Sleep Strategies for Ultramarathon with Borja Martinez Gonzalez | Koopcast Episode 133

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your humble host coach Jason Koop and this episode of the podcast is being brought to you out of my mobile recording studio otherwise known as my adventure van whose proper name is mobile base camp i'm sitting here in truckee california just in advance of the 2022 western states 100 where i'm ready to support a number of athletes that we've got in the race but that is neither here nor there because on the podcast today we are talking with borgia martinez gonzalez who is just finishing up his PhD work at the university of kent and it is all about how athletes sleep in races that are longer than 100 miles and in particular he followed a group of athletes around the spine race and saw what they actually did from a practical perspective in terms of how much and when did they actually sleep and i wanted to pick borgia's brain on how we can use this information coupled with what we know about sleep restriction and sleep deprivation to design strategies for athletes that are participating in races like the tour de jaunt or the triple crown of 200s or even the cocodona 250 next year so for any of you athletes that are considering those races

listen up because i think one of the things that you will find very valuable is that you really do have to individualize your sleep strategy depending upon the duration that you expect your race to take and i am not going to spoil it any more than that so i'm going to get right out of the way here is my conversation with borgia martinez gonzalez all about when and how much to sleep during ultra marathons i want to know just so the listeners can kind of get to know you a little bit more is how did you get involved in this in the first place like what was what's the origin story behind you trying to trying to figure all this stuff out the short answer i said by chance is like i do usually doing like explaining your own experience for students because usually here in italy i also teach physiology for master's students like more lab based like vo2 max lactate efficiency strength and conditioning i'm a loved guy in that sense and usually i recall my experience because i was on the other side not long time ago and what i found also during my career was like i was not motivated i was i did sports science i did a degree in sports science by chance i was it was not my plan i didn't know sports science and over the time it's like universities are different around the world also the person have

different maturity levels i went through the university was not the best student i was good enough to pass to just like do what is required and then after the degree i well before the degree i i was teaching like sports to kids like in spain it's like kind of the role of let's say like a sports instructor that we go to the schools after the classes and then over the time i realized that all that experience i had helped me to be where i am right now because when i started my degree i said okay i want to be the strength and conditioning coach of real madrid in football i used to play football when i finished my degree i hate football it's like it was like i was not following football at all and then i it was not i was not a researcher my contact with research i always do the same it's like i saw like a view to max once in five years of my degree like in the physiology lab once it's like when i finished my degree i was coaching triathlon and that was probably one of the changing points or the tipping points it's like oh hold on a minute i'm interested in this i'm motivated to do research so what what are my chances i took i had some money saved and said okay fair i mean if we tell the truth is like i did one year in the u.s in southeast state um southeast state missouri university i was a change student for one year and that was a the dream for us for someone coming from sports is like in the u.s everything is bigger everything

is better in terms of sports and i was hooked by that it's like i want to go back to the u.s and do my masters here but my friends in europe said why do you go to the uk and do the masters it's close to home so i visit them in actually in scotland and edinburgh and i saw the facilities and i said look maybe it's a good idea instead of going to the u.s to stay close to spain be to going to the uk to the masters so by chance and i have to say that when i apply for my masters ken was not my first option i was accepted in edinburgh first but then i don't know it was like that on the following day i've got the letter from kent and it makes a bit more sense to me and i ended up in kent but even like when i did the my plan was i was working with paratriathletes so i wanted to do something researching paratriathlon or or paralympic games i arrived in kent and they didn't have any module about it so i was lost completely lost so what i did in november when i had to choose my supervisor for the master's thesis i said okay let's go to the website and see who's the director of research and i checked and said oh this is italian professor samuel marcora so i booked an appointment with him knock on his door i introduced myself he probably catch up my spanish accent i said ah are you spanish okay let's go have a coffee we had a coffee we chat about life about physiology and said look i'm very

busy but maybe i can supervise your your master's thesis if you bring me like an interesting proposal and here i am like seven years that's hilarious that's hilarious to your original question sorry how did i end up in ultra and sleep by chance one day i was in the hallway and samuel said oh i've got this uh interesting psd proposal have a look at it i look at it and always like uh like the mountains it's like i used before i did the master's i i was doing like sports instructor like in a camp during the summers in the mountains in the in the middle of spain let's say so i was doing mountain biking climbing hiking and i was always in love with the mountains when i when i saw the topic i said this is a nice way to go back to what i really love it's like i love to be in the mountains well as you know what i was just going to say as you know kent is killing it i mean you guys are producing such great research out of there uh over the last several years that i i can't even imagine the brain trust that has gone through sam's department and sam's lab and you're you're a big part of that so i want to kind of narrow this down to what you were specifically studying during uh uh during your PhD work and you already alluded to um you already alluded to the opportunity but i want to kind of turn the turn turn the floor over to you what was the construct of the of the actual research

design and then i want to discuss the main findings from it and then use this coaching hat that you have to extrapolate that to how we can actually you how we could actually use that information in an ultra marathon setup so describe to the users or to the listeners what you were actually looking at during your PhD work and and and what the results look like the main idea was okay we know i mean in my in my mind i think what uh the the starting point was this paper about ultra trade du mont blanc where they analyzed the sleep and they found that the less you sleep the better your race performance is and that probably ring a bell rang a bell in samuel's mind and said okay but what happens in longer events so the main main point that he made to me because he knows me is like i'm probably you as well it's like i jump from one topic to the next one i need like to have some kind of pathway and he said okay focus focus here look for something longer than 100 miles i'm not interested because the research has been done it's like we need something noble so the first thing i had to do was to look for races not very far away where we can do research and the the first question was like okay how do they sleep

