September 30, 2022 • 25 mins
For most, it’s hard to fathom a 50-mile trek on foot across any terrain. But for YiOu Wang, a professional ultra-marathon runner, that kind of distance is all in a day’s work. It takes strategic training and relearning what it means to sleep and rest to prepare the body and mind for such exertion. Join host Anahad O’Connor to learn about the important role sleep plays in athletic training and competition. Plus, hear from neurophysiologist and brain coach to elite athletes, Louisa Nicola, as she explains how bodies in training at any level require more attention to sleep to maintain strong muscles and high performance.
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
There's no sleeping. I think that's usually the first question
I get is do get to sleep during ultra and
durance running events? And I'm like, no, not. If you're
trying to finish within the time limit, you run through
the night. Eo Wang is a competitive runner currently training
to compete this fall in the JFK fifty mile Ultra Marathon.
(00:29):
The race route spans over a thousand feet in elevation
along a mountainous and rocky section of the Appalachian Trail
at Horseshoes along the Cno Canal Towpath before ending in
historic Williamsport on the border of Maryland and West Virginia.
You know the best way to warm up start running.
(00:49):
While the varied terrain of this course makes for an
intense and arduous race, fifty miles is not the longest
distance for an ultra marathon, nor is it the longest
race Eo has ever competed in. But running long distances
is just part of the training program. These ultra endurance
athletes have to think about the whole picture. When you're
(01:10):
pushing your body to the max, you've got to think
about physical endurance, mental strength, nutrition, and most importantly sleep
in order for EO and runners like her to keep
going mile after mile. Sleep must be a part of
a winning plan. It can be almost four miles. Let's
go all the way to the top of the hill
to our little single track, do and come back. I'm
(01:34):
on a hut O'Connor, and this is chasing Sleep and
I heart radio production and partnership with Mattress Firm. As
a best selling author and a health calumnist with a
background in psychology, I've spent a lot of my time
studying and writing about sleep. Sleep is so essential to
our overall health, but often it's something we overlook and
(01:57):
it's the first thing we tend to neglect. In each
apios zode, we'll meet people living and working in extraordinary circumstances.
I want to learn how they rest and recharge their
bodies and minds to perform at their best, whether it's
an ultra marathon or training for their next one miles,
or an astronaut floating in space. Together, will explore the
(02:17):
unique challenges they encounter and uncover the universal secrets to
a RESTful night of sleep, no matter the environment or
occupational hazards. Today we'll look at the roles sleep plays
and training for intense and durance competitions, and the symbiotic
relationship between sleep and physical fitness. Plus we'll discover which
is more important an early morning workout or an extra
(02:40):
hour of sleep. My name is io Wan. I'm a
professional trail and ultra runner, and I'm also a teacher
throughout the summer. Eos starts the day with a cup
(03:01):
of coffee and then heads out to the trails for
a run. And she's not the only one. According to
a report from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association, about
fifty million Americans take part in running or jogging. After
competing in both the and Olympic marathon trials, Eo now
(03:22):
has her sights on becoming one of the top ten
women in a globally recognized ultra marathon. She has already
won the Lake Sonoma fifty mile race in and seen.
But people aren't born ultra marathons, and she wasn't even
always a runner. It took her some time to find
her rhythm in the sport. I started running when I
(03:43):
went to college at Might and I spectated my first
Boston Marathon as a freshman. I got so inspired by
what I was seeing happening in front of me. I
was not a runner at the time. I did not
think of myself as being athletic in any way, so
(04:04):
it was kind of a personal quest and challenge to
work on doing sports. And I kind of just got
hooked on the process of trying to run a bit
longer each day. And this idea that you know, working
towards a running goal means you have to be consistent
(04:25):
and train and develop fitness over time. So I remember
training for my first five k, and then once I
got the five k under my belt, moving to longer
and longer distances, eventually a half marathon and then a
full marathon, and I just kept going back for a
few years doing Boston, setting goals for myself of trying
(04:48):
to run a little bit faster each year. I ran
fast enough to qualify for the trials in and the marathon.
I've run a lot of fifty ks, fifty milers, and
hundred milers since then. Wait, did you just say one
hundred miles? Um? Yeah, there's a one hundred mile race
(05:12):
called the Western States hundred Miler, which claims to be
the oldest hundred miler around. Some people might dispute that
but I think officially on record, it is the oldest
organized hundred miler. It's a race that starts in Squaw
and ends in Auburn, California, and it just attracts a
(05:32):
very competitive field each year and has worked its way
to being one of the Marquis ultra endurance running events.
Her average finished time for one hundred mile race is
around twenty two hours, and she's running straight through that
entire time, no sleeping, just running for twenty two hours.
(05:52):
Think about your day yesterday and now imagine if you
were on your feet running almost every single minute of it.
