Running on sleepy: eyes half shut

Okay, hands up who's exhausted? Who would really, really like to catch up on the old zzzzs but is just too busy? Sleeping time gets hijacked when we've lots to do. Up at 4am to get that run in before work. Staying up late to get the ironing done or more pleasurably, to get some time with friends. Every day that sleeping time gets a bit more chipped off it, gradually whittled away, even on a bank holiday! Long gone are the days of sleeping til lunchtime.

I don't know about you, but I've just got used to having less than my allotted 8 hours kip and most of the time it's fine. Less sleep, more time to do things. Lying in wastes time that could be spent doing things - it wastes the day. Yes I am that age and I am now saying things my parents said to me.

Because I'm practicing body-sensing, I'm beginning to understand what sleep deprivation does to me. On our trip to Barcelona in March, the clocks went forward several times so we didn't know which way was up when we got home. Then an early rise for a trip to London, a few a late finishes at work and a long 'to do list'. None of these keep me awake at night, I go out like a light.  No my problem is waking up at 4am. If I've had a long day at work or lots of travelling, that's often accompanied by a night of poor quality sleep, my body restless from sitting down all day, eating crap food and drinking too much tea.  

When I'm tired, things go awry. I struggle to concentrate, I'm easily distracted and I can't resist nibbling on rubbish, high sugar, high fat, junk food. My brain is not engaged with what I'm doing, it floats around on the breeze of random thoughts. Chocolate is eaten with absolutely no conscious input at all, cake slips past the lips barely tasted. My brain is on stand-by and those chattering monkeys rule the roost (apologies for the mixed metaphor there).

So I've been doing some digging round about sleep.  Research shows that we never really catch up after losing that hour when the clocks change. Maybe because I'm a winter baby my body clock is on British winter time, I never really feel right when the clocks are on British Sumer Time. We lose about 40 minutes of sleep every night after the clocks go forward as our body rhythms struggle to adapt. That adds up to a hell of a lot of sleep, especially if we're all paring our sleep down to the bone just to get by.

There's plenty of research that shows that disrupted sleep might not kill you, but it can certainly make your focus a bit blurred.  One study I found recently (www.occdigest.org.uk) showed that a lack of sleep can make us more prone to cyber loafing "frittering away work time on unrelated online activities". Isn't cyber-loafing a great concept,? I don't get time to do it at work (honest!) but I do lot a bit in my own time and it is good sport when you're tired or a bit hungover.

Anyway, they looked at Google's publicly available data for entertainment-related searches and found that these searches were significantly higher after the clocks went forward. The costs of cyber loafing have been estimated at £300m per year. That's a lot of loafing.

One of the theories for 'cyber-loafing' is ego depletion.  Some researchers see will power as a resource that gets used up through effort and sleep replenishes and re charges it. Lack of sleep saps our regulatory resources making us easy pickings for behaviours we need to keep control of - our defences are low. Certainly waking up groggy and out of synch with yourself is not a great way to start the day and is often associated with random thoughts about bacon rolls or muffins.

Lack of sleep certainly saps my will power and gets right at my weak spots. Women's Running magazine cites research that shows that a good sleep helps cut snacking, a real problem for me.  Folks who got less than 5.5 hours sleep a night ate larger amounts of high carb snacks than those who got 8 hours - and don't my scales know it. And this is not counting any impact lack of sleep has on your metabolism, making it easier to out fat on and harder to get it off. 

And of course it can be serious, lack of sleep can affect your running. Running Times had an interesting article on sleep and running.  Decreased sleep for even a few days impaired glycogen synthesis, meaning you're running on a half full tank and may "bonk" earlier than a well-rested individual (stop sniggering at the back). Disrupted sleep undermines our ability to repair training-induced soft-tissue breakdown. Not good if you're putting your body through serious training. 

So, freshly back from a very nice run, feeling replenished and refreshed despite my lack of sleep, what do I make of all of this?  All the advice is about getting to sleep and I don't have that problem, I am out like a light maybe because I already do all the stuff you're supposed to do. My problem is I'm wide awake at 4am wake up and then I start thinking about what I've got to do and the game's a bogie. I think I might just have to love with this for a while, so until I get a cunning plan, I'm going to take two preventative measures.  First I'm going to be limit the amount of running-related damage I inflict on my body. If I'm not repairing myself fully, then I have to watch my recovery times and make sure I take in protein immediately after a long or hard run. Second, I'm going to make the most of those early rises, that bit of extra time, and I'm going to enjoy a run, or get into work early. I'm not going to fret, just go with the flow.

Only two short runs and a spin class this week because of being away at the weekend. So I did 2 faster runs, one barefoot in the beach where I really focussed on form - both quality.  Next week I'm not going to do a long run, I fancy a break from distance, so I'm going to do more shorter ones just for a change and see how my body reacts to greater frequency. I did one today with a cheeky hill in the middle and it feels good.

Have a great week whether you're running, walking, working, playing, whatever.

Take care

Suex