during these events because that was also like an interesting point for me as a researcher because you are educated from the lab to the field but this from the first minute it was completely upside down like no i got the feeling that first i should go to the field observe how do they sleep and then see what we can do so that's this that's that's the start of of the first study we did we did we run a couple of field studies in the spine race in december no sorry in january which is a an ultra winter ultra marathon that goes through the pennant way in the in the uk and it ends in the scottish at the scottish borders is brutal because it's a you can imagine the weather conditions yeah and um we were lucky because we had these devices which are like a watch but they are medical great watches where you can accurately measure sleep and sleep efficiency so these are watches that are coming from a sleep unit and we had the opportunity to to get them and we were crazy enough to think that we can give those to the athletes and recover them in scotland and then see if we've got the data apart from that from because i think i'm going through that study now um first logistically speaking

it was a challenge because so you have so you're you're using you're using the spine race yeah to look at what how athletes are trying what athletes are doing from a sleep perspective in in actual reality and then you're using you're using that to like come up with how to actually combat that or suggestions to actually like combat that based on the results essentially the idea was to study how athletes sleep during the spine race it's like how many hours how's the sleep quality when do they sleep how many times do they sleep to put this into context for the listeners because i've got primarily a u.s audience the spine race is really hard can describe what like how long it was taking most of the people that you were studying the cut of time if i remember well it's seven days it's 168 hours and the spine is a 268 miles if i remember well it's around 520 kilometers right i can check uh but it's um it's a one-week race it's like most of the i think the the record is around 86 hours something like that yeah so i just want to i just wanted to paint the picture to the listeners that it's several that it's several days right you can't just push

through without sleep it's non-stop so can you broadly describe the strategies that people were deploying in terms of when they were sleeping how much they were sleeping and then the quality of the sleep that they were getting and then we can kind of backtrack that to who was performing better so the first thing um was a i would say most of the people they finished in a five in a range of four to six days okay like we had some good performance not not top performance and we had some of the last finishers yeah um what we found is that the first night nobody sleeps yeah and i'm trying to because i don't want to sound like oh this is science and the first thing let's keep in mind that it was observational so i was there and usually it was challenging to be there because you know how ultra they start very close and then over time people will spread out and you will have people 100 miles three days apart exactly and i was that was struggling the first i remember the first the first edition and i was like wow like it's challenging because also for us it was something new so i was on my own i'm i was lucky that i had the volunteers and i could like ask for help but it was my job on my own

for one week not sleeping some days like traveling you're almost your participant at that point yeah i was so i was joking the participants is like sometimes i get less sleep than you guys because i need to be always uh on on the road the first night only a few of them had some sleep okay so observation number one is very few people sleep on the first night yeah which okay leads to the next question is like why what why is the reason and the good part of being during the races is not very scientific or or let's say top scientific options but you speak to them it's like okay why why why you don't stop on the first checkpoint to sleep and most of them they said look the first checkpoint the first night is is a hell it's a mess it's chaos why because you've got people that they just joined the race thinking they could finish they it's so noisy it's it's so chaotic that people just prefer to carry on also excitement first night pragmatic right it's more pragmatic and based around the yeah i mean tour de janta is kind of the same way where you have some of the refugios that people want to sleep in that are very conducive to it and then other ones are just not because they're small they're chaotic you know it's so anyway it's the same deal so the so the why behind that is more pragmatic versus performance based i would say that's one of the questions that we we still have to answer and we would like

to answer i would like to be positive and say in the next few years it's like what is better to not sleep the first night or to have some sleep and then try to sleep samuel call it like a sleep pacing it's like what is the best sleep pacing strategy i had some chats with some uh athletes that they did all the races they also do ultra triathlons and i got like which is interesting for us it's like i never got the same answer and some of them they said you know i did the same ultra twice the first night i didn't sleep the second night i catch maybe half an hour one hour and i was feeling completely different but with with the results we had is with the the results we had is like the first time the participants had some sleep was after 24 hours at least i think it was 25.7 hours that was the first the first message so okay so that's in the in in your research right okay so they're going through the first night without sleep they're getting their first sleep after about 25 hours 26 hours yeah so we consider the spine the spine sorry to interrupt you the spine starts at 7 a.m it means that they catch some sleep on the following morning yeah and how long was that

sleep for the first night it actually i have to look at it because i don't have it like in my mind but which is probably the the most um the most important part for your listeners is like okay how many hours of sleep shall i get on the first point i can give you the total times because i cannot i need to go in that case i need to go through my thesis sorry i didn't have like any outline where i could check that quickly but um in total they had yeah 24.6 was the hours before the first sleep about let's say and uh so they as an average they sleep 11 hours in six episodes so it's less than two hours like okay then whenever probably in the next few months this is published and is available you can find exactly how much time they slept per sleep about because that's one of the other things is like it's a group of people so it doesn't mean that everybody went to bed after 24 hours like some of them they catch some sleep after 36 hours so this is what i this is kind of what i find interesting and i think you're starting to see this in the field after that first bout of sleep did you find that most of their strategies

