There's no sleeping.
I think that's usually the first question I get is do you get to sleep during ultra 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. The race route spans over one thousand feet in elevation along a mountainous and rocky section of the Appalachian Trail. It 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.
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 raised 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 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 to go all the way to the top of the hill to our little single attack book and come back.
I'm Anahad O'Connor and this is Chasing Sleep and iHeartRadio production in partnership with Mattress Firm. As a best selling author and a health columnist with the 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 it's the first thing we tend to neglect. In each episod, 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 hundred miles, or an astronaut floating in space. Together, we'll explore the 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 intents, endurance 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 hour of sleep.
My name is Eo Wang. I'm a professional trail and ultrarunner, and I'm also a.
Teacher throughout the summer.
Eos darts the day with a cup of coffee and then heads out to the trails for a run. And she's not the only one. According to a twenty twenty report from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association, about fifty million Americans take part in running or jogging.
After competing in both the twenty twelve and twenty twenty.
Olympic Marathon trials, Eo now 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 twenty sixteen and twenty seventeen. But people aren't born ultra marathoners, 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 went to college at MIT, 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 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 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 to run a little.
Bit faster each year.
I ran fast enough to qualify for the trials in twenty twelve in the marathon. I've run a lot of fifty k, fifty milers, and one hundred milers since then.
Wait, did you just say one hundred miles.
Yeah, there's a one hundred mile race 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 very competitive field each year and has worked its way to being one of the marquee 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. 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. 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 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 of solid forty eight hours to come down and like crash. And it's really day two through seven after the race is when I 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 in our physical performance and how can we use sleep as a training tool for strength and endurance competitions. I decided to call up neurophysiologist 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 triathlete who competed at some of the highest levels.
Hi, I'm Louisa Nicola. I'm a neurophysiologist and brain coach to elite performers. 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 spoke to me about sleep. In fact, he was really against sleep. 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 twenty twelve, 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 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 Neuroathletics in twenty sixteen and dedicated herself to combining the science of neurology with athletic performance. Luisa knows all about the importance of sleep for elite athletes like EO, and explains that sleep will shift and change depending on where someone is in her training. According to her, there will be training periods whereas much as twelve hours of sleep is completely normal.
So sleep should change throughout your training schedule. So when we look at periodization, Okay, 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 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, it makes sense that they're sleeping because they're working out anywhere 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 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 most of my running is constrained by work hours. Currently, my ideal schedule would be sleeping till like seven and then wake up, have coffee, roll out for run around eight thirty and nine, be done around brunch time, have an afternoon nap, maybe do an evening walk for like 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 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 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 go to bed at nine, so you can get
up at five. I think what's key to preparing 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 weekends where I am running at least three hours Saturday and Sunday back to back, 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 seven hours.
So EO very strategically spends about two to three hours a day training and working to mimic the fatigue she experience. 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 injured and not burn out. Sleep is a great indicator of your 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 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 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 athletes want to know what's the secret to performance, and a lot of times the answer is just get more rest and get more recovery, Like ninety percent 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, but can it help us run faster or further?
As a ne're a physiologist, we had to go in and do a lot of sleep studies. So we'd go into a lab and we'd assess apation 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 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 rem sleep and non rem sleep. But when we have a look into these two stages, okay, when we look 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 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 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, their shooting accuracy is down by at least thirty percent,
and that is huge because every single point matters. So if you're taking a marathon runner, for example, and you've deprived them of sleep, they're going to be more prone to injury, they're going to be more fatigued, and in fact, their rate of perceived exertion is not going to be as high. There's 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 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 god, I'm tired, I'm fatigued, I don't want to go that far. You don't have to go that far, just stop, just go a bit slower. And it's those mind games. And so that's incredibly important too.
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 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.
And now back to chasing sleep.
Now. I'm certainly no elite runner in some five k's and one or two ten K's two, 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 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. It's called our human nervous system. Okay, It's 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 kudiovascular health, and it's going to be good for overall
sleep quality. If we're not training, it's definitely 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, I'm turning. It's like I haven't gotten rid of a lot of
the energy that I've got accumulated. So physical activity during the day of any type 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 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 on alftand 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, you're going to have this increasing quartersol and as free quartersol just roaming through your body. This happens for the next two hours after exercise as well, and cortisole 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 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, Luisa says, our heart rate variability or HRV can be an important guide in determining what our bodies need and what they're ready to 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 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 one 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 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 be to go really easy and capitalize on sleep. Whereas if you wake up and your HRV let's just say it's at one hundred, or maybe it's at one hundred and ten, and usually your baseline is one hundred, then you have room to go through and do a bit
of extra 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're 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 HLB and you know, predict it that way.
I think before the race it's important to 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 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. You often have to get up early to you know, get to the race and do all 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 a sleep.
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 would just be to be consistent and establish a routine. It's not about doing as much as you can all 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 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 going to be drinking ten cups of coffee every day, like maybe kind of rethink where that can fit in your day, or maybe it slides in later in the day, maybe it slides in the middle of the day. Sleep is really important.
That's all for this episode.
Don't forget to join me again next week, when we learn about how a journalist chases and finds healthy sleep through breaking news and the type deadlines at the twenty four hour news cycle.
Now you're trying to unplug from showtime mode, and you're trying to tell your body worktime is over and now it's time to relax and unwind and go to sleep, and your body's still in go mode.
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Until next time, Hoping you're living your best while sleeping your best.
Chasing Sleep is.
A production of iHeartRadio in partnership with Mattress Firm. Our executive producer is Molly Sosha, our EP of post is Matt Stillo, our producer is Sierra Kaiser, and this show is hosted by Annahad O'Connor