The Dark Side Of Coffee

Anyone who follows my blog knows that I love coffee and hardly shy away from touting its benefits. Today, however, I’m facing its dark side. Bushisms aside, there’s very little of the “with us or against us” mentality when it comes to most things in life. Conviction is only noble if it’s motivated by thought. Just because coffee increases both physical and mental performance and seems to stave of major illness and help you live longer, doesn’t mean it’s the Yoda of the nutrition world. We all have a little Darth Vader in us. And when I say all, I’m including everything that comes from living organisms, including coffee.

Due to our favorite magic elixir and its quite famous side effect, the jitters, need to be used strategically, simply because no combination of nutrients can out perform our most important training aid: sleep. Deep sleep, quite literally, is like doping. In various stages of slumber your body releases many of the same hormones cheating athletes inject themselves with while they’re awake. Hittin’ the hay is so important that the most decorated cyclist in history, Eddy Merckx, famously said, “the Tour [de France] is won in bed.” If coffee is having a negative effect on your sleep patterns then it’s offsetting any good that it’s doing for you.

I thought about this piece last week while lying in bed at 4am, staring at the ceiling, and itching like someone in the depths of drug withdrawal. Thanks to a volcano in Iceland, I found myself stuck in Sicily for the week (poor me, I know). I still had to work, however, and when our afternoon (PST) webinar on the Shakeology Cleanse had nearly 600 attendees it would be quite rude to try and move it just because it happened to be at two o’clock in the morning, my time.

Two AM, however, also happened to be the time that my jet-lagged body was lights out. Normally I’d have no trouble with such a topic in almost any stage. But each night Europe, just after midnight, I’d find myself hitting a wall as though Smokin’ Joe’d just clocked me with a left hook and I’d be dead to the world for about four hours until jet lag would work its voodoo, at which point I’d toss and turn until it was time to hit the cafe. Not wanting to risk disappointed 600 coaches by sounding as though I’d been sparring with Iron Mike I’d finished dinner with a couple of espresso’s, then had an American-style coffee just prior to the chat.

When I’m training hard I can often drink coffee at night and sleep fine. At times, however, I’ll over do it by using coffee as an ergogenic aid prior to training. A recent study showed that more coffee can be better than less, period, for staving off cancer. But all this goodness still has limits. I can always tell when I’m drinking too much coffee because I’ll itch at night. I was never quite certain if it was wholly to blame for this because I live in a dry climate. Sicily is not dry in the least, so when I felt the fateful itch I knew I was in for a long restless night. Quite simply, I’d overdone it. And like under hydrating during a race, over eating at Thanksgiving, or pulling that extra bottle of wine out of the rack I was going to have a price to pay.

So before you parlay the 20,000 or so positive studies for a 64 ounce coffee mug filled with extra-caffeinated Morning Buzz from the 7 Eleven, remember that most of those studies consider a 2 ounce espresso or a 6 ounce mug a serving of coffee. The six servings daily that may stave of prostate cancer could fit in one Starbucks vente. And caffeine may not even be the go to ingredient as some studies showed positive effects with decaf. The lesson here is that, like with most things in nutrition, keeping your coffee servings small and as natural as possible will give your performance the greatest boost.

Dreamtime

This morning I overslept on purpose. Yesterday, I spent a good part of my work day researching sleep and, after what I'd found, getting back in bed seemed smart instead of lazy.

Most people, especially athletes, appreciate the importance of sleep. The greatest cyclist in history, Eddie Merckx, once said, "the Tour is won in bed," and our own seven time Tour winner once credited his organization that gave him an extra hour in bed each night as the biggest improvement he'd made in his race prep. Athletes are probably the biggest proponent of napping who are no longer infants. When your life depends on recovering from exercise, being asleep is almost always preferable to being awake.

Oddly enough, I wasn't the one writing a sleep article yesterday. I was doing a news piece and Joe was writing on sleep. But, serendipitously, I ended up having a hard time finding good health headlines that weren't about sleep. In the last two weeks, four studies on sleep have hit the wires. Since we didn't run them because we already had a sleep article, I'll post them here.

The first three all focused on college students. Two independent studies showed that it helped with better grades. In one, the difference wasn't the amount of time slept but the difference between those who studied in the morning vs those who studies at night. Turns out your brain works better when you first wake up. Logical, since you recover as you sleep. The third was a study on female depression and sleep and, as you may have guessed, those who slept better were far less likely to have mental issues.

Finally--as if we needed it--another study was published showing how much sleep helps athletes recover. When you're asleep your body releases different hormones than when you're awake. There are five stages of sleep and it's imporant that you hit each one as many times as possible. The more you rest the quicker you recover. If you can sleep enough it can be like taking steroids. In fact, dreaming about taking steroids might be as effective as the real thing.

When you're training harder you dream more. I'm a big dreamer. So big, in fact, that some people think the alternate world I sleep in is weird. There are places I visit so much in dreams that I often forget they aren't real. I've developed entire climbing areas in my dreams and have frequented some of them many many times. These places are so vivid that when I'm considering where to climb I'll often consider them until I catch myself and realize they don't exist. It's pretty cool because I get to live two seperate lives: one when I'm awake and one when I'm asleep.

Anyway, throughout the winter, when I wasn't training much, my dreams were blank. I either didn't dream or didn't remember what I'd dreamt. Since I've begun this round of X, and especially lately doing doubles most days, all of these places have come back. So not only does exercise make my real life better, it gives me an entire other life to play in as well. Now that I think about it, I wonder which Tour Eddie Merckx was referring to?

pic: Romney and Bartleby get fitter.