diverged in terms of when they were taking their next sleep and for how long for or was it rather rather homogenous in the group i would say it's not going to be a surprise but my personal opinion is you plan your sleep based on the checkpoints and your speed it's like you have you already had a plan and it's like obviously in theory you may have more than one plan because things can go wrong and then you may have to change everything and um it's quite important for people that are participating for the first time because people and we had people that it was maybe the fifth or the sixth time that they were trying it you have that feedback which is crucial and that's why i was surprised because i was not expecting that at all coming from my background that the longest race i did was a marathon and you never trained you never had like a longer run covering a marathon while these guys they do they do recognition during maybe the summer and they do the the legs and i was wondering why why do you want to put yourself through this and then i realized that's actually a smart idea because then you've got the feedback okay things will change because of sleep deprivation because it's winter snow and everything but having that feedback and maybe remember that oh after this uh town there is a very nice village on the left that may help you going back to sleep i think is that it's a very similar

construction it's like you want to sleep always inside because it's winter and it's the uk so doing some sleep outside this is challenging i know i've got funny stories on i can like you can't imagine people trying to sleep anywhere that is not quite cold and trying to find any place to sleep i think it's part of the rules that you cannot go inside the house but maybe you can stay outside but most of the people they they plan to sleep at the checkpoints okay um let's let's kind of move this into the more practical piece of it because i want to draw on the the work that you not only did during your PhD thesis but also the work that your lab is doing as a whole and for the listeners i had a podcast just recently with one of your uh with one of your colleagues uh chiara on the same uh on the same topic when you're advising people that are going through these multi-day events and let's take the spine race out of it since it's so since it's mainly bordered by the pragmatic aspects of you have to sleep during the checkpoints and it's winter and you can't take trail naps and things like that is there a general construction that you can describe that you would advise athletes to do

that are participating in races that are going to take four five six seven days in terms of when they should um when they should take their sleep and for how long for is there any way that you could provide just like like like a basic umbrella for what that advice would look like i think you're going to kill me because for that i prefer to answer with tortoise jams which is another but i can also answer for the spine but for tortoise jams the main reason why i mention it is because we did some consultancy for two so well two general i don't know actually the military rank they actually hold but at that time they were not soldiers and we got in they got in touch with us because they want to finish tortoise jams and we took it as a pilot study because we knew logistically speaking how hard was the spine and we had the opportunity to do the same in tortoise jams so we took this as a challenge and we spent a couple of months like monitoring training testing these two these two person one was five kilometers far away to finish tortoise jams when he got an injury and he couldn't finish and the other one was completely new to ultra the longest distance he covered was a half marathon so as i think uh also the listeners can get an idea that we have challenges and um

what we did was to read the literature and we found that most of the ultra endurance runners they are doing something called a sleep extension or sleep banking which is in simple words is you try to sleep as much as possible before the event put it in this way it's like the cargo loading is like more or less the same concept it's like you try to catch some sleep so that first night in brackets it's easier because you have enough sleep if tomorrow i have to go and do like mont blanc and yesterday i slept for hours the chances that i will struggle at night are very high so that was the first advice and it's not it's not for sure no surprise for your listeners it's like before the event try to sleep as much as possible maybe also the day before take it easy but we know that is that's not easy i'm the first one like pre-competition anxiety is a thing so this is not a rule of thumb it's like you need to really really work through okay i want to sleep as much as possible but i really have to sleep i cannot be in bed you know watching netflix or something that's not it's going to help you to relax but it's not going to improve your sleep so that was the first advice they gave you gave them from a practical perspective i've used that sleep banking protocol and what i do is is i just do it for a week and say

stay in bed for 10 hours for a week before the race every single night you know for one week before the event and then just call it good i realize that there are like practical things around that people can't do that from a you know just from a time from a timing perspective or whatever but we just try to get it as close as possible so that that's intervention number one right sleep banking and i think that's well studied in the literature i'll link up a couple of papers in the show notes that people can check out let's move on to the event itself so how are you advising people for both sleep and also the countermeasures like caffeine and things like that during the event itself i have to say that actually the athletes gave us the idea because uh this military environment they are top in logistics they had everything planned average speed when do i when am i going to arrive to this place and that for me was like oh actually that's a good idea and i saw that also during the spine you know at the checkpoint when i saw people with a checklist in their backpacks and say oh i need this this this and that or that's my routine i realized that one of the crucial parts of ultra is logistics and actually i love logistics in that sense it's like i i prefer to have things in in a right order also i call it like i'm lazy i prefer to have something i can check and i don't need to think because if i think it's very likely i will do a mistake so we started planning based on their

actual plan and we said okay the first night we're not gonna sleep and then that was the second time where i heard that the first night they don't sleep because the checkpoint is not that far away the first checkpoint if i remember well in tortesian is 50k away or let's say in a range of 50 to 100 so what i took from the experience of one of the athletes was like this point is a chaos it's like there is plenty of people even if you want to sleep you cannot sleep so the best strategy is to carry on and just to introduce caffeine now into the equation that's when we started okay then what do we do when we don't want to sleep or let's put it in this way what do we take when we want to stay awake to take caffeine and we started doing research on caffeine because at the same time is um something we know people use it during competition but there is not a lot of evidence especially in ultra because and that was one of the limitations of my observational study in the spine is how do you track the amount of caffeine an athlete takes during a one-week event yeah it's tricky because it's coming from so many sources yeah but let's put the consultancy hat back on right and we can peel apart the caffeine piece how how much if you were so i've done tour de jauntes before right i'm a 96 hour finisher or something like that um would you advise me or somebody

