Team Training Anxiety - Can I "Teach Myself" To Fall Asleep In A Moving Truck?

Hello all - to clarify, I was referring specifically to the team phase of training.

JDEZR thanks for the kind words and the offer, but to be clear, I have zero interest in team driving, other than what I'm required to do for training. My hat is off to you and I wish you well, but aside from the sleep concerns stated above, sharing a closet-sized living space with another adult for ANY length of time beyond the required minimum sounds like sheer hell on earth to me lol.

Glad I could entertain you so, Kearsey. HA!..Yep I've done a couple "ride alongs", a pretty long one, and a short one, hitchhiking many years ago. And driven hundreds of thousands of 4-wheeled freeway miles, starting probably before you were born, young lady!

So I'm pretty familiar with most of the sounds of the road. Most of what Mikey was referring to was not those. I was referring to the vast majority of miles where the sound is more of a monotonous drone and the motion is mild. Have never had too much trouble sleeping in vehicles, even when the ride's been punctuated by more disruptive sounds and movements. But I'm obviously having to do a lot of speculating too.

ANYONE with a respectable amount of experience have any counterpoints they're willing to offer, or is the disparaging take on teaming universal here?

When your body is tired enough it will sleep. Yes you will be woken by crappy roads or hard breaks. Take some melatonin. If your trainer listen to music you can ask that he/she turn the speakers in the sleeper off. Get some ear plugs or ear buds to play your own music to sleep too. Go to dollar tree and get you a sleep mask. Is it easy no is it doable yes.

I'm in the team phase of my training at Wilson, out of the Missoula yard and what my trainer and I do might be ideal for you if yours will go along with it. I don't have any issues sleeping in the truck, but he hasn't done team in a good ten years so it's hard for him to get more than a couple hour nap in.

What we ended up doing after he had a talk with the safety guy in Missoula about it was running like what the safety guy calls a 'super solo'. We each drive our hours for the day and then stop for a 10 hour break. It works pretty well for us other than a few loads that we had to run as a team to deliver on time.

Glad I could entertain you so, Kearsey. HA!..Yep I've done a couple "ride alongs", a pretty long one, and a short one, hitchhiking many years ago. And driven hundreds of thousands of 4-wheeled freeway miles, starting probably before you were born, young lady!

So I'm pretty familiar with most of the sounds of the road. Most of what Mikey was referring to was not those. I was referring to the vast majority of miles where the sound is more of a monotonous drone and the motion is mild. Have never had too much trouble sleeping in vehicles, even when the ride's been punctuated by more disruptive sounds and movements. But I'm obviously having to do a lot of speculating too.

ANYONE with a respectable amount of experience have any counterpoints they're willing to offer, or is the disparaging take on teaming universal here?

Ah... Well then...you know everything so why ask for discussion?

You are perfect for teaming...so go apply and get to driving. Otherwise you will still be posting here for another decade looking for the perfect team mate.

Or go put an add on Craigslist or something. You seriously just want to use this forum to find a non existent perfect team mate. You would be better off doing so on Facebook groups as I stated earlier.

Good luck! Glad you are used to "hundreds of thousands of miles" over decades because you will be doing 200,000 miles per year. So that figure doesn't impress me.

You haven't mentioned any pros or reasons why you think teaming is so great other than you believe you will sleep better in a rolling truck with a stranger than you would solo and parked.

What benefits do you think you will get from teaming?

I know, I'm not 'quantified' nor 'qualified' to reply here.. but heck . . . when I did some months with the hubby in 2012 ; I listened to mood music on a MP3 .. (Yeah, ikr?) and .. I slept. Is there anything 'similar' nowadays?

I'm almost as light of a sleeper as our doggo... yet, when I hear something non intrusive .. I can elect to sleep through it.. even at home, in the country, with deer, and hunters.

Do MP3's exist anymore? Helped me.

Eugene, TOTALLY understandable you have no interest in team driving, just being able to get enough shuteye with your trainer. Sorry I mis-read that in my non-desperate zeal to find a co-driver. I hope you're picking up some good ideas here for getting through your training process. Maybe my "app" described below will be worth a try for ya. Works for me, though there's no magic bullet for sure.

So...good point, Anne, you bring up another thing I do to help me sleep sometimes, mostly to grab a nap at times when my natural sleep cycle "clock" isn't saying "time to sleep" (mid-afternoons and 10 pm or so are what it seems set for). Not with an MP3 player, but an "app" on my iPhone. Perfectly good used iPods ARE still available to buy though, and most iPhones have those players built in, and of course you can still download any of the millions of tracks that are sold. What a revolutionary and classic piece of tech the iPod is and will always be know as, for its time.

The app I use has a lot of both free and "premium sounds", simply repeating soundtracks of a multitude of familiar sounds you can play via a smartphone's speaker or a headset. Everything from house appliances to, well the name of the app is "Rain Rain" and sure enough there's lot of precipitation sounds like thunderstorms and gentle rain. My favorite is "Wet Forest", a mix of rain and the sound of a gurgling stream. Natural noises seem to work best for me, which figures, and there's a wide variety of those, like birds and such, but they also have human noise tracks like "Food Court", "Cafe", etc. There's music mixes, and also "pure" monotony like White Noise and Brown Noise...

You get the idea, whatever works to help someone conk out. You let the sound distract you from everything else, maybe try to sort of "meditate" on that and let the thoughts, stress, etc. fade away... Some folks get hooked to where they think they can't sleep without it... The girlfriend who turned me on to these apps played hers all night, even when we were camping in a forest...which I wasn't a fan of.

Most relevantly here, there's a Transportation category with these 5: "Airliner", "Train", "Car in the Rain", "Winter Traffic" and "Boat on the Lake". So thanx for the reminder, I'll get used to those ASAP... But if they'd only add some like "Big Rigs on the Freeway" and "Truck Stop Sounds", I'd jump on those right away to "have it made" ;-) ; get a more realistic head start on sleeping in a truck!

The bad of trying to sleep in a team truck is not the noise, but the movement of the vehicle.

Potholes, pavement seams, intersections, shifting, slow downs, cattle guards, overpass transitions, construction zones, scales, etc.

Until one has experienced this, you have no idea what it will be like.