Today’s question for Lindsey Parry comes from Klaus Geyer and it deals with having to cope with jet lag as an international runner coming to run the Comrades Marathon.

2014 was Klaus’ second Comrades Marathon after an 11:48 in 2012. For Comrades 2014 Klaus felt well prepared with 900km of training since January, with some decent hill training and a lot of training in the heat (as he currently lives in Central America).

Due to business reasons this time he arrived very late on Friday evening coming from America. He had a 15 hours non-stop transatlantic flight in his legs and a night (Thu-Fri) without sleep. He arrived in South Africa with an 8 hour time difference. He slept reasonably from Friday to Saturday, but Comrades Marathon race night (Saturday) he barely slept at all.

He had a terrible race. Almost from the start he couldn’t take in any liquids or any food. But more importantly, he had to battle with a horrible desire to sleep. His eyes were constantly closing, and he felt as he could sleep immediately on the road while he was running. After 35 km he decided to quit –he said he felt dehydrated, tired and completely exhausted. He almost fell asleep in the rescue bus.

Klaus’ question is as follows: Could the explanation for this be the jet lag? Are there similar experiences with jet lag or do you think it could be something else?

Brad Brown; Today’s question for Lindsey Parry comes from Klaus Geyer and it deals with having to cope with jet lag as an international runner coming to run the Comrades Marathon.

2014 was Klaus’ second Comrades Marathon after an 11:48 in 2012. For Comrades 2014 Klaus felt well prepared with 900km of training since January, with some decent hill training and a lot of training in the heat (as he currently lives in Central America).

Due to business reasons this time he arrived very late on Friday evening coming from America. He had a 15 hours non-stop transatlantic flight in is legs and a night (Thu-Fri) without sleep. He arrived with 8 in South Africa with an 8 hour time difference. He slept reasonably from Friday to Saturday, but Comrades Marathon race night (Saturday) he barely slept at all.

He had a terrible race. Almost from the start he couldn’t take in any liquids or any food. But more importantly, he had to battle with a horrible desire to sleep. His eyes were constantly closing, and he felt as he could sleep immediately on the road while he was running. After 35 km he decided to quit –he said he felt dehydrated, tired and completely exhausted. He almost fell asleep in the rescue bus.

Klaus’ question is as follows: Could the explanation for this be the jet lag? Are there similar experiences with jet lag or do you think it could be something else?

Lindsey Parry: I do think that the travels have affected him particularly negatively. There are two aspects to jet lag and travel. The first and most obvious that everyone experiences is obviously the disruption in sleep patterns. For some people it is very difficult to flick over from time zones so it takes them a good couple of days to be able to just even sleep when they are supposed to sleep.

Secondly there is also a major shift that needs to take place in our gastro intestinal tract. Because when you are hungry there is no food and when you’re not hungry there’s food. And that’s because your body works on biorhythms. So I think the lack of time that he’s given himself has caused him a problem.

When should you arrive to minimise the effects of jet lag?

When I work with elite sports people, I generally talk about a 4 day window. If you can’t get into a race 5 or more days before, then we get coming in within 4 days. So from that point of view, I guess he did the right thing. But he didn’t have any sleep on the flight over and he didn’t have any sleep on the night before the race.

Those 2 things – two whole nights of basically no sleep have come together and that is where the exhaustion is coming from and the feeling that he could literally lie down and sleep anywhere. Then the ability to take in any fluid or nutrition is probably linked to the fact that his body is just not ready to accept food and water at that time. Perhaps it’s normally at a time when he’s sleeping or something similar to that.

Comrades Marathon Jet Lag Solutions

Next time round, there are a couple of things he can do if he finds himself in the same situation. One of those is to get a mild sedative to ensure that he can sleep well on the plane. That would then mean potentially only having one disrupted night’s sleep and that’ll be the night before the race and that would’ve made an enormous difference.

Also what you can do is in his situation he knows he’s gonna be coming in late so he can move his clock one hour forward every day. So obviously he’s got a job to do and work so its impractical for him to start 8 days before and then sleep one hour earlier every night until he flies because its gonna interfere with his work life. But if he even pulls it back three or four hours it’s already giving him an advantage going in. So I would move meals and move sleep an hour earlier or an hour later depending on which way you’re doing your time travel, that will bridge half of the gap. Which means it’ll be easier for him to sleep on the plane when he needs to sleep on the plane. So those are the two tricks that I would use next time to help him and possibly even, again if it’s a mild sleeping tablet, it’s something you can probable use for the three days leading into the race just to make sure that you do get 8 hours of sleep leading up into the race and that would have definitely helped with the exhaustion.

To answer the third aspect of his question, when you are so tired there is already total disruption with your gastro intestinal function. You’ll have high cortisol and adrenalin levels which will suppress your appetite. He is going to have this problem running over three days. If you’re operating with these very high cortisol and adrenal levels, there is going to be a come-down at some point.

I think he unintentionally created the perfect storm for a nightmare Comrades Marathon and dropping out at 35km’s was probably the right thing to do. I think he could have pushed himself into some serious problems if he’d kept going.