similar to me to go through the first night without sleep and then if i'm going to take caffeine to stay awake how how much because that's what the listeners kind of want to know like how much do they need to take and and what's the timing of that look like yeah i would say that if we have the answer for that it would be commercial in the sense of that that's a tricky point and that's why i'm very careful with my words because i cannot i cannot risk someone saying oh this person in jason's podcast said that if i take 300 milligrams of caffeine i can go first of all we we do it based on your body mass which is common sense it's like if i am 70 and you are 90 we probably need different doses um what we did was uh for the pilot we took a very pragmatic approach which is like i consider caffeine like a drug which means that you need different doses over time so we went through the literature and all the literature in caffeine and sleep deprivation as you mentioned in the previous podcast with kiara the only population that is crazy enough to volunteer for this kind of experiments are soldiers so we've got research done in the u.s with soldiers that they were taking every four hours 200 milligrams of caffeine so but let's now let's put the physiology or let's put the lab stuff into it it's like we know

from from research and systematic reviews and you know that you have already explained to the audience that a systematic review is a review of a lot of experiments so it's like a nice recap of what what has been published in the literature in the scientific literature we know that the the dose to have like an a beneficial effect of caffeine on endurance performance is between three milligrams and six milligrams of caffeine per kilo of body mass so if we do like a quick match it's like if i am 70 kilos i need at least 210 milligrams and that's when people start like getting a bit um start asking a lot of questions like okay but how can i do that with coffee or or with the energetic drinks and i said look just go to the pills because in the pills you know exactly you know how much with the coffee it's a it depends on so many variables the type of coffee grounds the method you use to brew coffee so we started like that we said okay here are these uh pills at night after lunch oh sorry at night in that case the first night is like whenever probably after 9 pm or 10 just have it but take into account that caffeine takes up to one hour i would say 40 the literature says 45 to one hour i don't want to make things very very

complicated because then here is when i am where i introduce that we don't have the same sensitivity to caffeine it's based on genetics so maybe you and me have a different gene to metabolize caffeine or in this case like a different let's say it's like the plate of your car it's like we have different numbers and maybe my number has more chances to metabolize caffeine very slowly which means that i will not feel any effect up to the third hour while in your case if you are very fast metabolizer maybe you feel it after 45 minutes and then you start having some benefit but here here's always the here's always the tricky thing in these long ones is that we can you're right we can go through the literature and we can kind of pin down the ergogenic dose as anywhere between three and six milligrams per kilogram but that's in one shot right so that's taking a hit of caffeine 60 minutes before you're going to do a 40 kilometer cycling time trial or a marathon or something like that and and and those dose response those dose responses are fairly well studied but when you're saying hey i want you to take this every four hours or every eight hours or every 12 hours or at 9 p.m like you were just uh suggesting that's when everything gets muddy and you you kind of don't you don't know what the if the metabolism is any different at that point and

you also don't know if the effect is any different at that point so i'm once again i'm trying to like i know i know you i know you folks in academics don't don't like to like get pinned down on answers where you can't trace it back to research a lot but is it is it something where you would recommend a regular dosing of caffeine to stay awake or would you abstain from it at a certain point because you know you're going to have to sleep at a certain point during the race very very good point so our approach was okay take this amount of caffeine maybe with food or after having some food every now and then during the day but then the main issue is when you feel sleepy at 3 a.m or 4 a.m i don't think you will be able to fight that with a pill of caffeine and then we had our second option for the night we are still on the first night but i think this is going to be very useful what we find or we found was the chewing gum with caffeine because it goes through completely a different media yeah exactly so we said look here is your caffeine pill but we know it that it may not be enough so during the night because the goal is to

arrive awake to the next morning let's say in the best possible condition because let's remember that these guys are running or walking or we said look if by any chance you are feeling sleepy here are the caffeine chewing gums just put chew in your mouth that's probably a hundred milligrams and top up as much as you can it's like obviously with two chewing gums when you feel sleepy in less than 15 minutes you feel awake but the effects are shorter than the pill that was the first night it's like okay second day arrive to the checkpoint and then most of the most of the people is a big achievement you have survived to the first night with no sleep you arrive to the checkpoint and it's up to you it's like some of them they may feel the effects of caffeine because they took another two chewing gums at 4 a.m and then they at the end the half life of caffeine in 67 hours so they may arrive in the morning feeling quite energetic so the the advice is like carry on it's like obviously nutrition goes first cover your nutritional needs and then keep going but that's the good that that's i'm very happy that you made that point it's like okay but when do i stop if i need to sleep yes if my plan was to go to sleep at 7 a.m and i just had a cup of coffee with the breakfast i'm not going to be able to sleep so the advice we gave to them was like

at least two to four hours before your plan is sleep don't take caffeine and just so you so the withdrawal period or the apps the the period of of abstinence that you need is or that you're recommending is two to four hours at that point because we had no knowledge at all we said okay try to not take caffeine before going to bed it's like if you can avoid having chewing gums at night four hours before your plan to sleep do it i will send you a link because then that's again back to research i found um a website where you can plot and it is based on on um reaction time which is one of the tests that we use to to measure cognition or or reaction time in this case and you can plot so there is there is plenty of research done in a normal sleep and sleep deprivation up to several days and they were literally measuring reaction time of people yeah and then you can put the amount of sleep you get or you are planning to get and the amount of caffeine you are planning to take and it will also like uh there is the ccadien rhythms as the same as sleep so you've got like mainly two points of sleep need like at night and after lunch usually and with this app you can in a way play with the curve and match it with your strategy for for ultra in my case i took the risk and and we took