If you're wondering how it's even humanly possible to do this,
trust me, I'm right there with you. So how exactly
do you manage to keep going and stay awake through
it all? Yeah? So the human body is a remarkable thing.
(06:14):
You know. Think about the times when you've had to
stay up really late if it's really important or really exciting,
or like, you know, you're stuck at a layover on
an airport, and you amaze yourself by how many hours
you can stay up without going to sleep. It's kind
of the same thing because you're running on like so
much adrenaline and like crazy stress hormones and like this
fight or flight response, and that carries you through for
(06:38):
a remarkably long time, for very long events. Right afterwards,
there is a point at which you tend to crash.
I would say it takes me a solid forty eight
hours to come down and like crash, and it's really
day two through seven after the race is when I
(07:00):
can't move. I'm just gonna lay in bed all day
or I want to Anyway. As someone who loves to
dig into the science and research of how our bodies work,
EO's training plan and her approach to sleep got me
thinking what role does sleep actually play on our physical
performance and how can we use sleep as a training
(07:22):
tool for strength and endurance competitions. I decided to call
up neurophysiologists and brain coach to elite athletes Louisa Nicola.
Not only is Louisa an expert on sleep as it
relates to athletic performance, but she was also once a
try athlete who competed at some of the highest levels. Hi,
(07:43):
I'm Louis and Nicola. I'm a ner, a physiologist and
brain coach to elite performance. I raised for Australia, I
qualified for Beijing and London, and I also went to
med school and I became obsessed with human brain and
I realized that during my training my coach ever spoke
to me about sleep. In fact, he was really against sleep.
(08:05):
He basically said, you should be training and you sleep
when you're dead. And I think a lot of people
were thinking that. And this was going back, you know before,
which is when I retired from triathlon, and I always
felt as though there had to be more to human performance.
There had to be more to performance on the field
and athletic performance than just training, training the body and
(08:28):
training the tactics and technical side. There had to be more,
and that's when I became obsessed with understanding human physiology.
She founded her company neuro Athletics and dedicated herself to
combining the science of neurology with athletic performance. Louisa knows
all about the importance of sleep for elite athletes like EO,
(08:49):
and explains that sleep will shift and change depending on
where someone is in her training. According to her, there
will be training periods where as much as twelve hours
of sleep is completely normal, so sleep should change throughout
your training schedule. So when we look at periodization again,
(09:10):
you're you've got a block of where you're just doing
a lot of build work, which is you're just building
on endurance and you're doing a lot and a lot
of long distance and hard hard work. This means that
the body, both the body and the brain needs a
lot more time to recuperate and regenerate, so sleeping. If
I knew this back then we'd need to adjust our
(09:33):
sleep schedules to be sleeping if we can a bit longer, okay,
Whereas if we are doing short bouts of intense work,
our sleep may not have to be as long. If
you think of Roger Federer or Lebron James, they are
both renowned for sleeping twelve hours a night. But when
you couple this with the amount of training that they do,
(09:57):
it makes sense that they're sleeping because they're working out
in you where from four to five hours a day,
so it makes sense. However, they don't sleep twelve hours
a night during their competition phases because they're not training,
they're just competing. So basically, the general rule is the
more activity exerted during the day, the longer and better
(10:17):
quality the sleep needs to be. So if a professional
basketball player is sleeping twelve hours a night, training for
four to five hours a day and that's their full
time job, what does training and recovery look like for
EO who's competing to run fifty plus miles and working
as an elementary school teacher during the day. I think
(10:41):
most of my running is constrained by work hours. Currently,
my ideal schedule would be sleep in until like seven
and then wake up, have coffee, rollout for run around
eight thirty and nine, be done around brunch time, have
an afternoon nap, maybe do an evening walk for like
(11:02):
active recovery or a double session. That's the dream of
like the absolute pro runner lifestyle. But during the school year,
I have to be at school at eight am, which
makes morning runs challenging, and that means I have to
get up at five am and get out running by
six am, be done by seven seven thirty, and then
(11:25):
get to school. I just become completely wiped out by
like ten am, and you're like, there's still four more
hours of school. So these days I tend to be
a little bit gentler on myself as far as when
I fit the run in. I know always that like
(11:46):
if I try to get up in the morning and
do it, I might be able to run a little
bit faster or get a bit more quality run in
the morning, but that means I am sacrificing my sleep,
because no matter how hard you try, it's really hard
to like go to bed at nine so you can
get up at five. I think what's key to preparing
(12:07):
for an ultra is this idea of training specific systems,
kind of a time on feet approach, where you go
into some of your long runs already tired from the
week of training that you did. I like to have
at least a couple of weekends where I am running
at least three hours Saturday and Sunday back to back,
(12:30):
and one of those might actually have faster efforts, harder
efforts in there, so that you get used to running
hard when you're tired. And it's kind of about fatigue
management because there's a lot of things that you can
get away with when you're running and racing for two
and a half to three hours versus like four to
(12:51):
seven hours. So EO very strategically spends about two to
three hours a day training and working to mimic the
fatigue she experience. This isn't a race, and we know
some of her races keep her awake for at least
twenty four hours, but what does she think about sleep
during training periods? It's essential in order to not get
(13:12):
injured and not burn out. Sleep is a great indicator
of your like overall well being, and also usually one
of the first signs of overtraining is a noticeable decline
in sleep quality and quantity. So you fall into this
(13:32):
vicious cycle where you are fatigued, but your body is
so hyped up on the stress hormones that you can't
actually get enough sleep. And so one of the early
signs that we need to be careful of is like,
if we notice that we're consistently sleeping poorly, it's definitely
(13:53):
a sign that we're on the road to getting overtrained,
which is this chronic state of lack of recovery for
your body when you are pushing your body through the
hardest weeks of training. A lot of times we as
(14:14):
athletes want to know, like what's the secret to performance?
