He is the sleep specialist in elite sport: Bertrand De La Giclais, a doctor based in Annecy, prepares trail runners as well as navigators and, surprisingly, tennis players and even airline pilots. For Outside he once again devoted himself to sleep management in endurance sports. When should you sleep on an Ultra or while crossing the Atlantic? What should you do to sleep effectively? Can we practice optimizing our time to fall asleep? Sleep is an important performance factor in endurance sports and a parameter that more and more trail runners are working on. While we barely sleep on the elite side, it’s not the same in the heart of the peloton, where many athletes spend over thirty hours racing. And in addition to the challenges of the clock, sleeping allows for essential mental rest and, in particular, ensures clarity and alertness on the trails, as Bertrand De La Giclais, head of the sleep center at the Argonay-Annecy clinic, explains to us. This week, the trail runners completed 6.7 kilometer laps in the Backyard. The best ran an average of 52 minutes per hour… over 108 hours of testing. Which doesn’t leave much room for sleeping. What do you think of such an event? It’s torture, I think. The body will be much more tired than usual. Added to this is the impossibility of regenerating yourself physically and mentally with sleep phases. It’s also not very good for clarity. However, occasional sleep deficits like this are not very dangerous because athletes always recover in the end. It could be like this if we enjoyed it for months. Which is not the case. […] Lack of sleep, you should know that it was once a method of torture in eastern countries. To get people to confess, we…
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