SLEEP EASY RACE HARD

Sleep specialist Dr Charlotte Edelsten explains why age-group athletes are falling short – and how smarter habits around training, nutrition, thermoregulation and caffeine can turn nights into a secret weapon.

- JAMES WITTS

In the United Kingdom, we're rapidly approaching that very small window that is known as summer. That means a cranking up of weather talk, bemoaning your company's lack of air conditioning and lashings of antiperspirant. We also forecast many nights spent tossing, turning and generally lamenting the UK summer. In fact, it's these searing heatwaves that sends the greatest recovery tool we possess – sleep – front and centre. Your mood plummets along with your tolerance. It's explicit and hammers home the importance of good sleep – an importance that you must remember when the mercury drops. That's because, as you'll discover, nail your nocturnal recuperation and your health and performance fires up. Enter the realms of insomnia and your sleepwalking to a personal worst...

EXPERT INPUT

Dr Charlotte Edelsten is one of the world's leading sleep specialists. Her palmares is impressive. She spent 20 years in both a clinical and research environment, studying the power of sleep, before becoming a sleep consultant (high-performance-sleep.com) with a wide range of clients including elite and amateur athletes.

Edelsten's worked with numerous triathletes and Ironman athletes, plus ultra-runners. She's based in the heartland of UTMB (Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc) – Chamonix – and has studied the UTMB runners and how sleep deprivation impacts and impairs the 180km footrace over 10km of elevation. “The elites don't sleep at the event but we manage their sleep in the buildup,” she says. “Amateurs obviously take longer – there's a 46-hour cutoff – so we examine how we can manage their fatigue by sleeping for usually no more than 20 minutes at a time.”

Triathlon is challenging. But thankfully, unless you're a fan of deca racing – as the name suggests, 10 successive triathlons – your sleep challenge is the everyday. And, as 2024 research out of Brazil suggests, that is quite a challenge.