Excerpted from CORE PERFORMANCE ENDURANCE by Mark Verstegen with Pete Williams. © 2007 by JOXY LLC. Permission granted by Rodale Inc.

YOUR SLEEP NUMBER

So, how do you improve quality of sleep? Michael J. Breus, author of Good Night: The Sleep Doctor's 4-Week Program to Better Sleep and Better Health and a friend of Athletes' Performance Institutes, has some specific recommendations for endurance athletes.

First, determine your "sleep number." Most endurance athletes have a tendency to ignore or reduce sleep in lieu of training time, thus decreasing total sleep time. This is not a good idea. Recovery from muscle strain occurs during sleep; sleep is not just a time for rest. People need to determine exactly how much sleep they will need each night to feel refreshed the next day.

Once you have that number, determine when you must wake up. Then work backward to determine your bedtime, based on how you feel each morning. Try going to bed at 10 p.m. and rate your sleepiness in the morning on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being not sleepy and 10 very sleepy. Once you get to 4, you're getting close to your sleep number and can tweak accordingly.

Many endurance athletes don't give themselves sufficient time to relax before bed. Since they train so much of the day, they save evenings for chores, emotionally charged family issues, and so on.

Instead, create what I call a "power-down hour" where, for the hour prior to sleep, you spend 30 minutes doing low-key household chores such as dishes or laundry—certainly nothing as ambitious as scrubbing floors. Allot 15 minutes to change into bedclothes and for personal hygiene and the final 15 minutes for meditation, reading, relaxation, and stretching.

Finally, pay attention to your body's need for sleep. Learn the difference between fatigue, which is characterized by muscle soreness and feeling worn out, and sleepiness, where your eyelids are heavy, and you actually catch yourself falling asleep.

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