And a lot of times the answers just get more
rest and get more recovery, Like nine of your gains
can be made if you just sleep more, we know
that sleep plays a major role in keeping our bodies
healthy and free of injuries during intense training and competition.
(14:39):
What can it help us run faster or further As
a your a physiologist, we had to go in and
do a lot of sleep studies. So we'd go into
a lab and with assesssipation maybe if they're having any
type of sleep disturbances. So it gives you a real
life picture of what sleep is. And it's very much
comprised of more than just putting your head on appeal
(15:00):
and waking up eight hours later if you're lucky. It's
very intricate and it houses a lot of physiology. So
we have four stages of sleep, and each stage is
very important. We've really got two main stages, which is
ram sleep and non rem sleep. But when we have
a look into these two stages, okay, when we look
(15:20):
at this non rem sleep stage, we have light sleep
and deep sleep, and this deep sleep stage it's really
stages three and four, so it happens towards the end
of the night. This deep sleep stage is really responsible
for the secretion of a lot of hormones such as
our growth hormone, and this is responsible for regeneration of
(15:42):
muscle tissue. Muscle protein synthesis happens during the stage, so
we get a more well rounded recovery. We see a
lot of players during the NBA playoffs, for example, not
being able to recover and a lot of them getting
sick because they have been deprived of sleep. When it
comes to ball sports such as the NBA, we see
(16:05):
that shooting accuracy isn't as high if you've deprived a
player of sleep, even at a mere two hours. So
if they've slept six hours compared to eight hours, they're
shooting accuracy is down by at least thirty and that
is huge because every single point matters. So if you're
taking a marathon runner, for example, you have deprived them
(16:26):
of sleep, they're gonna be more prone to injury, They're
gonna be more fatigued, and in fact, their rate of
perceived exertion is not going to be as high. There
was one wonderful study that was done actually on sleep
deprivation and endurance athletes. Show that the first thing that
happens is their ability to keep pushing is dampened. So
(16:47):
if they can usually run ten miles, let's just say
at ease if they've deprived themselves of sleep, they're probably
going to get to maybe the six or seven miles
and their mind is going to start playing games and
start saying, oh my, and I'm tired, I'm fatigued. I
don't want to go that far. You don't have to
go that far, just stopped, just go a bit slower.
And it's those mind games. And so that's incredibly important too.
(17:09):
And I realized that, Wow, if I only optimized my
sleep back when I was an elite athlete, or back
when I was training over thirty hours a week, and
if I had understood this, understood the science behind sleep,
then I probably would have been a better athlete. I
probably my last race, I came thirteenth, and I think
(17:31):
that if I knew what I knew back then like
what I know today, then maybe I would have come
on a podium, finished top three. We'll be right back
after a brief message from our partners at Mattress Firm,
(17:52):
and now back to chasing sleep. Now. I'm certainly no
elite runner, but I've albled in some five ks and
one or two ten ks too, and I generally try
to keep up an exercise routine. But learning about all
of the science that goes into sleep for training athletes
has me thinking a lot about my own workouts and
(18:13):
sleep habits. Sleep matters to our performance physically in a
race or at the gym, It's undeniable, But is that
the end of the relationship between sleep and athletic prowess?
In addition to all of this, is it possible that
I'm also sleeping better because I'm keeping up a regular
exercise routine too. We've all got this one thing humans
in common has called our human nervous system. Okay, it's
(18:36):
comprised of the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system.
And what happens is we want to be in both
the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system, and
training and exercising and physical activity is going to be
good for cardiovascular health, and it's going to be good
for overall sleep quality. If we're not training, it's definitely
(18:58):
not going to be good for the amount of hours
that we sleep at night. And there's also something called
sleep pressure that builds up during the day, and this
happens with me. I find that if I haven't exerted
the amount of energy, or I haven't gone out and
gotten sunlight. I find it hard to fall asleep that night.