the risk of using this i said okay if this person is not going to sleep for 36 hours how is the curve going to look like when is he going to decline in terms of cognition because that's the point where we want to top up with caffeine yeah and we play but it was for your listeners short story trial and earwork short story short story what sorry so the source the the short story is like we for this pilot with these two athletes we just did our best and it was a bit of trial and error it's like okay let's see if this works and then we can think why it is working or why it's not working but that website that tool at least gave me some scientific evidence to say okay you may have to take 200 milligrams every eight hours because that's when you have the declining cognitive performance and that's normally two to four a.m if you have a normal rate yeah exactly if you have like classic eight hours of sleep but during ultra you are not having that so you are having maybe a couple of hours or four hours on the second night okay so let's move let's kind of the key let's continue this advice train right so you're going through the first night without sleep you're timing your caffeine every four hours what happens night two night three night four night five in terms of what you would advise a normal person

to to either get or forego sleep in terms of dose and timing i would say it depends on your speed and the cutoff times of the race because you know sometimes uh i remember in this in this pilot in the last checkpoint in tortes jans i'm trying to remember it was the last point oh yes yeah oh yes i got i got really mad with one of the participants because i said no you cannot sleep for hours you you've got to go exactly like and because because um i think after maybe it was the the previous one i remember there is a 10k uphill section and based on my experience with looking at the numbers of this person i said he's not going to be able to be fast enough for the next checkpoint so i rather put him uphill with two hours of sleep knowing that he has the caffeine chewing gums up as the backup option than having some good sleep and then realize that he's not going to make it and after the race both feet the the happy ending here is like both finished so mission accomplished we make two people to finish tortes jans but i remember i was a yeah i was in bed actually i was in corps major because we were based there and i couldn't sleep because it's my work and i was like okay i'm gonna check in the gps with

this person and he was going so fast uphill that they have to call the logistics and say is the gps okay because i don't think he can go that fast and then when he finished he told me you know i was so mad at you because i couldn't get so sleep then i said i'm going to go as fast as i can and then catch up some power nap or something um in the morning okay but let's design this for performance right because there's a lot of people that'll do tortes jant or there's a series of 200 milers here in the us that they they kind of know that they can finish comfortably under the cutoffs you know 10 hours to a day under the cutoff but they want to design a sleep schedule from an ergogenic perspective so that they can kind of like maximize their performance and what i'm trying to what i'm trying to pull out of you through your observation and looking through the research is is there a logical pattern of i'm going to sleep this much during this type of night that an athlete can deploy during those events considering that you know they've got the opportunity to do it and there's no logistical constraints like the spine race and things like that like is there is there a generalized pattern or is it something where literally they just have to sleep when they're tired and push on when they need to short answer most of the people will arrive at the checkpoint um late at night and by late i mean like 2 a.m 3 a.m 4 a.m 5 a.m or early in the morning

and what i observe in the spine and also in total is like they try to catch some sleep on the second third night and then there is a point where they need to sleep more right they move from 90 minutes two hours to because we are considering so is one week yeah so my biggest advice is if your plan is uh everybody's plan is then it depends what the race is but humans we sleep at night we function during the day we can extend our wakefulness until late at night but if you were not too crazy with caffeine during the night i think if you arrive at the checkpoint at 2 4 a.m you grab some food you go to sleep and then after two hours again based on your race strategies because some of them they they are fast enough to get maybe three to four hours of sleep every night and that's i would say that's not too bad that's one of my um all the things i have to do is like i want to start doing ultra because i need to apply what i learned also i need to perceive what the participants uh perceive but what you're what you're alluding what you're alluding to a little bit is this is this phenomenon that i don't think we we don't really know all that much about and maybe you can illuminate some of this for me there's only so much of a sleep deficit you can build up before you have to start erasing

that deficit and the way that that works out in the races is okay i'm going to plan on taking 45 minute naps or two hour naps or whatever for day one two three and four and then at a certain point you have to start erasing this huge deficit that you've already built up when athletes are planning this out for themselves or even for my own you know selfish reasons i'm planning it out for athletes i've always had a hard time figuring out exactly what that deficit is before before it reaches kind of a critical mass and you have to start building it back up is there anything that you know that you observe or that we can like look in the research to actually point to what that what that maximum amount of deficit is before you actually have to before you're kind of forced to essentially build it back up short answer from a scientific point we don't know a longer answer is from the spine what i observed was like after so one of all the other results we got was like at some point in this case i think it was a more than half more than half way all the athletes have to sleep more and more frequently and that's when also fatigue plays a role it's like actually is it the sleep deficit or is just like fatigue building up that just you're required to rest and to

recover so i don't have an answer i would like to say yeah after three days of sleeping four hours that's the tipping point where you have to get more sleep what i can tell is from the spine over time they have to sleep more and that's when probably most of the athletes had to get some sleep during the night somewhere like for half an hour or 45 minutes some of them on some of them will do that on porpoise some of them they will just say because part of my research was at every checkpoint i check every single participant and i asked them did you get some sleep we had a questionnaire like a sleep diary and because i want to check that with the watch just as a as a cross check let's say and some of them they were telling me you know what i cannot remember but i'm pretty sure from three to four a year i said i i sat down in the middle of nowhere and i fell asleep um i mean this always this this brings up a really interesting point here is that i do think the strategies when you're when you're laying them out on paper are going to be different for different ends of the spectrum so if you have a 200 mile race you can have people finish in 50 or 60 hours or you can have them finish in six days and depending upon where they are on that spectrum that patterning of

