Sleep and Recovery

Sleep. I have always had a love / hate relationship with this topic. I am way too high strung to spend the day in bed lounging around. I have established a routine that revolves around waking early and getting my body to react to working out. My unlike many of my training counterparts, I have long lacked the ability to nap.

For as long as I remember, napping hasn't come easy. In college, I wasn't one of those that came back to my room and crashed. If I was up, I was doing things. This issue is still prevalent today. It simply amazes me that I can get 5.5 hours of sleep, pound out 5-6 hours of training and still not be able to fall asleep. Today I did everything possible. I cut down the air, grabbed a blanket, turned on the fan and just tried to relax. For 30 minutes, I 'rested my eyes.' But resting my eyes merely means closing them. There was no sleeping.

Sleep has been on a my mind quite a bit lately. A lot of research surrounds the impact it has on the body particularly as it relates to workout recovery. Most people look at it from a simplistic perspective...a sleep routine is good. But more important is what goes on inside your body. When you sleep your body is in hyper-recovery mode. Around the 60 minute mark, the body begins releasing a growth hormone that instantly attacks damaged tissue. Since the body is nearly 50% muscle tissue, the secretion of this hormone is crucial to repairing all the micro-tears. This is why napping is that much more important. Read the training plans of a few professional triathletes and you will see 2 hour naps in the middle of the day.

To bring this full circle, sleep and I have been getting along lately, despite my inability to nap. I have commented a few times in the past weeks that my body seems to be craving sleep. I am going to bed early and sometimes sleeping much later than usual. I am not naive to think that this doesn't have something to do with the stress in my life and the increase in training. But what I find particularly interesting is the improvement in my ITBS injury.

Without wanting to overstate things, I feel like things are improving. My massage therapist said it was still a mess but better. My chiropractor is dumbfounded because the area demonstrated a great deal of repair since my last visit. Could it be sleep? Well all I know is that I have been getting more sleep lately than I have in years. I hope the literature is right and the hormones are repairing the tissue running down the side of my right leg.