The Wide and Wonderful World of Napping

Bulldozing zzz's and my napping roots

Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week: destigmatize the nap.

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Course 1

A Word of Gratitude: Front Seat Shmuffins

We as Americans, we hate naps. Not us as individuals, but as a society. For reasons of industry and the Puritanical work ethic tied into the fabric of this place, we’ve pushed napping to the margins. Unacceptable during the work day, frowned upon by family members, tsk-tsked by teachers and preachers if done in their presence.

As with riding bikes, napping is heavily endorsed as a child – ”I know, he’s only three but he can already ride a bike with no training wheels” or ”Oh, he’s such a good napper.” None of those accolades follow us into adulthood. As with riding bikes, adults hate it when other adults do it where they’re not supposed to. Get off the road! Get off the sidewalk! Don’t nap at work, there’s work to do! Don’t nap at home, there’s also work to do!

For the first several years of our lives we were told to nap, forced to nap, wrapped in swaddling clothes and set in dark rooms with blinds pulled and sound machines blasting. Like Bane, we were born into the dark, molded by it, each and every afternoon and evening and wherever our parents could get us to do it. That was our existence for a good three years. Growing up happens slowly and then all at once. Before you know it, it’s a social sin to close your eyes in public.

Yesterday we were told to close our eyes and go to sleep, today we’re expected to just execute Excel formulas in a cold bath of fluorescent office lighting. Sometimes it feels like a psy-op to turn us all into nodded-out fent addicts. These days that’s the only way to get in a good midday nap without anyone disturbing you.

That’s just America, of course. Other countries respect the nap, giving it the credit it’s due. There’s the well-documented siesta, that time in the afternoon when businesses randomly close in Spain. Same as the Italian riposo. Whether you sleep or not is up to you, but the option is available. In countries with warmer climates, it’s common to take off during the hottest part of the day. In the United States, that’s just a special time for workers to lose as many electrolytes as possible while the shade of their cooked skin gives a whole new meaning to the term “red scare.” In the northern latitudes, Swedish moms bundle their infants up and set them outside in sub-freezing temperatures for a good nap. I would pay good money to experience that as an adult, but I’ve sworn off Craigslist and I don’t know how to access the dark web.

When forced to, we’ll find ways to get our naps. When I worked a cubicle job, the number of people who both ate and napped in the driver’s seat of their car on their lunch break (and often during the work day, it was a government job after all) was somewhat alarming. Sheetz and sleep can mingle, but never in a car, except after heavily drinking, and as long as you’re not driving. Eating and sleeping in a vehicle – that’s something that should be left to the teenage demographic, like sex in the back seat.

Even those who avoid naps eventually succumb. Ultramarathoners will stay awake for 36 hours before hitting the ground in a heap for a whole minute of sleep. When they awake, they feel completely re-engerized and ready to finish the race. The raw power of the power nap.

I’ve dozed off while driving before, over and over again, until suddenly – I felt refreshed. I could drive for another two hours, no problem. I’m not sure if micro napping is a thing, but I swear it works for me. (Apologies to my bandmates back then, but hey – I kept the rig on the road.)

While I hope that eventually we’ll wake up to the benefits of sleeping here in America, I think I’ve seen enough by way of both Glocks and gas guzzlers to know that there are certain things so baked into our culture that my vision for more naps, more often, won’t ever happen in my lifetime.

Speaking of my lifetime, my relationship with napping has changed over that span. The fandom began as a toddler and picked up again in high school study hall before graduating to monstrous, three-hour spectacles in my college dorm room on any given weekday. I was bed rotting before Gen Z could claim it as their own, and I raw dogged it without a smartphone or TV screen.

Eventually I dialed it back, mostly because I was tired of being tired after a nap and the headaches were annoying. I started again after I got into running, naps after 20-mile long runs and races. Now that I’m used to those, I just go about my day. These days, I may nap once every few months.

But I still respect the nap, and that’s more than I can say for America.

Napping will always have a place in my life, especially when I move to Spain.

And for that, I am grateful.

Course 2

Appetizer: Cooking Directions Change at Altitude

I’ve had some pretty great naps in my lifetime. I’ve never been good at keeping a nap journal, so there are many I have forgotten. There are even new napping trends I haven’t even been able to try, like the napspresso, which is where you take a shot of espresso, but quickly crash out into a 15-minute sleep sesh, then wake up feeling extra rejuvenated. I love that after millions of years on earth, we are still breaking boundaries in napping.

