Sleep at the UTMB
by Doug Stewart
As it is the Ultra Trail Du Mont Blanc draw week, I thought I would share a paper that was published last year, researching runners at the race and looking at their sleep and subjective recovery following the event.
© UTMB - https://montblanc.utmb.world/
The researchers conducted their investigation at the 2019 edition of the race, and it involved 44 male runners. They had an average age of 43, and all of them lived in a location within 2 hours of Greenwich Mean Time. Moreover, none of the participants were taking medication that could have impacted their sleep. Of the 44, 29 runners finished the race (which is a higher finish rate than for the total field that year). Of these 29 who were then eligible for inclusion, 10 were removed for the study due to incomplete sleep tracking data.
Finally, of the 19 that were included, 6 were aged between 23 and 39 (Seniors), 8 were aged between 40 and 49 (Veteran 1), and the remaining 5 were in the 50 to 59 year old category (Veteran 2).
In order to collect sleep data, the runners wore a wrist-based device for the 10 days prior to the race, during the race and for 10 days after the race. Moreover, subjective measures of recovery were also collected.
The average finish time and time spent sleeping during the race for the three groups was:
Seniors – 41.0 hours - with 46.9 minutes sleeping
Vet 1 – 44.0 hours – with 26.9 minutes sleeping
Vet 2 – 42.9 hours and 26.7 minutes sleeping
The sleep prior to and after the race can be seen below:
Source: Baron et al., 2022
This is showing the average total sleep time (black triangles) for the runners and also the total number of minutes they were awake after having initially fallen asleep (black circles) for the 10 days prior to the race, and 10 days after.
What is interesting are the wakeful minutes on the night prior to the race (although not significantly different from the rest of the nights). I am sure this is something many of us can relate to: pre-race nerves leading to tossing and turning the night before!
The second night after the race did have significantly more wakeful minutes (as highlighted on the graph) – with the likely cause of this linked to muscle pain.
On average, it took 6 days for the runners’ sleep patterns to return to their pre-race levels, revealing the substantial and multidimensional nature of the fatigue. When looking at the three age categories, the younger runners tended to recover faster.
Having had the pleasure of speaking to one of the authors of this paper on multiple occasions, I know that more interesting research was conducted at last year’s race, again exploring sleep, and hopefully that will be published in the near future to give us more insight into the relationship between sleep and ultra running.
References:
Baron, P., Hermand, É., Elsworth-Edelsten, C., Pezé, T., Bourlois, V., Mauvieux, B., & Hurdiel, R. (2022). Sleep and Subjective Recovery in Amateur Trail Runners After the Ultra-Trail du Mont Blanc®(UTMB®). Journal of Science in Sport and Exercise, 1-7.