Sleeping Well and Dreaming of Great Things
Bobby Curtis
One Monday night in 2004, when Bobby Curtis was a 19-year-old Villanova University student athlete, he was unable to sleep. So he went to bed early the next night, but still no sleep. Or the next night. “Within two or three days I was a wreck,” he recalls. He was forced to withdraw from an indoor track meet in New York that weekend, and he continued to battle insomnia for months. “I went through the wringer,” he says. “I ended up taking off spring semester of my sophomore year.”
Curtis tried everything: sleep hygiene (getting out of bed if he couldn’t sleep), sleep scheduling (sleeping less than required to build up fatigue and thereby improve the quality of sleep), even getting drunk one night. “Not only was I hung over the next day, it didn’t help me sleep,” he says.
The sleep scheduling finally helped to some extent, and in 2007, Curtis ran his first sub 4-minute mile. In 2008, he won the NCAA 5000 meters. But in March 2009, a trip to Jordan for the IAAF World Cross Country Championships triggered a relapse. “The sleep scheduling stopped working,” he says. “For a few months in 2009, I wasn’t running at all.”
Curtis found his own solution: No matter how badly he’d slept the night before, he’d go for a daily run. He also lifted his self-imposed ban on going out in the evenings. “The less I focused on sleep and the more I focused on the rest of my life, that was when things got better,” he says.
This year, Curtis, now 26, set a 10,000-meter PR of 27:24.67 and a half-marathon best of 1:01:52. The ING New York City Marathon will be his debut at the distance, and his goal is to finish “between fifth and 10th place, maybe something better.”
Now that he’s sleeping, Curtis can dream big.
