LOUDON, N.H. -- For years, Tyler Reddick had a system for waking up in the morning: set five or six alarms and hope one of them worked.
Sometimes they didn’t.
The 23XI Racing driver could shut them off without realizing it, but would eventually emerge from a deep slumber in what he now describes as "a trance." On race weekends, if the schedule allowed, he might sleep in until 9 or 10 a.m. and still have to drag himself into the day. His wife, Alexa, had long told him "for years, quite possibly decades" how badly he snored, and there were nights when she would jolt him awake with a shake after something considerably more unsettling.
He had stopped breathing entirely.
Reddick would snap up, confused, beckoned by Alexa -- "Are you OK?"
“I mean, I thought I was,” Reddick told NASCAR.com on Saturday at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.
That answer makes more sense when Reddick explains how thoroughly he had normalized the problem. He's 30 years old, already a Daytona 500 champion, prolific winner and one of the most adeptly gifted drivers in NASCAR, but poor sleep had been part of his life for so long that it barely registered as something to fix anymore.
“I think I’ve dealt with this probably most of my life,” Reddick said. “You think, ‘Oh, it’s just how I sleep.’ Whether it’s how bad you sleep or the amount of times you wake up, how you feel when you wake up after sleeping -- all these things, I thought, ‘Well, it’s just me. It’s the way I live my life.’
“So I think for the longest time I chalked it up to that.”
What finally broke through was the same instinct that has carried Reddick to NASCAR’s highest level: the suspicion that somewhere, somehow, there was still more performance to uncover in himself.
At the end of last season, Reddick began taking inventory. Fitness, preparation, recovery -- all the usual levers available to an elite athlete were essentially accounted for already. Then he landed on a more basic question.
“What stones have I not unturned?”
Sleep topped the list.
Initially, when seeking answers, Reddick expected little more than confirmation that he had been right all along. Do the sleep study, check the box, establish that nothing significant was wrong and move along. But once he began paying closer attention and putting all the contextual pieces together while waiting for the appointment, years of evidence clicked into place as he realized what was actually happening.
The snoring. The exhaustion. The alarms. The fact that more time in bed rarely produced the recovery he expected.
By the time the study confirmed sleep apnea, Reddick’s reaction was not one of alarm -- it was relief.
“As crazy as it sounds, I was like, ‘Yes, thank goodness,’ ” he said. “Because if it wasn’t this, I don’t know why I’m the way I am.”
Reddick began continuous positive airway pressure treatment in March, using a CPAP device to help keep his airway open while he sleeps. The first night was enough to recalibrate his understanding of what "rested" is actually supposed to feel like.
“Literally the first night I used it, it was a huge difference,” Reddick said. “It blew my mind. I could not believe that what I thought was normal was beyond not normal.”
The most meaningful changes since then have been almost stubbornly ordinary.
Reddick says he wakes with more energy and no longer needs “mountains of caffeine” simply to get himself moving. A smaller CPAP device travels with him, taking away the anxiety that came with sleeping somewhere unfamiliar and wondering whether he would wake up when he needed to. Some mornings now, he beats the alarm altogether.
And then there is home life.
"It was really, really incredible how much it helped my day-to-day stuff as well. I'm a dad, and now I'm able to wake up in the morning and be sharp and tackle whatever happens."
Before treatment, a relatively open race morning could mean sleeping as late as possible while his wife took the children somewhere. Now, when the schedule allows, Reddick gets up and goes with them. After the kids are asleep at night, he can finish the work that tends to collect at the end of a day without assuming the next morning will be a trade-off he'll have to deal with.
His wife sleeps better, too. The snoring that kept her awake has subsided, along with the frightening interruptions -- and the frantic commotion that followed.
“For me, it was such a 180 from what I’ve been dealing with, and it was like, holy cow, yeah, obviously, I think I had it in mind for trying to be, how can I just continue to find things that make me better as a driver?"
[caption id="attachment_523043" align="aligncenter" width="1300"]It's worked so well for him, in fact, that his experience has now led to a commercial chapter as well.