I'm tossing, turning. It's like I haven't gotten rid of
(19:18):
a lot of the energy that I've got accumulated. So
physical activity during the day of any time is very
beneficial for sleep quality. Louisa says. We should also think
about the time of day you're working out so that
we can make the most of our sleep and avoid
interrupting our hormonal rhythms. The best time for training is
(19:39):
the furthest away from sleep as you can get. So
when we are training, when we wake up, we've got
this surge of cortisol, okay, and you really want to
go out and you want to do things. And that's
honestly the best time to train. Whether you're eating beforehand
or aftertown, I'm not talking about that, but the best
time to train is at least six hours away from sleep,
because what happens if you do train close to sleep,
(20:02):
You're going to have this increasing cortisol and as free
cortisol just roaming through your body. This happens for the
next two hours after exercise as well, and cortisol doesn't
help you sleep, it competes with the sleepiness hormones. So
this is going to prevent you from kind of relaxing
and settling your mind down and settling your body down
to get into sleep. So the best time to train
(20:23):
for sleep quality would be in the morning or mid morning.
And if you find yourself wavering between an extra hour
or so of sleep or getting up to hit the
trail or the gym some mornings, Louisa says, our heart
rate variability or HRV can be an important guide in
determining what our bodies need and what they're ready to
(20:45):
handle at any moment. Should you sacrifice sleep and train
or should you sacrifice training and sleep? And a really
good predictor of this is heart rate variability. Almost everybody
now who is training has access to a wearable and
wearable data, and if you look on this wearable data,
it comes up with this measurement every day and it's
called a heart rate variability. Oftentimes, we can wake up
(21:08):
every morning and we can feel a bit lethargic, okay,
and we may not feel good, and you look at
your HRV and maybe it's if it's usually at let's
just say for argument's sake, you peak at a hundred
every day, but you woke up today and it was fifty.
That would mean that your body isn't well rested and
your recovery index isn't that high. Therefore, the best thing
(21:32):
for you to do in terms of long term athletic
performance and in terms of overall health, the best thing
for you to do that day would it be to
go really easy and capitalize on sleep. Whereas if you
wake up and your HRV let's just say it's at
a hundred, or maybe it's at a hundred and ten,
and usually your baseline is a hundred, then you have
room to go through and do a bit of extra
(21:55):
hard work that day. And HRV is a really great
predictor of overall performance recovery. So that's how I would
judge them. So, if you are going out and you
really want to learn about your body, you really want
to learn about your own metrics and your own data,
the best thing to do would be to have a
look at your hr B and you know, predict it
that way. I think before the race, it's important to
(22:21):
not obsess about the night before, because it's really about
your two to three nights before the night before. Because
you know, we talked earlier about your body can go
for twenty four hours straight with no problem. So think
about it as like, say your race is Saturday, your
Thursday night sleep is going to get you through even
(22:43):
if you can't sleep Friday night. And a lot of people,
myself included, tend to not be able to sleep that
well the night before because you're often doing your last
minute preparation. You're nervous, you're thinking about the morning, and
the more you think about sleep, the less you're able
to sleep. And you often have to get up early
to you know, get to the race and do all
(23:04):
your pre race stuff anyway, So it's really the two
to three days before the night before the race that
are key. Eo has spent the last several years fine
tuning the way she runs and sleeps to maximize what
her body and mind can accomplish on race day, whether
it's a cup of coffee in the morning or sleep
(23:24):
cash that night. Eo says that consistency is key for
any level of running or fitness routine, even if you're
just getting started. I think my best piece of advice,
which just be two be consistent and establish a routine.
It's not about doing as much as you can all
(23:46):
at once, right at the start, because you will, you know,
burn out. I think it's about doing something every day
and sticking to that routine and also making sure that
you don't sacrifice things like recovery, nutrition, and sleep. There
(24:07):
are a lot of people who start a fitness journey
and they're like, Oh, I'm going to go to the
gym every day at five am in the morning before work. Like,
that's great if you're also able to get enough sleep
to like support that kind of schedule. If it's going
to be detrimental to you getting your sleep and you're
(24:28):
going to be drinking ten cups of coffee every day,
like maybe kind of rethink where that can fit in
your day, or maybe slides in later in the day,
maybe it slides in the middle of the day. Sleep
is really import that's all for this episode. Don't forget
(24:53):
to join me again next week when we learn about
how a journalist chases and finds healthy sleep through breaking
news and the tight headlines at the news cycle. Now
you're trying to unplug from showtime mode and you're trying
to tell your body work time is over and now
it's time to relax and unwind and go to sleep,
and your body is still in go mode. We want
(25:15):
to hear from you. Leave a rating or review for
our show on your podcast player of choice. You can
find me on Twitter at on a O'Connor. Until next time,
hoping you're living your best while sleeping your best. Chasing
Sleep is a production of I Heart Radio in partnership
with Mattress Firm. Our executive producer is Molly Sosha, our
(25:36):
EP of post is Matt Stillo, our producer is Sierra Kaiser,
and this show is hosted by an a Hot O'Connor
There's no sleeping. I think that's usually the first question
I get is do get to sleep during ultra and
durance running events? And I'm like, no, not. If you're
trying to finish within the time limit, you run through
the night. Eo Wang is a competitive runner currently training
to compete this fall in the JFK fifty mile Ultra Marathon.