The Importance of Sleep

A pretty good study on the importance of sleep...

By Ben Hirschler
53 minutes ago

LONDON (Reuters) - People who do not get enough sleep are more than twice as likely to die of heart disease, according to a large British study released on Monday.

Although the reasons are unclear, researchers said lack of sleep appeared to be linked to increased blood pressure, which is known to raise the risk of heart attacks and stroke.

A 17-year analysis of 10,000 government workers showed those who cut their sleeping from seven hours a night to five or less faced a 1.7-fold increased risk in mortality from all causes and more than double the risk of cardiovascular death.

The findings highlight a danger in busy modern lifestyles, Francesco Cappuccio, professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Warwick's medical school, told the annual conference of the British Sleep Society in Cambridge.

"A third of the population of the UK and over 40 percent in the U.S. regularly sleep less than five hours a night, so it is not a trivial problem," he said in a telephone interview.

"The current pressures in society to cut out sleep, in order to squeeze in more, may not be a good idea -- particularly if you go below five hours."

Previous research has highlighted the potential health risks of shift work and disrupted sleep. But the study by Cappuccio and colleagues, which was supported by British government and U.S. funding, is the first to link duration of sleep and mortality rates.

The study looked at sleep patterns of participants aged 35-55 years at two points in their lives -- 1985-88 and 1992-93 -- and then tracked their mortality rates until 2004.

The results were adjusted to take account of other possible risk factors such as initial age, sex, smoking and alcohol consumption, body mass index, blood pressure and cholesterol.

The correlation with cardiovascular risk in those who slept less in the 1990s than in the 1980s was clear but, curiously, there was also a higher mortality rate in people who increased their sleeping to more than nine hours.

In this case, however, there was no cardiovascular link and Cappuccio said it was possible that longer sleeping could be related to other health problems such as depression or cancer-related fatigue.

"In terms of prevention, our findings indicate that consistently sleeping around seven hours per night is optimal for health," he said.

Dream State

Dream State

I just got up. Still groggy, but I wanted to get this down. I dreamt about watching a movie last night—the entire movie. A full hour and a half feature film that doesn’t exist. When I first woke up my first thought was “This isn’t real. I’ve been dreaming. Damn!” because I knew I’d forget and it was a very affecting film.

It was about a mom and her two daughters and a relationship they have with a girl, who was the main character—yep, a total chick flick. I can’t remember much of it, only the final scene, the sound track, which as far as I know isn’t real music (if I were a musician I’d write it down, because it’s good), a few scenes that are fading as I write, and some very vivid, beautiful, and haunting shots of Toronto. This is strange, since I’ve not been to Toronto. And the only reason I know it was Toronto, and that I was watching a film as opposed to in the film, is that I read a review while watching it because I was surprised I hadn’t heard of it, being a film-0-phile and all, and one of the reviews had said, “Toronto has never looked so beautiful.”

This is pretty strange. I’ve never dreamt an entire film before. I do, however, have a vivid dream world. I dream in film scenes. I’m usually in the film but see the world as camera shots. I have a couple of different dream worlds, where places exist, relationships happen, people try and shoot me, new climbing areas are found, developed, re-visited, etc, etc. It’s very vivid. But, as far as I can recall, I’ve never watched a movie—certainly not an entire movie—in a dream.

The nature of the film is also odd. Not that it’s a chick flick; I watch plenty of those. It was an art house chick flick. Think Allison Anders, not Penny Marshall. Kind of a Blue Car meets Gas, Food, Lodging meets The Five Senses (the only Toronto movie I could think of). But I also watch plenty of “guy” films. And last night, prior to bed, I was watching Deadwood, which is about as un-chick flick as it gets.

So do I have a point? I guess it’s the way training affects ones dream state. Lately, my dreams have become extremely vivid and I’ve been exercising less and less. Last night, they were too vivid, I think. Dreaming that I’m in a movie is one thing, but watching a movie. Hmmm. I’m saying this is a signal to begin to get more serious about my training.

I had a pretty big year last year. During the winter, I trained hard for climbing and was in my best climbing shape in probably a decade. But only for a short time before I got hurt. Then I trained a lot on the bike, had a lot of epic days, and attempted something that hadn’t been done before, where I also got hurt. Then I went off to Australia and started climbing again, since my knee was out of commission. Over did it and hurt my shoulder, which I exacerbated over the next few months until finally I was forced to just shut everything down and take a big break. So, for the last couple of months, I’ve focused on work and life and have done less exercise than at any point since, probably 1999. Mainly just rehab and easy cardio.

Over the last month, my dream world has really picked up, getting more and more vivid. Something this made me think of was that it had, to a degree, disappeared. And since I was probably bordering on overtraining much of last year, I think I can now utilize my dream state to gauge my training. If it shuts down, I’m probably doing too much and should begin a recovery phase until it returns. But when I start watching entire movies in my dream, the recovery phase is over, and it’s time to pick up the intensity again. I think I’ll go get on my bike.

PS – For the record, I’m aware I didn’t address, at all, the nature of the film. I’m going to have to think about that one. In the final scene, them mom, who’d tried to kill herself, wakes up. The three girls are in a hospital room with her. There’s no dialog but you can tell by her actions that whatever caused her to try and take her life was a mistake, and she’s grateful to have a second chance. The music starts (the song that doesn’t exist except in my head at this moment). FADE OUT.

ROLL CREDITS (yes, there were credits. Unfortunately, I don’t remember any of the names.)