Tomorrow’s Sleep is Tomorrow’s Run!; With a Review of My Tomorrow Sleep Mattress
When discussing what makes a person successful as an athlete, often training and nutrition are first on everyone’s minds. People ask me all the time what my workouts are like, or what I recommend eating before or after a race, but I don’t actually think anyone has ever asked me about sleep! Sleep is often the ignored component in successful training—a good night’s sleep can ensure you recover from a hard workout or race, while a bad night’s sleep may help begin to dig a hole of fatigue that affects your subsequent training and recovery cycles.
I have never been one of those people who is able to get by just fine on just a little bit of sleep. If you've ever been a college athlete, you've definitely been in the position of seeing a teammate succeed beyond expectations during a workout on not a lot of sleep--this was literally never me, because in college anyway, I ceased to function when I got less than 8 hours and 45 minutes of sleep. (This was not true in high school, when I regularly went to bed at the wee hours of the morning from homework, and would wake up when my school bus hit the sharp and frequent speed bumps leading up to the entrance of Seton-La Salle High School. The older I get, the more I appreciate sleeping.) Anyways, I'm now a lot more flexible than in my college running days about my bedtime, but man, I LOVE sleeping. I am very (possibly too) good at it, especially when I'm in the middle of an intense training block, which honestly feels like most of the time with how many yoga classes I teach during the academic year!
I recently moved into my first home, and was extremely excited to upgrade to a new mattress from Tomorrow Sleep. My previous mattress had been purchased at the start of my Ph.D. program when I very first moved to Charlottesville in the fall of 2009; needless to say, this thing needed to be replaced as it had developed some lovely lumpy spots despite my best efforts to rotate my mattress here and there. My old, 8+ year old mattress was extremely squishy, but not in a benevolent, sleep-inducing manner. Enter: my new Tomorrow Sleep mattress. Any skepticism I had about this mattress “in a box” ("Wait, it comes in a little box?? How??") was completely erased as soon as I lay upon its soft plush surface immediately after unpacking it. (FYI: unpacking it was actually a lot of fun! It was awesome to see the whole mattress expand from its shrink-wrapped state to actually become a real, live mattress! You would never have believed that it would become a full-fledged mattress based on the size of the box! Too bad you can only unpack it once!) I could have fallen asleep right then and there when I was simply testing my mattress out!
It is neat to feel UPBEAT, refreshed on your feet, after you sleep!
FYI: bed, Pottery Bar; comforter, Anthropologie (and worth every penny--it's even softer than it looks!).
I really am picky about my mattresses. I had to buy a memory foam topper for the one I have on my bed back home in Pittsburgh because it was too hard and made my bottom hip hurt if I slept on my favorite side! Lo and behold, no topper needed for my new Tomorrow Sleep mattress! The combo memory foam/dynamic coil system feels like sleeping on the most comfortable memory foam pillow except, instead of just cradling your head, it cradles and restores your entire body. I feel both buoyant and supported upon it. It is just the right balance of soft and supportive. In addition to its extreme comfort, one of the mattress’ best features is its NASA-developed “sleep cool” technology. There’s a very particular discomfort involved in waking up way too hot in the middle of the night. Sometimes I literally do not move once I fall asleep. On my old mattress, this meant that after any very long day where I was essentially knocked out and motionless in deep sleep, I would awake after a couple of hours in a puddle of sweat from generating so much heat in one spot, and then have to scoot to one or the other direction in an effort to find a new dry patch (which I then sometimes would again overheat and sweat up…after a while, you just run out of room!). Not fun, and definitely not conducive to the real sleeping that I very much needed. You know how they talk about “the cool side of the pillow”? This mattress is evidently that all of the time, because I have never woken up in a sweat puddle since I have gotten it. Super hard sleepers, rejoice! This mattress loves good deep sleeping as much as you do! People who get too hot at night will cheer in the morning when they wake up cool, comfortable, UPBEAT (see photo, haha) and ready to take on the day. I can sleep as deeply as I want, and my Tomorrow Sleep mattress keeps me cool. Lastly, this mattress is hypoallergic and toxin-free—I am allergic to dust mites and am fairly sensitive to other allergens, so this is another point in Tomorrow Sleep’s favor.
This is a very solid, supportive, extremely comfortable mattress that I would highly recommend to anyone who just loves sleep or wants to sleep better and more deeply.
Stay tuned for forthcoming posts on how to get a better night's sleep as an athlete!
This blog post was sponsored by Tomorrow Sleep; it contains my honest feedback about my mattress.