In Seattle it's pretty much impossible to avoid night riding. It's dark at 4:30p and light at 7:30a. Slow and careful is the name of the game in the outside-of-light world. Had too many kangaroo experiences in Australia to do a lot of riding in the dark, off road, and in particular on this bike the headlight beam pattern isn't that good for such a task. I haven't done it in a few years, but I used to do long distance bicycle riding, like 400+ miles in 2 days. I also MTB and spend a lot of time riding at night here since it's dark, and a lot of my riding was generalized trail riding since we have lots of trails here.
I'm not generally a fan of trail riding at night unless the riding is just slow, annoying riding that isn't that technical or dangerous, or it offsets a much harsher penalty. 15-20 mph puttering over good sightline doubletrack / forest roads that's not technical but also can't be ridden fast is pretty much perfect riding conditions for night time. Technical singletrack or shale the size of dinner plates (CT125 doing the TAT over Engineer's Pass) is pretty much the worst case scenario.
- You need better lighting, with a different beam angle. Seeing to the sides and above you matters more. Without this, riding tends to be more dangerous and much, much slower.
- You fatigue faster as a rider, because you're physically more stressed trying to process the same task with less information, particularly if you are unfamiliar with the trail. Our subconscious does a lot of processing for us and we're largely robbed of that during night riding, which makes it exciting, but also exhausting.
- You miss visual cues that would otherwise be obvious during the day, particularly without adequate lighting - night time vision is less color oriented, so colorful signs or visual cues aren't as obvious. Sometimes this is just inconvenient, like navigation or tourism, but sometimes it's also inconvenient, like the kind of problem where you get a flat tire because you didn't see the hazard, or a broken collarbone and everything takes longer because they can't see sh*t either.
- You might have incomplete information when needing to go off route for any reason. An example was out near Quincy, WA I had to ride through a quarry that had moved some of the roadways and required some hike-a-bike to get around there. We started in the dark, and were thinking we'd have to carry our fully loaded bicycles up a sandy 40 degree incline, something I'd done before. After the daylight hit enough, we found that backtracking a quarter mile would allow us to ride up an unpaved roadway instead.
- You miss out sight seeing of things that are awesome if you don't know to specifically look for it, because your visual range is not that far. I've done multiple rides where you could feel the cold air from the lake or ocean, but you couldn't actually see it.
- If you start early enough, you can also put yourself into the logistical problem situation of arriving at a necessary checkpoint while no resources are available. For example, a need for food, but everything closes at 8pm. I learned this lesson the hard way at Castle Rock, WA, and you try very hard to only make that mistake once.
- Some equipment, such as Cuban fiber, does not like being stored wet, and typically such equipment will be wet from the previous night's dew.
There are some substantial advantages though. The short version of this is if dividing the world into trail and non-trail, all the non-trail tasks can be done during night hours to maximize trail riding hours during the day:
- You can hit the roadways early, and instead of riding the trails in darkness, you end up riding roadways in darkness and arriving at trailheads right as nautical twilight hits. A brief stop for food, drink, rest, refueling and checking gear, and the conditions will be light enough to have all the benefits of daytime trail riding, but you were able to get those extra miles in. Chipping away at those moments really makes a big difference on the right kind of route.
- There's a pretty large portion of multiday riding that's not riding. Generalized logistics such as swapping SD cards in GoPro's, making sure batteries get charged, adjusting and lubricating chains, etc. I'm the sort of person where at the end of a ride, I will be fatigued enough to start making mistakes and be frustrated by it. However, I also wake up early, so it becomes part of my pre-dawn inspection checks to go through those things and address them. If you wake up at 4am and sunrise is at 5:30a, and you have to adjust your chain and do an oil change, provided you have adequate lighting you're going to be ready to go as soon as sunrise is there.
- When an insomniac and a regular person travel together, or even an early riser and a late riser, provided they align enough the earliest riser can complete joint morning tasks and shortcut some of the difficulty faced by the late riser. I have a friend named Dave, we used to adventure a lot together - he's a late riser, and he always appreciated waking up to a full, boiling kettle ready to make a morning coffee. Sometimes this also meant understanding where our next stop would be for food. Dave loved riding with me because he got to go with the flow, and effectively had a logistical butler on hand to help him make every decision.
I generally find myself sleeping well after riding the bike. Either it beats me up a little, or I find it relaxing. I haven't figured out which of those it is.
