Double Summer Running

The suggestion that the UK should switch to so called double summer time (or normal European time as we could call it save for the fear of antagonising Daily Mail readers) is again doing the rounds in the media.  As before the debate centres on the benefits of more evening daylight providing leisure and fitness opportunities against the prospect of long dark winter mornings.  This set me thinking about how such a move would impact me and my grandly insane search for fitness and physical wellbeing.

I am generally an evening runner.  Ergo, longer evening would undoubtedly increase the opportunities for running in daylight.  I would be able to use a greater of variety of local routes; at present I have only one street-lit route available during the dark winter evenings.  I would also have a greater opportunity to cycle mid-week so thus far the proposal for double summer time looks good to me.

Of course, not all runners are evening biased.  Many prefer to run first thing in the morning and for these people the move to double summer time would reduce the number of mornings with useful pre-work daylight. 

Time to look at the hard numbers I think to see what we are really dealing with here.

I started by consulting the official sunrise and sunset times for Birmingham in the UK in 2011 courtesy of the HM Nautical Almanac Office (http://websurf.hmnao.com/surfbin/first.cgi).  We also need some boundaries in which to consider options.  Based on my own preferences and circumstances I propose the following:

1. that work accounts for 10 hours/day somewhere between 8am and 6pm including up to one hour travelling each way;
2. most people’s work aligns to the hours of daylight (I know this is probably the most contentious assumption but let’s work with it);
3. any daylight before 7am is being slept through;
4. to be really useful for leisure and exercise sunset needs to be after 7pm.

Under current UK time we find that for a staggering 213 days a year the sun rises before 7am.  Great for milking cows and the early runners but for me this amounts to 268 daylight hours unavailable by virtue of being at the wrong end of the day.  Under double summer time the number of days on which the sun rises before 7am falls to only 52 clustered, unsurprisingly, around midsummer.

At the other end of the day, Birmingham can currently look forward to 182 days in 2011 on which sunset occurs after 7pm.  Under double summer time this would rise to 225; an increase of 43 more days available for useful training.  Great news.  Case made.  Or is it?

The price of course is the darker mornings.  Currently Birmingham can expect 50 days in 2011 to have sunrise after 8am.  A move to double summer time would see this leap to 152.  Put like this I am not sure that 43 additional leisure evenings justifies 98 more days of waking to an alarm sounding in the pitch black of the pre-dawn. 

Fear not though for I have a solution.  Andy Time. 

Armed with the 2011 sunrise/sunset data, I can now reveal that if we were to switch to summer time at the end of February rather than the end of March we could gain an extra 17 useful training days with no increase in the number of days with a post 8am sunrise.  This may not sound like much but the days in question are those at a really key part of the year just ahead of all those spring events.  The opportunity to come out of winter training and rediscover those long forgotten summer routes a month early would be a great way to invigorate tired legs.

Andy Time is a simple and easy solution that does not require a three year trial or convert tactics to get past the anti-Europe xenophobes.  It does still leave the majority of all that slept through, pre-7am daylight wasted but I’m sure there are plenty out there in Grand Insanity land who will use it  - madly.