But for now, from what I can recall, these are my favorite naps:

1. Middle of class in high school nap. This was the first one that really made me appreciate napping. I had a certain way of curling my arms up and burying my head into the crook of my elbows that just made a nice cocoon. When I got into that mid-morning slump or post-lunch crash, I’d just settle in and wake up at the bell. It was like time travel.

   A girl in my math class took this photo of me during one of those naps and then developed it in the darkroom of our photography lab on an 8x10 print. It then sat in the art showcase in the hallway for a good month. It’s still one of my favorite photos:

2. Twenty-minute nap on the couch with the window open on a fall day. These days, I rarely nap. I find that I have a lot of energy and I’d just rather be doing something. However, from time to time, an afternoon nap is in order. When that happens, my favorite place is in our empty house, on my couch, on a cool fall or spring day with the window open. With two kids, this is an extreme rarity. I set my alarm for twenty minutes from the time I lie down, wait for the disjointed thoughts to come, and before you know it, I’m awake.

   It always seems insulting to be woken up from a short nap. The body wants more. But it’s important to escape sleep before it goes from the head to the heart and down to the bottom of the toes. Comatose is not the goal, it’s a quick kickstart. The rest of the day is ruined with anything more than a 20-minute nap, so I keep it to that.

3. Hammock nap on my back patio (or really anywhere). Again, a rarity. The weather has to be just right for this one, the background noise devoid of ambulance or police sirens in Baltimore. Again, a rarity. Slinging the hammock up beside a nice little creek in the shade is a very solid move. Bring a good book and fall asleep. I once tried to do this after a 50-mile race that started at 7 p.m. and ended at 7 a.m. I had to drive home an hour and a half, but when I laid down I was too wired to fall asleep. I tossed and turned for about 15 minutes but sleep never came, so I just got in the car and drove home. A bad napping experience in a hammock. Again, a rarity.

4. The absolute exhaustion nap. This usually happens when I’m jet lagged, as it did on a work trip last April. We were in Venice and my sleep was terrible for the first two nights (probably because I had been drinking espresso in excess). I was having a horrible time adjusting to the time change. The previous night I had only slept an hour or so before getting up to run a 10K race that morning. I still couldn’t fall asleep afterwards, and then ended up at an all-day event with Diadora. We were in a gathering space where everyone was milling about having lunch and more espresso. There was a small wooden stage that looked like a great bed, so I just laid down and closed my eyes. Fifteen minutes later, I woke up and it felt like I was reborn. Everything came back to me and I finished out the day (and trip) strong.

5. Beach towel nap. Does this even need to be explained?

But my absolute favorite naps? They’re coming up in the main course.

Course 3

The Main: This Nap Runs on Vegetable Grease

I fantasize about these naps more often that I’d like to admit. It’s highly possible I’ve mentioned them before, because I love threading these naps into a conversation about some of my greatest joys in life.

And they are lost and gone forever. They cannot be replicated. Like a hologram of a lost loved one, you can try and get them to rap like Tupac at Coachella, but the original essence of them will never come back.

Both of these naps occurred when I was in a touring band, traveling the country in a Ford F350 van, a diesel beast that had been converted to run on vegetable oil. To understand the magnitude of these naps, I need you to understand the mystery machine in which we traveled.

First, imagine a 15-passenger van, the kind used by homeschool families and halfway houses. Strip everything out except the driver and passenger seats. From the rear of the front seats to the bumper on the back, it’s just a metal shell.

Next, imagine you’re in a band with a lead singer who’s young and poor but likes to build shit. He’s got a blank canvas in front of him, and the task is to build out a habitation space so four dudes can travel comfortably on long-haul drives (see: Dallas to Amarillo) around America, but most importantly drink in Walmart parking lots until sunrise and then pass out comfortably. Also, every person in this band is flat broke on account of making $100 a night combined playing music on a good night, and as a result – you need an excuse to rob sushi restaurants and Taco Bell of their dumpster grease so you don’t have to pay for fuel.

That was us, and this is the machine in which we traveled. To build out a van that runs on vegetable oil, we had a company custom fabricate a 120-gallon capacity tank to hold the grease. This tank would sit inside our van. Extending from wall to wall in the back of the van, this beast was bolted squarely above the rear axle on account of its weight. A third of our space was devoted to that tank.

