Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep (16 page)

It was fortunate timing. Canada around that time had decided that when it came to sports, it was tired of being the nation of nice. The 2010 Winter Olympics were set to take place in Vancouver in a few years, and the Canadian government made it a priority to win more medals than any other nation. It set up a $6 million fund called Own the Podium for research and development, spending money on things like studying the aerodynamics of bobsleds in wind tunnels. Samuels submitted an application to come up with ways to harness the circadian rhythm. He had a two-pronged approach. First, Samuels needed to find a way for an athlete to quickly overcome jet lag after traveling across multiple time zones. Then, he wanted to manipulate the circadian dips that would affect an athlete’s performance no matter when or where an event took place. The challenge was to master time and space in such a way that the body of, say, a Canadian sprinter competing in Beijing at 2:30 p.m. would think that it was really 6:00 p.m. and time for a boost of energy rather than a nap. Done correctly, mastering the body’s rhythms could provide a slight advantage over one’s rivals.

To do so, Samuels drew on research that went as far back as 1662, when French philosopher René Descartes correctly noted that the tiny pineal gland in the brain reacted to light hitting the eyes. He called this gland “the seat of the soul” because he believed that it was responsible for thought and the movements of the body. In the 1950s, researchers at Yale University discovered that one of the chief functions of the pineal gland is the production of a hormone called melatonin, which is released into the bloodstream at night. Like a parent singing nursery rhymes to a toddler, melatonin coaxes the body to fall asleep. High levels remain in the bloodstream into the morning. The discovery of this hormone helped scientists identify the gears behind the biological clock: a small cluster of cells deep behind the eyes called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (known as the SCN to biologists). These cells let the pineal gland know when the eyes pick up bright light. When it’s dark for a while, the pineal gland assumes it is bedtime and sends melatonin throughout the body to let the organs know that it is time to close up shop.

But here’s the thing: the pineal gland can be tricked pretty easily. For all of its wonders, the human body is still a reflection of a world where the only source of bright light was the sun. Abundant white light—especially white light with a slight blue tint that mimics the sky on a clear day—can fool the pineal gland into thinking that the sun is still up. That is why watching television or working on a laptop late at night can make it harder to fall asleep. The SCN registers the light from the TV and tells the pineal gland that it is a little bit of sunlight because that is all the brain is built to understand. With enough bright light over the right amount of time, the pineal gland becomes something of a reverse snooze button, holding off on releasing melatonin because it thinks that it is still daytime.

Jet lag is debilitating because, light-wise, the body has no idea what is going on. You can feel this yourself the next time you travel across time zones. Let’s say that you are flying overnight from New York to Paris. When you land at eight o’clock in the morning Paris time, your body thinks that it is two o’clock in the morning, which it is back in the States. Walking out onto a Parisian street bathed in morning sunlight confuses the body even more. While the reasoning part of your brain grasps the concept of a time difference, your pineal gland only understands light. Because the human body wasn’t designed to hop across an ocean overnight, this gland reacts to sunlight coming at what it thinks is the middle of the night and considers it a sign of an abnormally long day. In effect, the body becomes convinced that it is still the afternoon of the day before and takes steps to rewind the circadian rhythm back an hour or two. Now you have a bigger problem: your body isn’t just six hours off of Paris time, it is eight hours off. And as anyone who has tried to fall asleep early for a few nights before a flight east across time zones knows, attempting to prepare the body for a time change is often an exercise in frustration. Many travelers simply can’t fall asleep at seven in the evening, no matter how exhausted they are during the day, because of the circadian rhythm’s early-evening shot of energy.

Samuels’s plan for the Canadian Olympic team came down to a hyper-awareness of light and its effects on sleep. He created a plan where athletes would begin to shift their exposure to light before they traveled, starting one day for each time zone that separated them from the place of competition. This would allow them to adjust to the time zone quickly once they got there and, just as important, to significantly improve their sleep the night immediately before an event. If this is done correctly, a Canadian athlete would have a natural edge. “The research into sleep has been done, but no one cares about it,” Samuels told me. “The U.S. cares even less. In the U.S. you’ll find it very difficult on a global scale to get coaches and trainers interested in sleep to the same degree that we are in Canada.”

He brought up a chart on his computer. “As I sit here talking with you, the lead of the BMX national team just sent me the upcoming world championship schedule. Soon, we will send her a team travel plan back with everything they need to do from the minute they get on the plane to the minute that they compete,” he said.

Samuels believes that bending an athlete’s circadian rhythm in preparation for competition will eventually usher in a new era of performance and sports training. “Ten years ago I would have been very reticent to say that light did this or that, but now we know that light improves alertness,” he said. “I was around in the sixties when Gatorade was invented, and this seems like it has the same potential to affect performance.”

Thanks to Samuels, the Canadian Alpine Ski Team travels with fifteen to twenty light boxes, a type of oversized flat lamp that simulates natural sunlight. Once at the site of a competition, the athletes will eat breakfast while sitting in front of one of them. The light stabilizes the circadian rhythm and improves alertness. Many will also spend ten minutes in front of a light box immediately before a race, especially if they are competing when their circadian rhythm normally dips.

Theoretically, this would improve their performance. I asked Samuels how one knows that the light strategy has worked in the real world.

“You don’t,” he replied simply. “My job isn’t to sit here and take credit for wins because I worked with the teams. I never do that. These are athletes and they win and lose on their own.”

Light improves the chances that athletes will compete at their peak no matter where or when the event takes place, he said. It is a form of sports training that isn’t about charting lost body fat, lifting heavier weights, or ingesting the latest supplement. The focus is instead on harnessing the body’s subtle rhythms so that an athlete doesn’t walk onto a playing field with an unseen handicap. Beyond that, anything can happen. In all sports, athletes competing at their maximum ability sometimes lose.

