How to sleep before a race: nerves, sleep banking and race-day travel

To sleep well before a race, keep your normal routine, bank extra sleep in the week before, and don't panic about a restless night. Most athletes sleep worse before a big event, and the research suggests one short night costs less than the worry about it. If you're traveling, protect your nose and your body clock as well as your hours in bed.

Why is it so hard to sleep before a race?

It's hard to sleep before a race because your mind won't switch off. In a 2015 study in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, researchers from Murdoch University and the Australian Institute of Sport surveyed 283 elite Australian athletes. 64% said they had slept worse on at least one night before an important competition in the past year.

The main problem was falling asleep, reported by 82.1% of those athletes. The reasons were mostly mental: thoughts about the competition (83.5%) and nervousness (43.8%). The poor sleep was situational, tied to competitions rather than a general sleep problem.

Many athletes had no plan for it. 59.1% of team-sport athletes said they had no strategy for poor sleep before competition, compared with 32.7% of individual-sport athletes, who used relaxation and reading. If you're a runner, cyclist or triathlete, that's the group you're in, and it's worth having a plan.

So if you lie awake the night before, you're in good company. Elite athletes do it too, and they still race.

Does one bad night before a race hurt performance?

One bad night can hurt performance, but usually less than people fear, especially for morning races. A 2022 meta-analysis in Sports Medicine pooled 69 studies and found that sleep loss, defined as 6 hours or less, cut exercise performance by about 7.6% on average. Every type of exercise was affected, including endurance.

The details are more reassuring. Performance dropped about 0.4% for every extra hour awake before exercise in the studies that kept people up or woke them early. And tasks performed in the morning were largely unaffected, while afternoon tasks consistently suffered. Many races start in the morning, which may help.

A real-world-style example comes from a 2025 trial in the European Journal of Applied Physiology. Ten recreational male runners did a 10-km treadmill time trial after a normal night (8 hours in bed) and after a night with only 3 hours in bed. On the short night, they ran about 5% slower, 51.9 versus 49.4 minutes. Caffeine before the run offset that loss in this study, but it was a small trial, and race morning isn't the time to try anything new.

Three hours is a rough night, much worse than the usual pre-race tossing and turning. If you get five or six broken hours, you're likely to be closer to normal than that.

Is sleep two nights before a race more important?

The idea that sleep two nights before a race matters most is common advice, but we couldn't find a study that tests it directly. It may be a useful way to take pressure off the night before, and it makes practical sense: the night before is when nerves, early alarms and travel tend to cut sleep short.

What the research does support is that sleep across the days before matters. That's the idea behind sleep banking, below. So rather than betting on one particular night, aim for good sleep through race week, and treat the night before as a bonus.

Does sleep banking work before a race?

Sleep banking has some evidence behind it, though not from races. In a 2009 study in Sleep, researchers at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research had 24 healthy adults spend a week either at their usual time in bed (about 7 hours) or at 10 hours in bed. Then everyone had seven nights of only 3 hours in bed, followed by five recovery nights.

The group that banked sleep had fewer attention lapses and took longer to fall asleep on an alertness test during the week of short sleep. They also bounced back faster once recovery sleep began. Interestingly, the two groups didn't differ in how sleepy they felt, so the benefit showed up in performance, not mood.

A study on athletes points the same way. In a 2011 study in Sleep, 11 Stanford men's basketball players aimed for at least 10 hours in bed each night for five to seven weeks. They slept about 111 minutes more a night on average, their timed sprint improved from 16.2 to 15.5 seconds, and their free throw and three-point accuracy each improved by about 9%. That was a small study without a control group, and it tested weeks of extra sleep, not a few nights.

For a race, the practical version is simple: go to bed earlier in the five to seven nights before, and let yourself sleep in where your schedule allows. Our guide to exercise and sleep covers how training and sleep affect each other.

How do you calm pre-race nerves at night?