Today’s question for Lindsey Parry comes from Klaus Geyer and it deals with having to cope with jet lag as an international runner coming to run the Comrades Marathon.

2014 was Klaus’ second Comrades Marathon after an 11:48 in 2012. For Comrades 2014 Klaus felt well prepared with 900km of training since January, with some decent hill training and a lot of training in the heat (as he currently lives in Central America).

Due to business reasons this time he arrived very late on Friday evening coming from America. He had a 15 hours non-stop transatlantic flight in his legs and a night (Thu-Fri) without sleep. He arrived in South Africa with an 8 hour time difference. He slept reasonably from Friday to Saturday, but Comrades Marathon race night (Saturday) he barely slept at all.

He had a terrible race. Almost from the start he couldn’t take in any liquids or any food. But more importantly, he had to battle with a horrible desire to sleep. His eyes were constantly closing, and he felt as he could sleep immediately on the road while he was running. After 35 km he decided to quit –he said he felt dehydrated, tired and completely exhausted. He almost fell asleep in the rescue bus.

Klaus’ question is as follows: Could the explanation for this be the jet lag? Are there similar experiences with jet lag or do you think it could be something else?

Brad Brown; Today’s question for Lindsey Parry comes from Klaus Geyer and it deals with having to cope with jet lag as an international runner coming to run the Comrades Marathon.

2014 was Klaus’ second Comrades Marathon after an 11:48 in 2012. For Comrades 2014 Klaus felt well prepared with 900km of training since January, with some decent hill training and a lot of training in the heat (as he currently lives in Central America).

Due to business reasons this time he arrived very late on Friday evening coming from America. He had a 15 hours non-stop transatlantic flight in is legs and a night (Thu-Fri) without sleep. He arrived with 8 in South Africa with an 8 hour time difference. He slept reasonably from Friday to Saturday, but Comrades Marathon race night (Saturday) he barely slept at all.

He had a terrible race. Almost from the start he couldn’t take in any liquids or any food. But more importantly, he had to battle with a horrible desire to sleep. His eyes were constantly closing, and he felt as he could sleep immediately on the road while he was running. After 35 km he decided to quit –he said he felt dehydrated, tired and completely exhausted. He almost fell asleep in the rescue bus.

Klaus’ question is as follows: Could the explanation for this be the jet lag? Are there similar experiences with jet lag or do you think it could be something else?

Lindsey Parry: I do think that the travels have affected him particularly negatively. There are two aspects to jet lag and travel. The first and most obvious that everyone experiences is obviously the disruption in sleep patterns. For some people it is very difficult to flick over from time zones so it takes them a good couple of days to be able to just even sleep when they are supposed to sleep.

Secondly there is also a major shift that needs to take place in our gastro intestinal tract. Because when you are hungry there is no food and when you’re not hungry there’s food. And that’s because your body works on biorhythms. So I think the lack of time that he’s given himself has caused him a problem.

When should you arrive to minimise the effects of jet lag?

When I work with elite sports people, I generally talk about a 4 day window. If you can’t get into a race 5 or more days before, then we get coming in within 4 days. So from that point of view, I guess he did the right thing. But he didn’t have any sleep on the flight over and he didn’t have any sleep on the night before the race.

Those 2 things – two whole nights of basically no sleep have come together and that is where the exhaustion is coming from and the feeling that he could literally lie down and sleep anywhere. Then the ability to take in any fluid or nutrition is probably linked to the fact that his body is just not ready to accept food and water at that time. Perhaps it’s normally at a time when he’s sleeping or something similar to that.

Comrades Marathon Jet Lag Solutions

Next time round, there are a couple of things he can do if he finds himself in the same situation. One of those is to get a mild sedative to ensure that he can sleep well on the plane. That would then mean potentially only having one disrupted night’s sleep and that’ll be the night before the race and that would’ve made an enormous difference.

Also what you can do is in his situation he knows he’s gonna be coming in late so he can move his clock one hour forward every day. So obviously he’s got a job to do and work so its impractical for him to start 8 days before and then sleep one hour earlier every night until he flies because its gonna interfere with his work life. But if he even pulls it back three or four hours it’s already giving him an advantage going in. So I would move meals and move sleep an hour earlier or an hour later depending on which way you’re doing your time travel, that will bridge half of the gap. Which means it’ll be easier for him to sleep on the plane when he needs to sleep on the plane. So those are the two tricks that I would use next time to help him and possibly even, again if it’s a mild sleeping tablet, it’s something you can probable use for the three days leading into the race just to make sure that you do get 8 hours of sleep leading up into the race and that would have definitely helped with the exhaustion.

To answer the third aspect of his question, when you are so tired there is already total disruption with your gastro intestinal function. You’ll have high cortisol and adrenalin levels which will suppress your appetite. He is going to have this problem running over three days. If you’re operating with these very high cortisol and adrenal levels, there is going to be a come-down at some point.

I think he unintentionally created the perfect storm for a nightmare Comrades Marathon and dropping out at 35km’s was probably the right thing to do. I think he could have pushed himself into some serious problems if he’d kept going.