But light is only part of how the circadian rhythm dictates athletic performance. The other part is actually getting athletes to sleep, which can be tougher than it sounds when they are constantly on the road. And perhaps no sport punishes athletes’ sleep schedules over such a long time as professional baseball.

Fernando Montes has spent all of his adult life testing the limits of the human body. Unlike researchers in the military, he is not interested in the body’s ability to withstand extremes of hot or cold or how long someone can go without food. Montes’s interest in the body is limited to what makes it possible for one person to throw a baseball faster than another one.

Not long after he graduated from college, he found himself working on the strength and conditioning crew for Stanford’s football team. After the team won its 1993 bowl game, Montes was offered a job as the strength coach for the pitching staff of the Cleveland Indians. The biggest change in jumping from football to baseball was the amount of time between one game and the next. The increased frequency of games radically altered Montes’s concepts of strength and endurance. In football, his job was to shape brute strength, crafting a team full of athletes strong enough to bring down or run over the guy on the other team. But in baseball, sheer physical size wasn’t as important as consistency. His new challenge was to train a pitcher’s body to be able to hurl a baseball at speeds often over ninety miles per hour, more than a hundred times a game—and then do it again four days later. Added to this was a grueling 162-game, six-month schedule that would often include two straight weeks crisscrossing the country. Making the playoffs or the World Series could add another month and a half to the schedule. “In football the whole environment of recovery is not really truly understood because it doesn’t need to be,” Montes told me. “You have more days to recover because you’re not playing everyday. It’s a big difference from baseball, basketball, and hockey. Baseball is the worst because you’re playing every night.”

Schedules that feature six games in seven days make fatigue an unspoken part of baseball’s culture. For a long time, players relied on amphetamines for a game-time boost of energy. Pills became a part of baseball in the wake of World War II, when returning veterans facing a double header turned to the same drugs the military gave them for use during combat. When the drugs were banned before the 2006 season, players said that their absence would be noticeable immediately. “It’s going to have a lot bigger effect on the game than steroid testing,” Chipper Jones, the Atlanta Braves’ All-Star third baseman, said at the time. “It’s more rampant than steroids. . . . I think the fringe players will be weeded out.”

For most coaches, the long season boils down to a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t dilemma. Resting a top player so that he can perform at a high level late in the season comes with the risk that the absence will result in a loss today. Recovery was something that sports trainers in the United States concerned themselves with on a superficial level by giving athletes ice packs and massages, but Montes saw that sleep was rarely a part of the conversation. This seemed crazy. A pitcher’s body won’t recover from the trauma of the last game in time for his next start without sleep, for a number of reasons. Some of them are physical. Sleep, for instance, is the time when the body sends growth hormones to repair damaged muscles. But pitching is unique because it isn’t only about muscle. Knowing the tendencies of your opponent—whether he will bite at a high curveball, how often he swings on the first pitch—is half of the battle. Without enough sleep, a pitcher might lose the ability to learn and analyze information that is vital to his success. A pitcher who isn’t getting enough sleep has already lost the mental battle that he fights every time he is on the mound.

If carried out correctly, however, a schedule that emphasizes sleep could result in players who consistently play well. An athlete who can recover quickly creates an advantage that increases exponentially as the schedule gets longer, because it allows the best players to play in their top condition during the maximum number of games against progressively weaker rivals. If he could train players’ bodies to regularly perform at their peaks despite the schedule and without banned drugs, Montes would find one of the holy grails of baseball. But one of his first challenges was to find an answer to something that bothered him from the minute he stepped onto a baseball diamond.

Pitchers, unlike other players on the field, aren’t judged on their foot speed, body strength, or any other standard test of physical ability. What makes a good pitcher isn’t the ability to throw a ball faster than anyone else. It is the ability to throw strikes that batters can’t hit. The result is a startling mix of body shapes. Yankee’s All-Star pitcher CC Sabathia, for instance, is known as one of the most durable pitchers in the league because of the high number of complete games he finishes each year. He accomplished these feats while weighing close to three hundred pounds. In 2011, he surprised sports writers by showing up at spring training twenty pounds lighter, but downplayed the rumor that he was on a more stringent workout routine. “I stopped eating Cap’n Crunch every day . . . I used to eat that stuff by the box,” he said. Sabathia, one of the top players in the league, was also one of the heaviest, and yet other top pitchers were tall and lanky. Age, too, seemed to have little effect on a pitcher’s effectiveness. The Boston Red Sox’s Tim Wakefield was forty-five at the start of the 2011 season, and already held the record for the oldest pitcher to ever play for the team. And yet he remained in the starting rotation on the strength of a knuckleball that rarely topped speeds of seventy miles per hour.

Montes wanted to find out if there was a measure that could help him evaluate his pitchers on a common scale. “In baseball, they keep stats up the wazoo,” he told me. “So one of the first things I asked was, how can you tell me that a pitcher is in shape? Still to this day there isn’t an answer, and as far as I know it was never studied by anyone.” He turned to conversations he once had with sports trainers from the old Soviet Union who said that their tradition of emphasizing recovery time between events was an overlooked aspect of their success. Sleep obviously affected performance, and yet that didn’t register within a sports world that often considers rest the sign of a soft athlete. Football’s so-called Hell Weeks, for instance, are notorious for players’ having to participate in full-contact drills twice a day for five days with little time for sleep or recovery. Yet this measure of toughness is deceiving. Surviving a Hell Week doesn’t mean that a player will maintain his strength over the course of a full season. An athlete who can recover faster between games, on the other hand, has a clear advantage over competitors still sore from the last contest.