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Outside Magazine, April 2005
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Out There
Miles to Go Before I Sleep (cont.)

COULD STAMPI'S STRATEGIES be put to use in other sports? Adventure racers, mountaineers staring down an emergency, and ultra-endurance cyclists experience the same brutal conflict between performance and the need to stay awake. Thirty-six-year-old American adventure racer Rebecca Rusch, whose Team Montrail won the grueling 2003 Raid Gauloises, says three hours of sleep a day for a weeklong race is common. As are hallucinations: She once conjured up a Vietnamese fruit stand in the middle of a New Zealand field and was so convinced of its existence that she asked her teammates if they had any money. Instead of wasting time trying to convince her it wasn't real, they just told her they were broke. "Oh, OK," she said, and kept going.

Anneke Heitmann, research director at Circadian Technologies, in Lexington, Massachusetts, once worked with Stampi on some of his sleep-deprivation experiments. She thinks a Stampian approach could benefit these extreme athletes. "A polyphasic regimen gives your body more chance to repair," she says.

How about the rest of us? Sleep researchers, including Stampi, agree that if you have the option of snoozing a solid seven or eight hours per night, then taking it is the best strategy for being a well-rested, efficient human being. But if you can't pull it off, a Stampian approach might help keep you upright with less than sufficient sleep.

Before I joined him in Newton, Stampi sent me a wrist sleep monitor. For two weeks I tried a variety of extreme sleep patterns. I started with the great Leonardo and tried to sleep just 15 minutes every four hours. After two days I was a walking ghoul, barely able to make a pot of coffee. I decided to go for an Ellen MacArthur solo-sailor pattern, with one to three hours of sleep in the middle of the night and enough 20- to 30-minute naps to get my sleep total up to about five hours in 24. This was a lot better, but, absent the threat of dying at sea, it got harder and harder to limit the overnight sleep to just three hours.

Ultimately I gravitated toward a five- or six-hour chunk of sleep at night, supplemented by a 25-minute nap in the sleepy part of the afternoon. Now I was getting somewhere, and when Stampi eventually downloaded all my sleep data from the wrist monitor, he wasn't surprised. He diagnosed me as a hybrid owl/lark, but with the owlish preference for longer sleep periods.

"What's your schedule?" I asked him.

"Pretty much the same as yours," said Stampi, who slumbers six hours a night, with a 15-minute nap in the afternoon. "I never feel tired."

As for Joe Harris, it took the Transat for him to discover where exhaustion ends and a coma begins. "I'm so much more aware of my sleep patterns now," says Harris, who is working with Stampi to prepare for the 2006 5-Oceans Solo Race (formerly the Around Alone).

Winning races, or even just getting extra hours in a day, is not a bad trade-off for a little less shut-eye, so Dr. Sleep has an interesting bargain for a tired world. But don't call him after lunch. He'll be napping.
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