23XI Racing announced Tuesday a new partnership with ResMed, the company whose CPAP equipment Reddick had already begun using on his own in March. Resmed branding will be featured on track with Reddick's No. 45 23XI Racing Toyota at Bristol, Talladega and Homestead this season. According to the team, 23XI was separately in conversations with ResMed before learning that Reddick was, coincidentally, already using the company’s devices. His personal experience ultimately provided a natural connection between the two, and a partnership seamlessly followed.
Cup teams spend entire seasons chasing hundredths of a second through simulation, setup, aerodynamics and pit-road execution. When they're not behind the wheel, drivers conduct their own version of the same search through training, nutrition, hydration, reaction time and recovery. Reddick went looking for another place to get better, and found one in the portion of his day when he had assumed for years there was nothing to optimize, humbly coming to terms with his apparent fate of needing to sleepwalk through life.
But not so.Even before his sleep study, he began experimenting and tinkering with his sleep hygiene and habits on his own. As part of that, Reddick changed the way he positioned himself in bed, trying to sleep more upright in hopes of keeping his airway open while he waited to see a doctor months after booking the appointment.
“It sucked,” he said. “I’m not gonna lie, it wasn’t very comfortable.”
But he thought he was indeed sleeping tangibly better, ever so slightly, but another clue that this particular stone, once flipped over, may uncover an edge both in racing and in life.
What treatment has now offered him is not something super flashy but, heading into The Chase with something to prove, potentially quite useful: capacity to meet his demands.
“Typically, this time of the year, it just kind of feels a bit run down,” Reddick said. “It’s like, holy cow, we’re getting ready to go start the real true grind with all the stakes in play.
“I think just mentally, I’m naturally in a better place than I normally would be, year in, year out.”
That is where Reddick is comfortable drawing the connection between his sleep and his Sunday duties. Not just horsepower, lap times, or RPMs, but also the REM cycles and circadian rhythm that allow him to complete the work required every day of the week.
“If there are late nights of prep and trying to get caught up, or doing the extra, putting in the extra hours, whatever it might be, I’m not as worried about being tired the next day,” he said. “When you do have those late nights and everyone’s grinding, working hard, I’m walking into work or the track on those tougher days or stretches with a better mindset.
“It just has a huge positive influence on my energy, all the things, and then that, in turn, is positive on those around us.”
All of this makes the timing difficult to ignore.
Reddick returns to Daytona this week for the regular-season finale, six months removed from leaving the same track with the Harley J. Earl Trophy and forever marked as a Daytona 500 champion, sparking what became the hottest start to a season of his Cup career and arguably anyone else's. Back then, the No. 45 team looked almost untouchable. Now, with his Chase berth secure but the weekly consistency harder to locate over the summer, Reddick heads toward the championship portion of the season, trying to recover the form that made him the standard.
The vibe has shifted; the ceiling has not.
Five wins in astoundingly short order already proved how good Reddick and the No. 45 can be. The task has become, however, to rebuild enough of that foundation underneath to revert their gaze back up at the next level.
There is no magic answer in a sleep study for that.
Reddick’s race car still has to be right, his team still has to execute, and the driver still has to deliver. But the longest, highest-pressure part of the season is arriving, and he believes he is entering it with one less source of wear and tear accumulating in the background.
Consistency matters with the treatment, too. Reddick travels with his device and can monitor usage and mask seal through an app from ResMed. If he accidentally falls asleep putting one of his children to bed or dozes off on the couch without it, the difference is apparent the next morning, and the data reflects it ... pretty accurately.
“You don’t feel amazing,” he said.
The larger change is that an imperfect night no longer starts the same familiar slide toward feeling completely depleted. That can't be stressed enough, as Reddick embarks shortly on his best shot at a title yet.
“The more consistent you stay with it, it is ultimately way better,” Reddick said.
That same word -- consistency -- now hangs over the racing side of his year, with 11 races to go, 10 of which will decide a champion. The Chase will determine whether that historic opening stretch, where Reddick was an overwhelming early championship favorite, was merely the spectacular first act of a nice season or proof of a level of dominance the No. 45 can summon again when it matters most.
Either way, the driver entering that grind now understands something crucial about himself that he spent years brushing off, mistaking as normal.
For most of his life, Tyler Reddick needed five or six alarms just to start the day.
And now, when the first one goes off, he'll be ready for it.
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