Flashes of Panic

It’s probably just a coincidence that, on either side of a weekend of deliberately upsetting my sleep cycles, I’m renaming figures from a chronobiology book. (Per the glossary: chronobiology: the study, at all levels of organization, of adaptations evolved by living organisms to cope with regularly occurring environmental cycles.)

We’ve done this for three years, now, but for the first two years I was in Van 1. This year I was driving Van 2. With a twelve-person team and six runners in each van, the vans have three on-off cycles in the course of the race. Van 1 is on-off-on-off-on-off; Van 2 is off-on-off-on-off-on.

We’ve always started within an hour of noon, and usually both vans have finished their first shift not long after dark. The second shifts are entirely in the dark, and usually the sun rises on the last leg of the second shift or the first leg of the third shift.

If you’re in Van 1, this means you run in the afternoon, then “stay up late” for your second shift (about 8 PM to 1 AM) and “get up early” (dawn) for your third shift. In Van 2, on the other hand, you run in the afternoon, try to get your night’s sleep early, run through your deepest sleep hours, and then wait all morning for your last run.

Psychologically, you’re also antsy much of the afternoon waiting to get started, where Van 1 starts when the race starts, and is “done” much sooner.

The trade-off, of course, is that Van 2 gets to run the last legs from Kingston down to Rye and Hampton. After wandering like damned souls through the back roads and hills in the darkness and rain, bombing along the beaches with the wind at your back is nothing short of exhilarating.

Now playing: Drive Away from Golden Age of Radio by Josh Ritter