(00:29):
The race route spans over a thousand feet in elevation
along a mountainous and rocky section of the Appalachian Trail
at Horseshoes along the Cno Canal Towpath before ending in
historic Williamsport on the border of Maryland and West Virginia.
You know the best way to warm up start running.
(00:49):
While the varied terrain of this course makes for an
intense and arduous race, fifty miles is not the longest
distance for an ultra marathon, nor is it the longest
race Eo has ever competed in. But running long distances
is just part of the training program. These ultra endurance
athletes have to think about the whole picture. When you're
(01:10):
pushing your body to the max, you've got to think
about physical endurance, mental strength, nutrition, and most importantly sleep
in order for EO and runners like her to keep
going mile after mile. Sleep must be a part of
a winning plan. It can be almost four miles. Let's
go all the way to the top of the hill
to our little single track, do and come back. I'm
(01:34):
on a hut O'Connor, and this is chasing Sleep and
I heart radio production and partnership with Mattress Firm. As
a best selling author and a health calumnist with a
background in psychology, I've spent a lot of my time
studying and writing about sleep. Sleep is so essential to
our overall health, but often it's something we overlook and
(01:57):
it's the first thing we tend to neglect. In each
apios zode, we'll meet people living and working in extraordinary circumstances.
I want to learn how they rest and recharge their
bodies and minds to perform at their best, whether it's
an ultra marathon or training for their next one miles,
or an astronaut floating in space. Together, will explore the
(02:17):
unique challenges they encounter and uncover the universal secrets to
a RESTful night of sleep, no matter the environment or
occupational hazards. Today we'll look at the roles sleep plays
and training for intense and durance competitions, and the symbiotic
relationship between sleep and physical fitness. Plus we'll discover which
is more important an early morning workout or an extra
(02:40):
hour of sleep. My name is io Wan. I'm a
professional trail and ultra runner, and I'm also a teacher
throughout the summer. Eos starts the day with a cup
(03:01):
of coffee and then heads out to the trails for
a run. And she's not the only one. According to
a report from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association, about
fifty million Americans take part in running or jogging. After
competing in both the and Olympic marathon trials, Eo now
(03:22):
has her sights on becoming one of the top ten
women in a globally recognized ultra marathon. She has already
won the Lake Sonoma fifty mile race in and seen.
But people aren't born ultra marathons, and she wasn't even
always a runner. It took her some time to find
her rhythm in the sport. I started running when I
(03:43):
went to college at Might and I spectated my first
Boston Marathon as a freshman. I got so inspired by
what I was seeing happening in front of me. I
was not a runner at the time. I did not
think of myself as being athletic in any way, so
(04:04):
it was kind of a personal quest and challenge to
work on doing sports. And I kind of just got
hooked on the process of trying to run a bit
longer each day. And this idea that you know, working
towards a running goal means you have to be consistent
(04:25):
and train and develop fitness over time. So I remember
training for my first five k, and then once I
got the five k under my belt, moving to longer
and longer distances, eventually a half marathon and then a
full marathon, and I just kept going back for a
few years doing Boston, setting goals for myself of trying
(04:48):
to run a little bit faster each year. I ran
fast enough to qualify for the trials in and the marathon.
I've run a lot of fifty ks, fifty milers, and
hundred milers since then. Wait, did you just say one
hundred miles? Um? Yeah, there's a one hundred mile race
(05:12):
called the Western States hundred Miler, which claims to be
the oldest hundred miler around. Some people might dispute that
but I think officially on record, it is the oldest
organized hundred miler. It's a race that starts in Squaw
and ends in Auburn, California, and it just attracts a
(05:32):
very competitive field each year and has worked its way
to being one of the Marquis ultra endurance running events.
Her average finished time for one hundred mile race is
around twenty two hours, and she's running straight through that
entire time, no sleeping, just running for twenty two hours.
(05:52):
Think about your day yesterday and now imagine if you
were on your feet running almost every single minute of it.
If you're wondering how it's even humanly possible to do this,
trust me, I'm right there with you. So how exactly
do you manage to keep going and stay awake through
it all? Yeah? So the human body is a remarkable thing.