You calm pre-race nerves by expecting them and keeping your evening familiar. The athletes in the Australian survey who had a plan used relaxation and reading. There's no need to force sleep; lying quietly in the dark is still rest.

The NHLBI's general sleep advice works well the night before:

• Use the hour before bed for quiet time, away from bright screens
• Avoid heavy or large meals within a few hours of bedtime
• Avoid alcohol before bed, and caffeine later in the day, since its effects can last up to 8 hours
• Keep the room quiet, cool and dark
• Try a hot bath or relaxation techniques before bed

Lay out your kit and set two alarms early in the evening, so you're not checking them at midnight. Slow breathing can help too, and our guides to breathing exercises before bed and how to fall asleep faster have simple methods.

How do you sleep well when you travel to a race?

You sleep well when traveling to a race by protecting your body clock, your room and your nose. For long trips across time zones, the NHS suggests getting plenty of rest before you travel and starting to shift your bedtime toward the new time zone. On the flight, it suggests drinking plenty of water, moving around and using an eye mask and earplugs if they help. After you arrive, it says to switch to the local schedule quickly, get outside in daylight and avoid sleeping during the day. It also notes that too much caffeine or alcohol can make jet lag worse.

A stuffy nose is another common race-trip problem, whether from a cold, allergies or an unfamiliar room. If congestion is what keeps you up, nasal strips are worth packing. In a 2018 randomized, placebo-controlled trial in Allergy, Asthma & Clinical Immunology, 59 people with chronic nighttime nasal congestion and sleep difficulties used nasal strips or placebo strips nightly for two weeks. The real strips improved some measures of sleep satisfaction and symptoms on waking compared with placebo at day 7.

Some runners pack TitanAir Nasal Strips for hotel nights so a blocked nose doesn't cost them sleep. Try them at home in training weeks first, not for the first time the night before. Our guides to the best nasal strips for travel and how to sleep with a stuffy nose cover more.

Do nasal strips help during the race itself?

Nasal strips are unlikely to make you faster. A 2021 meta-analysis in the European Archives of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology reviewed studies of nasal strips during exercise in healthy people and found no improvement in maximal oxygen uptake, heart rate or perceived exertion.

Some runners still like them for comfort, especially if their nose feels blocked when they breathe hard. That's a personal choice, and the evidence doesn't promise a time benefit. Our guides to nasal strips for exercise and the best nasal strips for running go through the studies in detail.

When should you see a doctor about sleep before races?

You should see a doctor if poor sleep isn't limited to race nights, or if you have signs of sleep apnea. The NHS lists breathing that stops and starts during sleep, gasping, snorting or choking noises, waking up a lot and loud snoring, along with feeling very tired during the day and finding it hard to concentrate. It says to see a GP if you have the main symptoms.

A nose that's always blocked, not just on trips, is also worth checking, since strips won't fix a structural problem. If you're pregnant, ask your clinician before using any sleep or breathing product. Athletes get sleep apnea too, and our guide to sleep apnea in athletes explains what to look for.

Our pick (paid partner): TitanAir Nasal Strips

If a stuffy nose tends to steal your sleep on race trips, our pick is TitanAir Nasal Strips. We haven't tested or ranked strips ourselves, and Titan's strips weren't used in any of the studies above; this is our recommendation, not a performance aid.

Titan says TitanAir strips are drug-free external nasal dilators with flexible spring-loaded bands. Its placement instructions are to put the strip just above the flare of the nostrils, on the soft part of the nose rather than the bony bridge, on clean, dry skin with no moisturizer. To remove one, Titan suggests loosening it with warm water and peeling slowly from the ends inward, which is gentler on a race-morning face.

Titan says the strips are third-party tested and certified PFAS-free, and its 30-night guarantee gives you time to try TitanAir on ordinary training nights before you rely on them away from home.

Read next

• The best nasal strips for travel
• Do nasal strips help during exercise?
• Exercise and sleep: does timing matter?

* This content is for informational and educational purposes only and is not medical advice. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease or health condition. Talk to a qualified healthcare provider about your health.