Sleep deprivation for running

I’d say so, when I’m doing my 60 mile weeks, I don’t get less than 9 hours and sometimes I get as much as 10.5-11 hours of sleep. That’s if I have no homework and the next morning I don’t have a double before school to do.

You would absolutely feel a difference. All high school athletes should sleep more. one of the most simple things you can do to improve, if you are training well.

Shoot for 9hrs +/- 1 hr per night. put your phone on the other side of the room at bed time and just go to bed.

There are 24 hours in a day. There is always enough time to sleep, train, and get what you need to done for the day. I know of guys who get up at 4 am to get 10-12 miles in in the morning before going to work, med school and whatnot. Roger Bannister would train at his lunch hour and I can't remember the other guy's name but he would train at night after working all day (if someone remembers his name please post it).

I find sleep to be very important but still it is not enough to recover fully. When I am in hard training, I aim for 9-10 hours a night, but even then I am still quite fatigued but that is where the athlete mindset comes into play: even when you are tired, you need to fight that fatigue and still get your workouts in for the day. It is just that more sleep helps you recover better and energize you more.

Right on. It is about being disciplined. I find it interesting how some people make time to go on their phones during the day, watch an hour or two of TV at night, yet complain about not having enough time for studying, or running. When you are training, you need to put other things aside and make running your primary focus if you want your best results.

It is like anything else in life. How bad do you want it? If you want to be the best, you need to make sacrifices, whether you want to be the best doctor out there or be the best runner. I don't have a social life really and I am happy to say that because this life is not about self-pleasing activities or hedonism but rather it is about working hard and working for the Lord (you may disagree with me and that is ok). I am fine with not having a social life because I am running fast times and working towards running in the Olympics one day. It is a slippery slope. When you start to dedicate your life to running, you begin running times that you never would have dreamed about. And that fuels you to train even harder. When you see all those doubles starting to pay off, you understand why you made those sacrifices that the world calls crazy. And then you push even harder and run even faster.

When you start running 4:0x miles, 14:3x 5k, 30:xx 10k, sub 70 half marathons, sub 2:30 marathons, you understand where all your free time went: into training and achieving times 99% of the population will never run because, not that they have no "talent" or fitness, but because they are unwilling to put in the work. There is no "talent". There is just hard work.

I agree and very well said. I put it as much dedication as I can really, I lack some of the genetics but my work fills that gap.

Hoping to get faster wrote:

As a high school athlete who runs 40 mpw, and gets 7-7:45 hours of sleep would I feel a difference if I tried to spend a month getting 9? I heard of a study done that some college basketball players dedicated a season to getting 10 hours of sleep a night, and all of them had a big increase in ft% (I think it was like 6-8% more on average than their other teammates). Is it worth trying and has anyone tried or heard anything themselves?

The answer is not that straightforward. Most of us can agree from experience that we need more sleep generally and crave it, throughout our busy lives, and when fill the lacking we benefit. Obtaining that fill may not be as straightforward as just trying to tack on extra hours to the single sleep session overnight. There is a mystery to life indeed. For example, I’ve been doing training recently and I have to get up sometimes at night or in the early morning to eat extra, to defecate extra ??and to sometimes wash up extra. I then take another nap or two throughout the day. Sometimes a full luxury nap as little as 15 minutes changes everything. Sometimes destiny or my body wakes me and urges me to action when I wish I could have an extra hour or two like yourself. Sleep is something complex like nutrition. The brute force method which works in math, sometimes falls short here. There is a subtle art to getting the right combination of foods for a particular moment, for example. In the past week, I’ve had some terrible meals and some meals where everything came together perfectly like a key and a lock.

The situation I’ve described is long post high school and college. Since you’re in high school, I’ll relate some points in the same spirit but with different characteristics. I often found it prudent to give up a little sleep at night or in the morning to prepare. I would prepare a list for the coming day... block it out, hour by hour, etc. There’s no getting around it, if you can’t manage your school and social affairs to a reasonable degree, it will become a nuisance, and sometimes that management and its benefits are worth the sacrifice... console yourself however that every hour of sleep counts. That’s a lesson for college students. Don’t do all nighters. Cut it short and sleep. Even 2-5 hours of sleep is tremendously useful.

Getting more sleep will help all things being equal, but there are two caveats. If there are domains of your life that you are not taking care of (nutrition, social, school), the extra sleep you try to tack on may be sluggish not find its mark, so to speak. Similarly, if you don’t brush your teeth before bed time, you may get reduced results and less pleasureful sleep. I’m long out of high school and this is still a lesson I relearn. The second thing is that you need to tune in to the present moment and it’s circumstances and antecedents so that your intuition can guide you.

Due to chronic insomnia I don't get more than 3 hours of sleep each night. Nothing seems to fix it. Can't break 22 min in the 5k anymore.

Athletes getting at least nine hours of sleep a night are more likely to do higher-intensity workouts such as weight lifting, biking, or running. That means you'll have more energy to get physical. Plus getting enough shut-eye can benefit your mental strength too. Pro athletes typically need more than most—it's recommended that they get 8-10 hours every night. But for the average adult, aim for seven to nine hours of sleep a night to avoid the effects of chronic sleep deprivation. Source - https://dailysleep.org/insomnia/

You'll perform best if you let your body have as much sleep as it wants, getting up naturally each day. If extra sleep isn't going to make you run at hot times of the day, go for it.

Training at night sounds like Mark Nenow but he also trained before work in the morning. 10 mile steady doubles with one 20 miler on the weekend all year round. 8(?) weeks before major competition he would sharpen up and do track work solo at night hence being nicknamed the Ghost. No one could know what type of shape he was in. By my count on the road and track(mostly track) he ran sub 28 14 times with a good amount under 27:30 although I think there are a lot more road results in this range out there that I didn't find immediately. Remarkable guy but had bad experiences with coaches and ultimately he never reached the accomplishments he was capable of earning since he was mostly self trained. After 5 years off he came back to run Carlsbad in 1994 at the age of 37 and in his words had a terrible race, he ran 13:56. Called it quits for good after that.

Actually, that wasn't the race he said was terrible. I'm now recalling that it was a track race and he ran something in the 14:10s. Can't recall the race.