(06:14):
You know. Think about the times when you've had to
stay up really late if it's really important or really exciting,
or like, you know, you're stuck at a layover on
an airport, and you amaze yourself by how many hours
you can stay up without going to sleep. It's kind
of the same thing because you're running on like so
much adrenaline and like crazy stress hormones and like this
fight or flight response, and that carries you through for
(06:38):
a remarkably long time, for very long events. Right afterwards,
there is a point at which you tend to crash.
I would say it takes me a solid forty eight
hours to come down and like crash, and it's really
day two through seven after the race is when I
(07:00):
can't move. I'm just gonna lay in bed all day
or I want to Anyway. As someone who loves to
dig into the science and research of how our bodies work,
EO's training plan and her approach to sleep got me
thinking what role does sleep actually play on our physical
performance and how can we use sleep as a training
(07:22):
tool for strength and endurance competitions. I decided to call
up neurophysiologists and brain coach to elite athletes Louisa Nicola.
Not only is Louisa an expert on sleep as it
relates to athletic performance, but she was also once a
try athlete who competed at some of the highest levels. Hi,
(07:43):
I'm Louis and Nicola. I'm a ner, a physiologist and
brain coach to elite performance. I raised for Australia, I
qualified for Beijing and London, and I also went to
med school and I became obsessed with human brain and
I realized that during my training my coach ever spoke
to me about sleep. In fact, he was really against sleep.
(08:05):
He basically said, you should be training and you sleep
when you're dead. And I think a lot of people
were thinking that. And this was going back, you know before,
which is when I retired from triathlon, and I always
felt as though there had to be more to human performance.
There had to be more to performance on the field
and athletic performance than just training, training the body and
(08:28):
training the tactics and technical side. There had to be more,
and that's when I became obsessed with understanding human physiology.
She founded her company neuro Athletics and dedicated herself to
combining the science of neurology with athletic performance. Louisa knows
all about the importance of sleep for elite athletes like EO,
(08:49):
and explains that sleep will shift and change depending on
where someone is in her training. According to her, there
will be training periods where as much as twelve hours
of sleep is completely normal, so sleep should change throughout
your training schedule. So when we look at periodization again,
(09:10):
you're you've got a block of where you're just doing
a lot of build work, which is you're just building
on endurance and you're doing a lot and a lot
of long distance and hard hard work. This means that
the body, both the body and the brain needs a
lot more time to recuperate and regenerate, so sleeping. If
I knew this back then we'd need to adjust our
(09:33):
sleep schedules to be sleeping if we can a bit longer, okay,
Whereas if we are doing short bouts of intense work,
our sleep may not have to be as long. If
you think of Roger Federer or Lebron James, they are
both renowned for sleeping twelve hours a night. But when
you couple this with the amount of training that they do,
(09:57):
it makes sense that they're sleeping because they're working out
in you where from four to five hours a day,
so it makes sense. However, they don't sleep twelve hours
a night during their competition phases because they're not training,
they're just competing. So basically, the general rule is the
more activity exerted during the day, the longer and better
(10:17):
quality the sleep needs to be. So if a professional
basketball player is sleeping twelve hours a night, training for
four to five hours a day and that's their full
time job, what does training and recovery look like for
EO who's competing to run fifty plus miles and working
as an elementary school teacher during the day. I think
(10:41):
most of my running is constrained by work hours. Currently,
my ideal schedule would be sleep in until like seven
and then wake up, have coffee, rollout for run around
eight thirty and nine, be done around brunch time, have
an afternoon nap, maybe do an evening walk for like
(11:02):
active recovery or a double session. That's the dream of
like the absolute pro runner lifestyle. But during the school year,
I have to be at school at eight am, which
makes morning runs challenging, and that means I have to
get up at five am and get out running by
six am, be done by seven seven thirty, and then
(11:25):
get to school. I just become completely wiped out by
like ten am, and you're like, there's still four more
hours of school. So these days I tend to be
a little bit gentler on myself as far as when
I fit the run in. I know always that like
(11:46):
if I try to get up in the morning and
do it, I might be able to run a little
bit faster or get a bit more quality run in
the morning, but that means I am sacrificing my sleep,
because no matter how hard you try, it's really hard
to like go to bed at nine so you can
get up at five. I think what's key to preparing
(12:07):
for an ultra is this idea of training specific systems,
kind of a time on feet approach, where you go
into some of your long runs already tired from the
week of training that you did. I like to have
at least a couple of weekends where I am running
at least three hours Saturday and Sunday back to back,
(12:30):
and one of those might actually have faster efforts, harder
efforts in there, so that you get used to running
hard when you're tired. And it's kind of about fatigue
management because there's a lot of things that you can
get away with when you're running and racing for two
and a half to three hours versus like four to
(12:51):
seven hours. So EO very strategically spends about two to
three hours a day training and working to mimic the
fatigue she experience. This isn't a race, and we know
some of her races keep her awake for at least
twenty four hours, but what does she think about sleep
during training periods? It's essential in order to not get
(13:12):
injured and not burn out. Sleep is a great indicator
of your like overall well being, and also usually one
of the first signs of overtraining is a noticeable decline
in sleep quality and quantity. So you fall into this
(13:32):
vicious cycle where you are fatigued, but your body is
so hyped up on the stress hormones that you can't
actually get enough sleep. And so one of the early
signs that we need to be careful of is like,
if we notice that we're consistently sleeping poorly, it's definitely
(13:53):
a sign that we're on the road to getting overtrained,
which is this chronic state of lack of recovery for
your body when you are pushing your body through the
hardest weeks of training. A lot of times we as
(14:14):
athletes want to know, like what's the secret to performance?
