To sleep is to replenish vitality. The more intense the individual's physical and mental activity, the greater the need for rest. To sleep seems to me just as important as any other facet of an athlete's training. I prize at least eight hours of sleep per day, always deep and uninterrupted.
Poor sleep means ill health, poor performance and mood, mental fatigue.
--Carlos Gracie Jr. from "Body health" in the Sound Body issue of GracieMag.
I've been training harder than ever before, getting very close to averaging four training sessions a week. I've been doing more off-mat conditioning than ever - and smarter conditioning than ever before, thanks to the work of Joel Jamieson. My diet has improved dramatically, with the addition of some Gracie Diet-influenced additions (namely eating fruit daily and not mixing carbs). I'm regularly weighing-in at under 155 - a number I usually only make under duress in the final few hours before a pre-tournament weigh-in.
At the same time, I got sick twice in October last year as cold and flu season kicked in and, here we are a year later and I'm stumbling through my second rhinovirus in 30 days.
So what's the deal?
The only thing I can point to is a lack of rest. Since I started at The Daily Planet, I've been averaging about 6 1/2 hours of sleep a night, getting up at 5:30 am for work and hitting the sack sometime between 10:30 and 11 pm - usually closer to the latter.
In some other situation, this may not be such a big deal. But when you add in all the physical stress of training and conditioning (and as far as mental stress goes, life at the Daily Planet is no children's crossword puzzle, either), 6 1/2 hours just isn't going to cut it.
As much as I'd like to pretend otherwise, I'm 42. And if I'm going to keep up this pace, I'm going to have to get my rest the old-fashioned way: 8 hours of sleep minimum during the week.
Maybe getting some sort of cold has been inevitable (I'm pretty sure that I've gotten a cold every fall for at least the last several years). But the double-dip nature of it all - the two colds in October last year and the two setbacks this fall - speak to something more than just the regular change-of-seasons headcold.
So that's what I'm figuring right now. Assuming that I'm not going to get sick for a third time this year, there may not be an easy way to tell if this "figuring" has worked (though maybe an uptick in my on the mat performance would be one welcome sign). But I've really got to try something to break this pattern and, from some perspectives, forcing myself to hit the sack at 9:30 or 10 p.m. at the absolute latest, might be both the easiest and most effective approach.
