I have always had a casual relationship with distance running. In high school, I was on the cross country team and put in quite a few miles every fall, mostly to stay in shape for basketball. At that level, the race distance maxes out at 3.1 miles, compared to the 26.2-mile marathon distance. After high school, I would run periodically with several-week bursts where I told myself, “I should run a marathon!” before falling off the wagon for any number of reasons. I did that for years before deciding on Jan. 1, 2024, that I was finally going to do it for real. Before that day, the longest run I had ever done was 8 miles, a far cry from the distance I would to complete my first marathon. I only ran 50 miles in 2023, so I needed a lot of training. The key to marathon training is being able to run (almost) daily, and to run every day, you need to have excellent recovery. That starts with sleep. I used the sleep tracking and sleep coaching features on my Garmin Forerunner 965 to maximize my recovery, be more strategic about my training schedule and be as ready as possible on race day.
I have worn a Garmin watch for a long time, but it was pretty outdated by the time I upgraded to the Forerunner 965. The new Forerunner has a ton of new features I was able to explore, but the biggest thing I noticed was the sleep features. On my old watch, I didn’t find the sleep tracking to be valuable enough to actually wear it on a nightly basis because it really only tracked my sleep duration and sleep stages. The Forerunner 965, and most newer Garmin watches, not only tracks your sleep duration and stages, but it also tracks how often you move at night, your nightly stress, heart rate variability and respiration. The device will then synthesize all the factors into a nightly “sleep score” that is provided in a handy “morning report.”
Your sleep score is a huge contributor to another important metric provided by Garmin called “training readiness.” Training readiness considers how much and how hard you have been training and how well you are recovering, and then tells you how effective training that day is likely to be. If you got poor sleep the night after a long, challenging training run, then the training readiness score will be low. Now, this might sound like a bunch of random numbers that just make things more complicated or are only for the most serious runners — but I found that these scores directly correlated to how well my training run went that day. For example, with a few weeks to go before the race, my training plan called for a 20-miler to really get my body and mind used to running that distance. My sleep score the night before the run was 95, one of my highest scores ever, and my training readiness was also in the 90’s. And I was able to complete the distance at my intended race pace. It just felt good, too.
Good sleep equals good training, and bad sleep equals bad training. There is also the Garmin Sleep Coach feature, which offers advice on how to improve your sleep and recommends how many hours of sleep you should get each night. If you are training for a marathon or a triathlon or you are trying to get serious about your gym routine, I think a sleep tracker of some kind would be very useful. These sleep-tracking features are available on most of the newer Garmin watches, including the affordable Forerunner 165. For me, I will be continuing to wear my Garmin nightly as I train for future races.