Against that tank, our lead singer Luke built a rudimentary bunkbed out of two by fours and plywood. Then running down the metal side wall lengthwise from the bunkbeds to the driver’s seat, he built a bench seat out of more two by fours and plywood, all topped off with some sort of cheap Ikea cushions. We also had a little platform for a mini refrigerator adjacent to the bench seat. There was enough floor space between the bench seat and the dual side doors for a person to lie down. Seatbelts were nonexistent.

So that was the sleeping arrangement for us four: top bunk, bottom bunk next to the grease tank, wooden bench seat running the length of the van, and floor. Sometimes other people would join us on tour. Sometimes someone would sleep on the pavement underneath the van. Or on top of the van. It was weird.

I give you all this background information because it’s entirely relevant to understanding the context of the two best naps I’ve ever had.

Unlike a lot of bands, we split the driving equally between all members. On most occasions, we stayed up til at least 4 a.m. and woke up sometime before noon either in a parking lot or the floor of a stranger’s house, so a little bit of extra sleep was always a nice respite on a four-hour drive between midsize cities and/or cornfields in the Midwest.

Let me remind you that the van was a stripped out shell. So the only heating and A/C vents were in the dash. The entire back of the van had no climate control, which was fine in the temperate seasons, but misery in August while en route to Brownsville, Texas (aka the tip of America’s dick), or traveling from Grand Rapids to Detroit in February (aka the snotsnicle of America’s schnauz).

In summer, you were just cooked by sitting in the back. Shirts off, pop-out side door windows open, just hoping to catch a bit of relief. The bunk beds were essentially Crock Pots; throw some carrots and celery salt in there and the other boys are eating good tonight if you’re not careful.

In the winter, there was a hack to stay warm. Which brings me to my first favorite nap.

The aforementioned tank of vegetable grease for which we used as fuel sat in the rear of the van, filled with the golden liquid that served as a baptismal pool for whole cities worth of of Chick-fil-A sandwiches and waffle fries. However, veggie oil isn’t the same as diesel gas. It has a higher viscosity, especially at colder temperatures, so it needs to be heated up before moving into the fuel lines and eventually the engine. The custom tank we had for the grease also had an internal heating mechanism, so when the van was running the oil stayed hot. Meaning, the tank offered warmth in a time of coldness.

The bottom bunk sidled straight up against that tank, so that the tank was almost a wall. Combined with one end blocked by the fridge and the other by the foot of the bench seat, it created a sort of warren to escape from the outside world. We called it the Rabbit Hole, on account of our new guitarist (nicknamed Rabbit after the rookie cop in Super Troopers) who always took his naps there. Which he did, because it was the best place for naps.

Crawling into that den with your sleeping bag and knowing you could disappear into a world of sleep for the next few hours, it was almost a spiritual experience. A return to the womb, if you will. The heat radiating from the grease tank was just enough to keep you warm inside the tin can tundra of the van in the wintertime. Since it was a shelter, it even kept you safe from the blasts of cold air brought on by the routine cigarette breaks coming from the driver and passenger windows.

Because of the lack of insulation inside the van, it was pretty loud back there, so the front of the van disappeared. Just the sound of the road and the occasional whirring of the mechanisms inside the grease tank as it filtered the dirty grease into clean.

Yes, you’d wake up smelling like a McDonald’s line cook, but that’s a small price to pay for a nap of infant proportions.

The last year of being in the band I started to become more withdrawn. I was almost 30 years old and tired of sleeping on floors next to the same dudes, tired of interacting with strangers each evening and engaging in transactional conversations just to gain a space to sleep. So when I could, I’d just take the van to myself, even as it sat curbside in front of a house, or in someone’s driveway. The rabbit hole felt like it could be my own bedroom, as I slept somewhere in a copy-paste suburbia in which I never saw before or would ever see again.

My other favorite nap was on the floor.

In the same way as the rabbit hole, the elongated space for lying on the floor lacked temperature control. If positioned just right, you could get a little bit of air from the two vents above the CD player in the dash, but it was mostly futile. Things could get especially cold in the wintertime when sleeping on the floor, since it was just a thin layer of carpet and some steel between you and the road.

