How to properly manage your sleep on your Ultra

He specializes in sleep in high-level sports: Bertrand de la Giclee, a physician based in Annecy, prepares runners, navigators and, most surprisingly, tennis players and even airline pilots. For the outdoors, he’s back to managing sleep in endurance sports. When do you sleep on an Ultra or while crossing the Atlantic Ocean? What should you do to get effective sleep? Can we train ourselves to improve our sleep times? Sleep is one of the key factors in performance in endurance sports, and it’s a factor that more and more runners are working on. If we barely sleep on the elite side, it’s not the same in the heart of the peloton, where many athletes spend more than thirty hours racing. In addition to the challenges of the hour, sleep allows essential mental recovery, in particular ensuring clarity and alertness on the roads, as Bertrand de la Jiclet, head of the Sleep Center at the Argonay-Annecy Clinic, explains to us. This week, in the backyard, runners completed 6.7 km loops. The best ran an average of 52 minutes per hour… over 108 hours of testing. Which doesn’t leave much room for sleep. What do you think about this type of event? I think it’s torture. The body will be more tired than usual. In addition, there is the impossibility of physical and psychological regeneration with the stages of sleep. It’s not very good for clarity either. But occasional sleep debts like that aren’t too serious because athletes will almost always end up recovering. It can become so if we enjoy doing it for months and months. This is not the case. […] Lack of sleep, you should know that it was at one time one of the methods of torture in the countries of the East. In order to make people confess, we…