when to sleep and how much to sleep can vary a great extent because on the short end of the spectrum you can put up with a lot of sleep restriction and sleep deprivation for that short period of time but you can't do it you can't extend that for too long before you have to pass out on a rock as your you know as your as your participant mentioned it so i i don't know there's not a there's not a question that other other than to say as people at home are listening to this and kind of thinking about it be wary of where you're getting the advice from because it's it likely there's my caveat it likely your your sleep patterning should match the actual pacing that you anticipate during the race in terms of how long do you think it's going to take you yeah you nailed it that's the that's the advice if i have to give an advice to someone is that one we've got uh i'm trying to remember i think it was the summer edition of the spine we've got the male winner that probably he got 90 minutes of sleep on wednesday yeah yeah we know also from tortoise jams that the winners the only sleep that we get probably at the checkpoints and they didn't even realize you know they were just like having like a power nap or something but that that's that's the take-home message is like one size does not fit all it's like it's the same principle of training it's like oh i must do this amount of miles per week to finish an ultramarathon

like well depending on what your fitness level your commitment and everything i would say with the sleep what you said is what i actually said is like plan according to your race strategy yeah yeah and this is why i think the training becomes so important because if you can if you're more fit and you could move faster down the course you just have more bandwidth to sleep at the aid stations if if finishing is your goal or if you have a particular time goal the fitness matters a whole lot and i always hear athletes that are trying to like make up for time by not sleeping and you always give it back because you can't locomote as fast down the trail when you're you know when you're in such a sleep to sleep deprived state that's um because one of the things i learned also was uh you should have several plans and that's also part of my personality when i was with the soldiers i said where's your plan b oh we don't have a plan b we just commit to this it's like no no you should have a plan b plan c plan d i remember it was so funny because i looked like a football american football coach i got my book and i said okay this athlete is he following plan a or plan b based on the time because you must be prepared it's a one-week race it's not a marathon where you said oh you know what i'm not feeling well after half marathon let's slow down it's like no if you slow down during a one-week ultra the chances that you will not finish are very high so i need to plan in advance and and maybe said you know what let's instead of

four hours let's try to sleep three hours 30 and before i forgot i would like to mention something that is not related to sleep but it may help someone it's about the logistics it's about the time you spend at the checkpoint and okay maybe i'm over optimistic and think in the formula one it's like it should be like a pit stop it's like you should go because i saw um jasmine paris for instance in the spine or or a couple of other potential winners of the spine race and i was amazed when they arrived to the checkpoint they may spend only 15 minutes and it was like how how is it possible so i would say you can also train for that and that's where the checklist may be useful and that's why maybe some kind of psychological strategies to say okay i'm just going to visualize what i'm going to do when i arrive to the checkpoint because also we need to consider we are humans you may have spent the whole night in the case of the spine like at minus 10 degrees it's a snowing it's completely dark because in january the amount of light we've got is less than eight hours just constantly talking to your own mind and maybe what you really want to do when you arrive to the checkpoint is to have a chit chat with one of the volunteers and you know to get a cup of tea and some porridge and then you start spending extra time at the checkpoints that probably you will regret when you are close to the next checkpoint and you're

very close to the to the cut of time so my advice is as you said plan your stops properly and try to be as much efficient as possible in these ways like i would say probably the checkpoint it was one thing that changed my life when i saw one of the athletes from not not even from the top just probably from the back of the peloton that he opened his suitcase and he has a list of day one day two day three checkpoint one checkpoint two three i said cut off is like perfect well and people have the worst sense of how long they spend in aid stations because if you talk to them afterwards they're like oh i was only there for two minutes when in reality they were actually there for 20 minutes okay i i want to i want to kind of wrap wrap this up a little bit here and i'm wondering if there is if there's any big rocks of advice like one or two things that you've observed or that you have seen kind of teased out in the literature that people can do to either prepare for or combat sleep deprivation in longer ultras greater than 100 mile ultras what what would that be what what are the things that any listener out there regardless of where they kind of sit in the pack what can they do to to to get themselves prepared for these things i think um well because you mentioned it when you did the interview with chiara like sleep deprivation training is something that at the moment we cannot advise we don't have a prescription for

it because we had only hair case study which one person right in one specific race but we need to do more research and we're going to go back to a non-scientific uh chat but as well as chiara and you during tordes young you had conversation with athletes we had because actually when i listened to chiara's interview i said yeah i know that story i know where is it coming from because we were having a coffee and some person like on the other side was like oh i did this and yeah yeah it's like i used to train with no sleep i used to two months before the event i used to do some training with no sleep and actually also i i heard maybe you already know it but i have heard the same thing with people doing expeditions it's like they were training not to sleep just to do the summit and that was the the start of this sleep deprivation thingy of can we train to not sleep but i'm afraid that the answer from the scientific point is like we still don't know and we know from from chiara and from other researchers that has written a letter saying that actually this could be dangerous and then probably here and samuel will answer back with with their their views is i would like to to see where is it going in terms of we should do like a randomized control trial research and with the sleep deprivation

training but if i had to give an advice to someone is like sleep banking that's going to be the most useful part for the first night on the second day i would say plan your caffeine well it's like don't be silly and have like a crazy amount of caffeine before going to bed in this case avoid avoid the negative again it's like i can tell you we had some athlete that he was struggling to finish that night he put uh two to four chewing gum two hours before arriving to the checkpoint he had to sleep i cannot remember maybe three to four hours and he couldn't sleep and when he woke up he looked at me and said i couldn't sleep it like of course then why you stay four hours in bed just looking at the ceiling it's like just come outside uh ask me and then maybe we can have another strategy so from from from research uh yeah i would say the abc would be a sleep uh extension before the event plan your caffeine and also it's like plan your sleep based on your race uh strategy yeah i i think that that's really reasonable people are going to want a very specific answer sleep two hours per night between two and four a.m or something like that but the reality is is on the intervention side we know that sleep sleep banking works so that's

