of the time I would go late supper with friends and returned home to prepare to get to bed afterwards. By the time I was in bed, it would have well pasted midnight. Therefore, perhaps I had “cooled down” myself enough for sleeping. Hence I won’t feel much trouble getting to sleep.

Occasionally I might go running some time late, hence I would need to go to bed almost shortly afterwards. The significance of such effect would indeed largely depend on how hard I run. If it is a casual run, I may have more difficulties to get to sleep because I am hyped both physically and emotionally; however, if I trained rather hard, to the extent getting close to complete exhaustion, it would not be any challenging task to get to sleep because sleeping would be exactly someone I dearly dread for.

Therefore, it seems the difficult part is how to make sure a training is “hard” enough. We often err on the safe side and prefer for “comfortable” experience hence would never work up to the capacity, leaving us ending the session without “emptying the tank”, which would become uncontrolled fuel disrupting our sleeping experience. Trying to beat ourselves enough to work really hard would be the real challenge in accomplishing a rewarding session.