Quite a simple 1%er today.
Get more sleep.
Easy.
Most triathletes I know don't get enough sleep. Triathlon is a time intensive sport. Training for any sort of endurance event takes time, but training for an event that combines three endurance events can consume your entire life if you let it. Between work, family, cleaning the house, walking the dog etc, sleep tends to get pushed to one side. It easy to start viewing sleep as a nice to have, something that you can do without. We tell ourselves that we will catch up, or convince ourselves that we are superhuman and actually only need 5 hours a night. All of these are bad ideas.
Sleep is about the most effective legal performance enhancer that we have available to us.
If somebody came up to any of us and said I have this wonderful gizmo that will dramatically improve the effectiveness of your training and, therefore, your racing, most triathletes would be beating down the door to give them their money. Just look how much we are prepared to pay to have the latest and greatest bike, wheels, shoes, helmet, nutrition, goggles, tyres, trisuit, wetsuit......
However, most of us willingly and deliberately hamstring ourselves by not getting enough sleep during the week.
The general guidance that health professionals give is between 7 and 8 hours of sleep a night. Most of us scoff at that as some unrealistic pipe dream. Nobody gets that, I don't need that much sleep we tell ourselves. However, most people who think they need less are actually surprised how much better they feel when they get more. In fact one of the major differences between somebody who trains for triathlon full time and somebody who trains around work is the amount of rest that they get. A lot of the top age group athletes probably train a similar amount to some pros, however, the difference is that the pro is getting 8 hours of sleep a night and potentially naps during the day too. This allows them to keep up this training load sustainably without getting injured or sick. It also allows the pro to increase this training load if necessary. This is one of the reasons that they can perform at the level they do. They get more effective recovery so they are able to train longer and harder. Simple.
Getting a proper amount of sleep helps the body recover and repair between sessions, which means the next session can be that much more effective. More rest means our minds are fresh so that we can engage with a session rather than putting in junk. Because our bodies are recovering and repairing more effectively we are less likely to get sick or injured.
The list of benefits of adequate sleep is long.
So the big questions? How much and how do you get it?
Well the how much question is quite individual, but most stuff I have seen roughly agrees with the 7 to 8 hours figure. However, as I have said, it is individual, I personally struggle to sleep for more than 7 hours, even if I have no reason to get up, but my wife really needs about 8 to function properly The main point is that people need more than 5 or 6 hours, which is about the average amount of sleep Australian's get.
How you get enough sleep really comes down to priorities. Most people think they don't have enough time to get to bed early, but often that isn't the case. Do you need to watch that last bit of TV before bed, did you need to check Facebook one more time? Sometimes commitments such as family etc are unavoidable, but with careful planning they can be minimised. Often getting enough sleep is as simple as making sleep a top priority, rather than the bottom priority. If you stop treating sleep as a nice to have and instead treat it as an essential (which it is) you soon find that you plan your evening around getting to bed, rather than the other way around. I used to plan my entire night about getting to bed by 9:00pm. I wouldn't always manage it but by having it as a priority I was often very close. If I aimed at 9:00 I would usually be in bed by 9:30pm and so I would usually be good for 7 hours of sleep (getting up at 4:30am). It sounds stupidly simple, but often the will to get to bed early is a big part of the battle.
Now, off to bed.
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