And a lot of times the answers just get more
rest and get more recovery, Like nine of your gains
can be made if you just sleep more, we know
that sleep plays a major role in keeping our bodies
healthy and free of injuries during intense training and competition.
(14:39):
What can it help us run faster or further As
a your a physiologist, we had to go in and
do a lot of sleep studies. So we'd go into
a lab and with assesssipation maybe if they're having any
type of sleep disturbances. So it gives you a real
life picture of what sleep is. And it's very much
comprised of more than just putting your head on appeal
(15:00):
and waking up eight hours later if you're lucky. It's
very intricate and it houses a lot of physiology. So
we have four stages of sleep, and each stage is
very important. We've really got two main stages, which is
ram sleep and non rem sleep. But when we have
a look into these two stages, okay, when we look
(15:20):
at this non rem sleep stage, we have light sleep
and deep sleep, and this deep sleep stage it's really
stages three and four, so it happens towards the end
of the night. This deep sleep stage is really responsible
for the secretion of a lot of hormones such as
our growth hormone, and this is responsible for regeneration of
(15:42):
muscle tissue. Muscle protein synthesis happens during the stage, so
we get a more well rounded recovery. We see a
lot of players during the NBA playoffs, for example, not
being able to recover and a lot of them getting
sick because they have been deprived of sleep. When it
comes to ball sports such as the NBA, we see
(16:05):
that shooting accuracy isn't as high if you've deprived a
player of sleep, even at a mere two hours. So
if they've slept six hours compared to eight hours, they're
shooting accuracy is down by at least thirty and that
is huge because every single point matters. So if you're
taking a marathon runner, for example, you have deprived them
(16:26):
of sleep, they're gonna be more prone to injury, They're
gonna be more fatigued, and in fact, their rate of
perceived exertion is not going to be as high. There
was one wonderful study that was done actually on sleep
deprivation and endurance athletes. Show that the first thing that
happens is their ability to keep pushing is dampened. So
(16:47):
if they can usually run ten miles, let's just say
at ease if they've deprived themselves of sleep, they're probably
going to get to maybe the six or seven miles
and their mind is going to start playing games and
start saying, oh my, and I'm tired, I'm fatigued. I
don't want to go that far. You don't have to
go that far, just stopped, just go a bit slower.
And it's those mind games. And so that's incredibly important too.
(17:09):
And I realized that, Wow, if I only optimized my
sleep back when I was an elite athlete, or back
when I was training over thirty hours a week, and
if I had understood this, understood the science behind sleep,
then I probably would have been a better athlete. I
probably my last race, I came thirteenth, and I think
(17:31):
that if I knew what I knew back then like
what I know today, then maybe I would have come
on a podium, finished top three. We'll be right back
after a brief message from our partners at Mattress Firm,
(17:52):
and now back to chasing sleep. Now. I'm certainly no
elite runner, but I've albled in some five ks and
one or two ten ks too, and I generally try
to keep up an exercise routine. But learning about all
of the science that goes into sleep for training athletes
has me thinking a lot about my own workouts and
(18:13):
sleep habits. Sleep matters to our performance physically in a
race or at the gym, It's undeniable, But is that
the end of the relationship between sleep and athletic prowess?
In addition to all of this, is it possible that
I'm also sleeping better because I'm keeping up a regular
exercise routine too. We've all got this one thing humans
in common has called our human nervous system. Okay, it's
(18:36):
comprised of the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system.
And what happens is we want to be in both
the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system, and
training and exercising and physical activity is going to be
good for cardiovascular health, and it's going to be good
for overall sleep quality. If we're not training, it's definitely
(18:58):
not going to be good for the amount of hours
that we sleep at night. And there's also something called
sleep pressure that builds up during the day, and this
happens with me. I find that if I haven't exerted
the amount of energy, or I haven't gone out and
gotten sunlight. I find it hard to fall asleep that night.