an intervention you can absolutely uh uh you can absolutely perform we know that caffeine works it's very well studied we know we know a reasonable amount about the dose response and if you plan it on a schedule that's a reasonable way to get the ergogenic and alertness effects as well as try to avoid it interfering with your sleep like your story your story mentioned and then have some semblance of how long the race is going to take you and use that to design your sleep schedule not the other way around not trying to come up and this is what i was trying to pin you down on which is kind of unfair but if you have a total duration i think that's the that's the first kind of the first place to start and have another plan it's like have the best uh have a plan b and if you are crazy enough plan z plan b is like okay what happens if because i'm always recalling my my experience is like it happened to us we estimate like oh this athlete is going to take he made hours to cover this section and then all of a sudden he was hit by fatigue so hard 12 hours you know for me as a coach and as a researcher is like i must be ready maybe i'm maybe i'm an overthinker i'm always like okay what if i'm i know that's pretty bad but it's the way i am but uh when when it works sometimes i feel proud it's like okay maybe being an overthinker sometimes it's good yeah well it's it i mean you have a gazillion and of ones but like i said like i said from the onset of this podcast we have to use research and what we know about

uh how sleep restriction works and how sleep banking works and things like that to design the best to really design the best plans we can't just wing it right we have to use observation and evidence that we draw in either observational studies or randomized control trials or or whatever the intervention is or whatever the study is we have to use that to design best practices otherwise everybody's just guessing and if you get it right you're just lucky yeah also it's gonna sound like very very silly but what we know is like the fastest runners they sleep less should just run fast i love it that's a great place to end just run faster i think as a coach is it's a very good advice to tell your athletes he's like don't moan about sleep just go fast well but here's the i mean from a practical perspective this is why i have a such so i'm going off on a tangent here so buckle up this is why i have a hard time encouraging athletes to do sleep restriction training like i talked about with with chiara is and just for the people who didn't listen to that podcast that would be intentionally withholding sleep for like one night a week in a very deliberate fashion or just sleeping for two hours or something like that in order to gain some sort of uh physiological and or psychological advantage during the race the reason i have such a hard

time recommending that to athletes is that it's very difficult in most circumstances to not have that impact the training and the training is what helps you go faster down the trails as you were just mentioning so i'm not i'm not completely ruling that out as an intervention but that's why i have a hard time prescribing it is because it's very difficult in most cases to have it not impact the training although that's counter to the case study that we went over but anyway that's a that's another that's a totally another topic if you ask me as an athlete like aiming to do tordes youngs in the future that's my personal opinion you know my expertise my personal opinion is i should try because i want to experience and i want to face the challenge of checking my gps at 3 a.m in the morning with no sleep at all but we cannot advise people to do that yeah that's it's so tricky so for me it's logical is um okay we go back to the marathon training but you need some feedback of what's going to happen we're not saying you should do it every week for one month or something like that but i would say the same thing you would recommend your athletes to do some night training because they need to experience how he's running in the mountains at 3 a.m in the morning with a torch light i would say it's very logical to say that you

should do some training in a sleep deprived state we're not saying 48 hours with no sleep but yeah i know i know it's controversial i know it's a it's a double edge sword in this case personally i'm i'm more likely to prescribe something like that on a very infrequent basis so maybe once every eight weeks or something like that or which amounts to just a small handful of times you're doing an overnight run or you're doing something in a sleep restricted or sleep sleep deprived state i outside of that experience that you just mentioned i need to check my gps watch at four in the morning i need to like learn how to like deal with brain fog there's an absolute advantage to that i what what i struggle with is is there some sort of material improvement in in the athlete from a physiological perspective like is there an adaptive response which is what we talk about in physiology right is there an adaptive response are you bigger stronger faster can jump higher and things like that to doing that sleep uh to doing that sleep restrictive or sleep deprivation bout that's what i think we all kind of struggle with is is is there an actual adaptive response and the the question is out there certainly there's an experiential response right you just know how to handle the experience and that's that's worthwhile but who knows if there's any adaptation that goes along with it and so we'll debate it and research it

further right that's why we got good people like you the answer is we don't know yet but yeah i make an emphasis on yet it's like yeah we will work on it because we know is a question that we all want to answer i have to say that also part of my of my PhD we took like um a very what we said like natural approach for tortoise jans is like we've got a group of soldiers and we did some sleep deprivation protocol but it was not sleep deprivation training the main reason why i mentioned this is because uh guillem me yet that was the external examiner was actually making that point and we argue about is this kind of sleep deprivation training and i explained it to him and our and that's a very honest answer is like we didn't plan it as a sleep deprivation training we plan it as we as if we were someone who wants to prepare a tortoise jans i said okay why do i do if i want to prepare tortoise jans i may do one two ultra marathons longer than 100 miles and they will for sure be races where you sleep as less as possible and the the reason why i mentioned this is because we test them pre and post so before and we tested them on a period of 14 weeks and we develop a protocol where you come to the lab

with norm after normal sleep you run the until exhaustion and then you don't sleep on that day you are controlled 24 7 and then on the following morning so under 24 hours of sleep deprivation we do exactly the same test and we calculate the difference between performances and then we do that after a period of 14 weeks where you have been doing your normal training for tortoise jans and you may have done like uh um two races of 100 kilometers or one recognition of 100 kilometers because our hypothesis was okay that's what the people usually do which we don't know but we it was our hypothesis like okay that's why that's how people may prepare tortoise jans we didn't find an improvement in sleep deprivation tolerance let's say in the decrease of of of performance but it's still on the same i would say is first of all it's not a sleep deprivation training as something you plan but i guess is a on the same direction of piara's case study in the sense of we need to do proper research in the field like a randomized control trial to see whether it may not work as some researchers proposed or it may work as our research group proposed just for your listeners the science is like science is a constant fight and it's not that we are better than the others or vice versa it's like no we all are on the same