But that space was my favorite. Getting into the van and rolling out my sleeping bag, with my pillow propped up in the center rear of the driver and passenger seat. I’d pull out all the crap from the pockets of my skinny jeans – cigarettes, lighter, wallet, flip phone – and set them to the side underneath the bench seat. Then I’d grab one of the eight books I checked out from the library before the tour and start to read, right about as the van got onto the interstate. After a few chapters my eyelids would get heavy, the lullaby of the road mixing with the voices from the front seat, soundtracked by the newest Band of Horses album. And I’d fall asleep, my body hovering just a few feet above the paved veins that connected all of America.

After awhile, I’d wake up. Maybe we were close to our destination or maybe not. I didn’t check my phone because none of us had phones to check for anything. I’d sit up on the bench seat and take in our surroundings, grab the coffee cup from the front console that we used as an ashtray, and light up a cigarette.

Soon, we’d arrive.

I was going to leave at that, but I have one more. It was never one of my favorite naps, but it was a nap of necessity. At times, we’d be driving our van through adverse conditions– rain, snow, sleet, hail. Towing a dual axle trailer behind us, barreling down a turnpike in the dead of night. I remember one time coming back on I-76 across Pennsylvania, the final stretch towards home after three weeks on the road in December. It was snowing like a madman, pretty much a whiteout condition and accumulating fast before the plows could get to it. We wanted to be home, so it was a “to hell with it, let’s just power through” type of decision, the kind of thing you do when you’re 23 years old with just your life on the line.

We were driving in our first 15-passenger van, with the middle seats ripped out and a mattress in their place, but the rear seat still anchored in the back. Fat snowflakes smacking into the headlights like kamikaze pilots. A hard brake would easily send us into a jackknifed fishtail and likely into or over a median. I was a passenger on this drive and thought: “There’s a not-zero chance we crash and die tonight.”

So I figured the best thing to do was just go to sleep, and if we die, it’ll happen in my sleep. I won’t even know it.

I closed my eyes and said goodbye, hoping for the best. I went to sleep, and we survived.

Course 4

Dessert: A Repast of the Past Week

Man, I’m sorry this was so long, I didn’t realize how much I apparently needed to write about napping. I’m quite impressed if you didn’t take a nap yourself in the middle of this thing.

Well, this past week a tornado touched down less than a mile from our house, ripping up a bunch of beautiful trees in two of our parks in Federal Hill and the Canton waterfront. I was about to go run a route that would have placed me exactly in that place at exactly it touched down, but switched it up in the last minute and went to the gym instead. It proved to be the right decision.

Before that, we went to the Orioles game on Wednesday afternoon to see them lose yet again in what has become a nightmarish season. On the bright side, nobody was there to watch the game, so we sat in the outfield and my kids got thrown baseballs from both Harrison Bader for the Twins and Cedric Mullins from the Orioles, so that was cool.

Last night, I went back to Pennsylvania to attend my 25-year class reunion. It was the first one I had gone to, but it was actually a lot of fun. Drinks were had, catching up was done, and we ended the night with McDonald’s drive thru, so pretty much just a repeat of my life 25 years ago or 25 minutes ago.

Other things I wrote this week:

New Balance FuelCell Rebel v5 // Shoe review for Believe in the Run

Brooks Hyperion Max 3 // Shoe review for Believe in the Run

Tracksmith Releases All-New Meridian Collection For the Heat // Gear roundup for Believe in the Run

I also contribute to The Drop, a weekly email from Believe in the Run, where I round up running news and stories in a generally sarcastic (and sometimes heartfelt) manner. You can subscribe here.

I’m also the co-host of The Drop running podcast, one of the top running podcasts in the country, where we mostly talk about things other than running that thousands of people seem to find entertaining. You can listen to our most recent episode here.

Ingredients List

📖 : This week’s “The Morning Shakeout” newsletter from Mario Fraioli’s was so good. It’s good every week, but this one – about his mother who died when he was in his twenties, as well as nuggets of other wisdoms – is just so full of things you need to hear.

“An Immense World: How Animal Sense Reveal the Hidden World Around Us” by Ed Yong // Finally got this on loan from the Maryland elibrary, and so far, so fascinating. I’m only a couple chapters in but it already has me seeing the world in different ways. This also helps confirm my belief that we have barely scratched the surface in the ways in which the natural world is truly supernatural.

END OF MENU

Thank you for dining with me this evening, I hope the service was acceptable. Tips (whether monetary or recommendations to others) are appreciated, but not expected.

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