November 22

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TRAIL RUNNING TRAINING: SLEEP MORE, RUN BETTER. BY MAYAYO

Posted by on November 22, 2025 in trail running, trail running spain, trail running training | Leave a comment

TRAIL RUNNING TRAINING:

SLEEP MORE TO RUN BETTER. BY MAYAYO

I’ll start with an unheroic confession: for years I was one of those mountain runners who bragged about functioning on five or six hours of sleep, as if voluntary insomnia were some kind of sporting merit badge. “Let’s pull an all-nighter” used to be the prelude to endless evenings, impossible early starts, long runs chained straight into workdays, overnight trips to make it to an ultra, coffee injected directly into the veins, and that absurd mantra of “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” I’m sure that never happened to you. Or… maybe it did?

With time, and after many mountains, many races and a healthy dose of stubbornness, I eventually discovered an uncomfortable truth: if you want to become a better trail runner, you probably don’t need a new interval plan, or faster shoes, or those heroic dawn runs. What you need is sleep. More of it. And better quality. It doesn’t sound epic, I know. But it works — and science backs it with a bluntness that leaves little room for bravado.

SLEEP MORE TO RUN BETTER IN THE MOUNTAINS

Sleeping, just like training, requires consistency. You can’t make up for three four-hour nights with a single ten-hour binge. Just like running forty kilometers on a Sunday won’t help if you haven’t trained all week. In the studies by Mah, Van Dongen and Mollicone, a key idea repeats itself: the benefits (or the damage) of sleep are built day by day. And that’s pure gold for anyone preparing a full season, an alpine marathon or a long ultra with hours and hours of sustained effort.

But beyond theory, the inevitable question is: what about those of us with jobs, families, schedules, training plans and sporting ambitions? Where do we fit those extra hours of sleep? The answer is uncomfortable, but honest: if you want to sleep more, something has to give. And it doesn’t have to be training.

Sometimes all it takes are small choices: cutting screen time, eating dinner earlier, or turning sleep into a real priority rather than a vague wish. You don’t need to become a monk or a sleep guru: you just need to stop treating sleep as the drawer where you dump the leftover minutes of the day.

If you think about it, sleep is the cheapest performance-enhancement tool you have. It doesn’t require gear, subscriptions or gadgets. It only requires discipline and sacrifice — the same ingredients any training plan demands. And unlike many workouts, its benefits show up everywhere: you climb better, descend more safely, get injured less, regulate effort more smoothly, eat better, recover faster and keep your mind steadier when racing gets ugly.

Trail running, in the end, is a sport of patience, consistency and intelligent suffering. Sleeping more won’t make you win a race overnight, but it will help you build more stable seasons, more reliable legs and a clearer head. It will allow you to truly absorb each quality session, arrive sharp on key days and avoid that chronic fatigue that turns every run into a slog.

SLEEP MORE TO RUN BETTER: The science behind

Mah Study at Stanford University (2011)

Sleep more, run better. It sounds too simple, but that’s where the magic is. And the evidence. Imagine that your best training session were simply staying in bed a little longer. It sounds ridiculous from the mountaineering-hero mindset we love so much, but a classic study by Mah and his team on Stanford university athletes proved exactly that: when they were made to sleep more — close to ten hours a night — they improved their speed, accuracy and mood. They became better athletes while they slept.

When you read that study for the first time, you may feel just as fooled as I did after years of unnecessary early mornings. If more sleep made them faster on a court, imagine what it does for you as you fly down a technical scree slope with your legs already burning. That 2011 work showed very clearly that fine precision — that very precision that decides whether your foot lands on a stable rock or the empty gap between two stones — improves when you sleep more. Sometimes nature doesn’t bother being subtle.

Van Dongen

Still, many of us cling to the idea that “six hours is enough,” as if our biorhythms could be convinced by sheer willpower. But science has absolutely no intention of agreeing with us. Van Dongen and collaborators showed long ago that sleeping six hours per night for several days impairs cognitive function just as much as staying awake for almost two full nights.

And the worst part: the participants had no idea they were impaired. They believed they were functioning normally while their performance nosedived. Does that feeling ring a bell? Feeling “fine,” yet tripping more, losing focus more easily and misjudging the pace? There’s your explanation. If you regularly hit the mountains with only six hours of sleep behind you, you’re probably making race decisions with the same mental sharpness as a permanently jet-lagged traveler.

Milewski

And if it already bothers you to know that lack of sleep makes you less precise, clumsier and more distracted, wait until you see what it does to your injury risk. Milewski and his team studied young athletes over an entire season and discovered that those who slept fewer than eight hours a night had a far greater risk of getting injured.

Adults are not exempt from this mechanism: less sleep means poorer neuromuscular coordination, less ankle and knee stability, weaker pain perception and a reduced ability to correct a shaky foothold. That sprain that “came out of nowhere” after three bad nights? There you have it.

Shona Halson

Physiology also reminds us that sleep is the most powerful recovery tool we have, though we sometimes treat it as a luxury incompatible with our lifestyle. Shona Halson, one of the world’s leading experts on the subject, puts it plainly in her review on sleep and elite athletes: lack of sleep affects the immune system, increases inflammation, disrupts motor learning, alters mood and directly interferes with muscular recovery.

It’s almost a checklist of everything you need working properly if you want to progress in mountain running without falling into the vicious cycle of overload and accumulated fatigue. It’s no coincidence that your best training weeks tend to be the ones when nerves finally allow you to sleep more than usual.

Fullagar

And if all of this weren’t enough, Fullagar and his team gathered the available evidence to investigate how sleep — or the lack of it — affects sports performance. Their conclusion seems tailor-made for trail runners: sleeping less reduces accuracy, decreases maximal strength, lowers endurance for prolonged efforts, slows reaction times and reduces concentration capacity. Exactly what you don’t want when you’re descending a technical trail after several hours of running.

It’s clear, then, that sleep doesn’t just make you feel better. It makes you a better runner. And yet, we keep cutting sleep before we cut kilometers. The logic flips upside down: instead of protecting what improves our performance most, we sacrifice it first.

Mollicone

Mollicone and his colleagues added another interesting point: the effects of sleep restriction accumulate day after day, and there are specific times of day when the deterioration is especially noticeable. Does that late-afternoon run that feels twice as long sound familiar, even though you “should” be fresh? Maybe it’s not your legs. Maybe it’s your brain begging to be put to bed.

References.