Bring On Those Sleepless Nights!
An insight into the slightly warped mind of an event professional…
I can’t think of many other professions where people will realise that over the course of a year they will lose over 15 full nights worth of sleep and decide that they still need to lose a few more.
Well that is what we’ve done with the expansion of the Sunrise City 5K series in 2019.
We have recently added two brand new cities – Bristol and Coventry – to the roster, while also adding a second date in Nottingham following the sell out success of 2018.
The event starts at 5:30am on a Friday morning for the participant. They get to see their city in a new light during a non-competitive run or walk over 5km.
For the event team, the event starts at around midnight, depending on how far from Nottingham the event is happening.
Three of us arrive on site at 2am, unload our bikes and set off around the course erecting signs and conducting a final risk assessment of the route.
During this time, we get to see cities in the still of night and others in full swing towards the end of a night out. The one thing that’s for sure is that it’s always interesting.
We aim to finish by 4am when the rest of the delivery team arrive on site to set up registration. This team will normally have been on the go since 2am.
Partcipants begin to arrive at 4:30am to get ready for their run.
We have tried a variety of things to see if sleep actually is an option, but so far we’re still not sure what works best. Personally, I prefer to go through the night, but others have attempted to get a couple of hours in.
The one thing that all of us agree on is that that the excitement of the event makes it hard to sleep. There’s something thrilling about getting ready to deliver event and heading off to do so in the middle of the night. It’s like your own secret adventure.
And while we may lose a lot of sleep, we get a fantastic feeling from seeing so many people enjoying themselves on the back of that effort. Again, there’s very few professions where you get to directly witness this pay off.
The fact is, we love what we do and so I can’t see us getting too much more sleep any time soon.
