Nuclear spins associated with the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center are useful resources for quantum information processing and quantum sensing, especially as quantum memories. They are also an emerging platform for constructing inertial sensors. The native nitrogen spin of the NV center can serve as a gyroscope using Ramsey interferometry protocols. The sensitivities of these nuclear-spin-based NV gyroscopes are limited by the phase coherence time of the nuclear spin, which is in turn limited by the T1 of the NV center’s electron spin. There is an active research effort to decouple the nuclear spin from the electron spin and other sources of decoherence to extend the phase coherence time past the NV center electron T1. However, this presents an associated challenge – how to readout of the nuclear spin ensemble if the electronic spins have relaxed into a thermal state. We introduce an optical repump pulse to repolarize electron spins from an artificial thermal state and investigate its effect on the readout of nuclear spins in this regime. We find for ensemble-based sensors, our readout protocol has around a sixfold improvement in sensitivity around the excited state level anti crossing (ESLAC) at 500 G compared to low fields (200 G), despite the presence of deleterious spin flip-flop dynamics in the excited state. Our results highlight how ESLAC dynamics can benefit inertial sensing and other sensing applications involving nuclear quantum memories.