boat it's like we want to answer a question and if the question is no this doesn't work i would say first perfect yeah we we answer a question i'll be the first person if you start to tease out some sort of sleep deprivation training that shows a clear cause and effect in terms of the sleep deprivation tolerance that somebody can that that somebody can actually experience i'll be the first person to throw that intervention in the mix of my athletes training and obviously balance it with everything else that's going on but i think that we don't know yet is a very important part of all this you made a very good point it's like the the impact of a sleep deprivation training on at the end of the story we are not professional athletes you've got a job you've got a family it's not it's not easy not to get your normal schedule or your normal routine impact by that it's the same i guess it's um because that's probably my question for you it's like i guess it's the same rationale about the back-to-back runs on the weekends to do like longer yeah to do like long events it's like some people just said oh no on the weekend you should do like 50 miles on saturday and then 50 miles on sunday like what is the impact on your what is the cost of that type of training what's the trade-off right you always whenever you have a i could do a or i could do b right or a more more more commonly what we're evaluating from a

coaching perspective is how much impact you can get from intervention a versus how much does it cost if you were to do intervention b and you and once again you've got an unlimited number of arrows in your and your training quiver to to to perform you got intervals you got sleep deprivation training you got volume and all this other stuff you have to decide what combination of all those is going to impact the athlete positively the most and then how do those things actually affect the run of show you know later down the road so you've got two questions right does the sleep deprivation training actually work does it improve people's sleep deprivation tolerance and then the second question this is probably the harder one is what is the cost and how does that cost impact another area that you could improve with that particular athlete so it's it's this is always the case whenever we look at these very specific interventions is how much is the impact and then what is the cost rolling down the line but that's going to be a conversation for another time borja i appreciate you coming on the podcast today this is one of those things where we could pick each other's brain for forever and i probably will do so if i ever uh find myself in a pickle with an athlete that's that's dealing with sleep deprivation issues um but i appreciate the work that you do where can athletes find you or where can they learn more about the research that you're doing

i would say that as soon as the thesis is uh available which should be no later than september i would say considering that the summer maybe the universities are closed but actually i must admit the comments this friday so it may take like less than a month yeah that's that's that's well that's a different story but yeah no but um i will probably send you an email with the thesis i would perfect well i mean you also the university usually the PhD thesis are available and you know you can post the link and you will find there like all the bits and bobs of all the different studies we do with the numbers and i feel sorry because i could have prepared everything like in a better way telling you okay in this check when there's left this amount of time um um yeah it has been a pleasure it's part of the it's one of the things that for me as a researcher i want to make an emphasis is like it's very important for us to to explain what we do and for me personally any opportunity i've got to engage with the podcast or an audience is like i i love to answer questions and we could chat forever um yeah the other place where you can find me probably is on twitter you can um perfect place it because if i have to spell it it may be a bit messy but yeah i mean

then you can find me also on the university you put my email and i may it may take a while to to respond sometimes because i'm quite busy but i would say it's part of my role as a researcher to answer questions so if any of your listeners may have like further questions about anything in terms of the sleep deprivation and ultra or particularly ultra events i'm more than available no you're leaving the door open man you might get flooded after this podcast i appreciate you and appreciate what you do man um i'll leave links in the show notes to everything that you just mentioned and uh like i said this is a really fascinating area and i hope we continue to uncover more and more about it through efforts uh through people i have to make a disclosure like i'm not coaching anymore i'm not i'm not open to coaching offers i have to you're busy enough yeah i love coaching it was my background it was the start of the story for me and um in a way i miss it a bit but um it's uh it's very complicated at this at this point but um i really appreciate that coaches that get into science because uh it sounds like a bit sad but we don't know so many we don't know anything that's my take home messages training is a black box the way i see training is a black box we have inputs which is the training and we have the output which is the performance but what is happening in the middle we don't know it's a black box yeah exactly that's a

great place to leave it man that's a great place to leave it i appreciate it we're gonna let you go borgia and uh like i said links to everything will be in the show notes man thank you thank you for inviting me and also inviting kiara and probably on behalf of samuel also thanks for letting us explain a bit what we do in our we'll get sam we'll get sam on the podcast eventually hopefully i'll move up the ranks enough to to get to have him on i will i will mention it to him the next time i will see him that will be tomorrow so there we go i will just mention it so we can make a bit of pressure to see perfect because he's perfect he's also i mean we learn from him here and me it's like the way we are is a bit of our supervisors uh views on and we have seen him like involving in seminars in conferences and that's why we need to push him to be in the podcast all right borgia we'll leave it at that man appreciate it my pleasure all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to borgia for coming on the podcast today this is always a really tricky topic because we want to give athletes very specific advice and advice that's based in the research and there's just not a whole heck of a lot of it out there as we alluded to multiple times during the podcast appreciate the heck out of all the listeners out there if you like this podcast please share it with your friends share it with your training partners

as always this podcast is brought to you without sponsors without any sort of endorsements and that's so we can keep the podcast and the advice the podcast contains as unadulterated as possible you always get my honest opinion on anything that is out there whether it's a supplement or an intervention and sharing this podcast with your friends and your training partners help spread the message and spread the word and spread the love this podcast contains that is it for today and as always folks we will see you out on the trails