I'm tossing, turning. It's like I haven't gotten rid of
(19:18):
a lot of the energy that I've got accumulated. So
physical activity during the day of any time is very
beneficial for sleep quality. Louisa says. We should also think
about the time of day you're working out so that
we can make the most of our sleep and avoid
interrupting our hormonal rhythms. The best time for training is
(19:39):
the furthest away from sleep as you can get. So
when we are training, when we wake up, we've got
this surge of cortisol, okay, and you really want to
go out and you want to do things. And that's
honestly the best time to train. Whether you're eating beforehand
or aftertown, I'm not talking about that, but the best
time to train is at least six hours away from sleep,
because what happens if you do train close to sleep,
(20:02):
You're going to have this increasing cortisol and as free
cortisol just roaming through your body. This happens for the
next two hours after exercise as well, and cortisol doesn't
help you sleep, it competes with the sleepiness hormones. So
this is going to prevent you from kind of relaxing
and settling your mind down and settling your body down
to get into sleep. So the best time to train
(20:23):
for sleep quality would be in the morning or mid morning.
And if you find yourself wavering between an extra hour
or so of sleep or getting up to hit the
trail or the gym some mornings, Louisa says, our heart
rate variability or HRV can be an important guide in
determining what our bodies need and what they're ready to
(20:45):
handle at any moment. Should you sacrifice sleep and train
or should you sacrifice training and sleep? And a really
good predictor of this is heart rate variability. Almost everybody
now who is training has access to a wearable and
wearable data, and if you look on this wearable data,
it comes up with this measurement every day and it's
called a heart rate variability. Oftentimes, we can wake up
(21:08):
every morning and we can feel a bit lethargic, okay,
and we may not feel good, and you look at
your HRV and maybe it's if it's usually at let's
just say for argument's sake, you peak at a hundred
every day, but you woke up today and it was fifty.
That would mean that your body isn't well rested and
your recovery index isn't that high. Therefore, the best thing
(21:32):
for you to do in terms of long term athletic
performance and in terms of overall health, the best thing
for you to do that day would it be to
go really easy and capitalize on sleep. Whereas if you
wake up and your HRV let's just say it's at
a hundred, or maybe it's at a hundred and ten,
and usually your baseline is a hundred, then you have
room to go through and do a bit of extra
(21:55):
hard work that day. And HRV is a really great
predictor of overall performance recovery. So that's how I would
judge them. So, if you are going out and you
really want to learn about your body, you really want
to learn about your own metrics and your own data,
the best thing to do would be to have a
look at your hr B and you know, predict it
that way. I think before the race, it's important to
(22:21):
not obsess about the night before, because it's really about
your two to three nights before the night before. Because
you know, we talked earlier about your body can go
for twenty four hours straight with no problem. So think
about it as like, say your race is Saturday, your
Thursday night sleep is going to get you through even
(22:43):
if you can't sleep Friday night. And a lot of people,
myself included, tend to not be able to sleep that
well the night before because you're often doing your last
minute preparation. You're nervous, you're thinking about the morning, and
the more you think about sleep, the less you're able
to sleep. And you often have to get up early
to you know, get to the race and do all
(23:04):
your pre race stuff anyway, So it's really the two
to three days before the night before the race that
are key. Eo has spent the last several years fine
tuning the way she runs and sleeps to maximize what
her body and mind can accomplish on race day, whether
it's a cup of coffee in the morning or sleep
(23:24):
cash that night. Eo says that consistency is key for
any level of running or fitness routine, even if you're
just getting started. I think my best piece of advice,
which just be two be consistent and establish a routine.
It's not about doing as much as you can all
(23:46):
at once, right at the start, because you will, you know,
burn out. I think it's about doing something every day
and sticking to that routine and also making sure that
you don't sacrifice things like recovery, nutrition, and sleep. There
(24:07):
are a lot of people who start a fitness journey
and they're like, Oh, I'm going to go to the
gym every day at five am in the morning before work. Like,
that's great if you're also able to get enough sleep
to like support that kind of schedule. If it's going
to be detrimental to you getting your sleep and you're
(24:28):
going to be drinking ten cups of coffee every day,
like maybe kind of rethink where that can fit in
your day, or maybe slides in later in the day,
maybe it slides in the middle of the day. Sleep
is really import that's all for this episode. Don't forget
(24:53):
to join me again next week when we learn about
how a journalist chases and finds healthy sleep through breaking
news and the tight headlines at the news cycle. Now
you're trying to unplug from showtime mode and you're trying
to tell your body work time is over and now
it's time to relax and unwind and go to sleep,
and your body is still in go mode. We want
(25:15):
to hear from you. Leave a rating or review for
our show on your podcast player of choice. You can
find me on Twitter at on a O'Connor. Until next time,
hoping you're living your best while sleeping your best. Chasing
Sleep is a production of I Heart Radio in partnership
with Mattress Firm. Our executive producer is Molly Sosha, our
(25:36):
EP of post is Matt Stillo, our producer is Sierra Kaiser,
and this show is hosted by an a Hot O'Connor
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