Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2009 02:11:06 -0500
Reply-To: David Beierl <dbeierl@ATTGLOBAL.NET>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: David Beierl <dbeierl@ATTGLOBAL.NET>
Subject: Re: Any Suggestions for 24-hour,
straight through driving road trip??
In-Reply-To: <SNT124-W2643CFD6FF8B3DD9C64450D2A90@phx.gbl>
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At 06:31 PM 11/12/2009, Richard Golen wrote:
>Any hints, suggestions, etc? Red Bull? "speedballs"? espresso? 3
>hrs driving, 3hrs off??
Bare feet have a remarkable rejuvenating effect when your eyes are
getting heavy. I wasn't convinced until I tried it. Playing Ghost
with your partner is wonderfully effective in getting your brain to
take an interest in things. To play it, you add letters in turn to
the end (or if you're a serious glutton for punishment, either end)
of a word. First person to arrive at a legal word of three letters
or more is one third of a ghost. If you don't believe the previous
letter is legitimate you can say "I challenge you" which will cost
either you or the previous player one life. However the round ends,
the loser starts the next word, and play progresses clockwise. If
there are more than two players, anyone who speaks to a ghost loses a
life, which gives the ghosts something to do while waiting for the
round to end. I challenge anyone to fall asleep while actively playing Ghost.
Willingness to stop right where you are and change drivers or take a
nap by the roadside is something I was forced to learn early as I was
subject to abruptly falling asleep in my youth.
Noticing that your steering around corners is a bit coarser i.e.
larger wheel movements than usual is a real tipoff that you're too
tired and need to get out of the saddle right now. My dad noticed
that and I confirm it.
A periodic 20-minute catnap can extend effectiveness remarkably out
of proportion to the actual minutes of sleep. Anything approaching
an hour at a time is liable to put you into a logy ineffective state
that's hard to shake without sleeping it off. If you're going to
sleep longer than a half hour, make it at least two or three hours
and maybe more.
At my present age (rising 59) I notice that I actively value the
regular two-hourly exercise stops that I used to think were too
effete for words. They make a big difference to how I feel at the
end of the day.
Keep the temp just on the chilly side of comfortable if
possible. Sometimes a mixture of warm and cold air streams is quite bracing
My dad used to listen to talk radio -- he said it made him so mad he
stayed awake. Personally I think that every single thing about what
I just said is horrifying, but to each his own. His own chronic
anger and its effects on me certainly color my feelings about it.
"Trucking music" -- something with pardon my saying a driving beat
that I can hammer on the steering wheel to if I like, alternating
with quieter music and silence seems helpful to me.
In the Vanagon, a set or even two sets of Bose noise-cancelling
headphones is expensive but wonderfully restful, with or without
music. You can hear music clearly without blasting it, and without
music you can actually hear conversation better than
without. They're remarkable devices but the price is only cheap by
comparison with their noise-cancelling headsets for pilots which cost
absolutely indecent amounts of money. Boy, those would be great in a
Westy, though, rigged for intercom. There are much cheaper
noise-cancelling phones with some effectiveness -- you can tell them
apart from the useless ones by turning them on while wearing
them. If there isn't a clear reduction as the power comes on and the
device phases into the outside noise, then don't bother. The Bose
cost either two or three hundred dollars new, and for fifty dollars
you can get a much lesser but still somewhat useful effect. The
earplug phones that achieve high isolation by sealing the ear canal
are obviously totally unsuited for driving. The Bose are actively
tuned to eliminate steady-state, fairly low-frequency noise and
they're just amazing.
Hot and cold drinks in alternation...I don't feel very much effect
personally from caffeine, though if you take enough of it (several
hundred milligrams maybe) you'll be too uncomfortable to fall asleep
perhaps. At opposite ends of the scale, some people are very
sensitive to caffeine and find it effective; and most people will
become temporarily psychotic with an immediate dose of 700 mg or
so. From memory coffee is somewhere around a hundred mg per cup,
less as the roast gets darker. Tea I think 25-maybe as much as 50
mg/cup and colas around 25 mg/can.
I would heartily disrecommend any genuinely effective stimulants
unless you're already very experienced with them and how you
personally react to the various dosages and timing and to the states
of increasing fatigue that you'll pass through. Take it from someone
who spent several years actively managing and calibrating exhaustion
while taking high doses of Adderall, which is essentially a mixture
of dextro- and racemic (dextro/levo mixed) forms of amphetamine.
I can tell you, for example, that somewhere around day three you'll
pass through a stage of an hour or two when you will fall asleep
standing up and hit your head on whatever's nearest -- and that after
that passes you'll have another 24 hours or so of "usefulness"
although driving in that state would be insanity, after which the
bill will come due all at once and you'll need to rest for several
days with no drug. Earlier stages aren't trivially simple to manage
either, and sitting down at a boring job like driving is a high-risk
environment for suddenly waking up, dead or otherwise. *Be told.*
I guess that's most of what I know about staying effectively awake
while driving. You'll notice that alternation/variation of stimuli
is important, because the way our bodies are designed any
steady-state stimulus will zero out and become the baseline.
Yours,
David
