Back to Blog

Sleep or Die

Sleep is something that is highly overlooked in our society.

You don’t often hear people talk about getting more sleep like they talk about getting more exercise or improving their diets. ‘Sleep’ is always something referred to as ‘I wish I had more time for sleep’. It always seems to be the last thing that people try to improve when they are looking for better health. Yet it’s ironic that it can take decades of poor diet, or lack of exercise to catch up with you and result in serious health consequences. But even if you have a very good exercise program and you eat very well — if you don’t sleep enough for just a few weeks, you can end up in the hospital — like I did! You are only as strong as your weakest link! If some ‘links’ in your life are seemingly indestructible (like diet and exercise as they are in my life), but if you have a very weak link, you will fail and break all the other links. Here in this video is my story of how I neglected the principle of needing adequate sleep and it all but killed me in a very short period of time.

My super fitness and super diet were powerless against my neglect of sleep. I eat nothing but fruit and run all day, for days on end with seemingly no limits, but when I take sleep out of my life it all comes to an abrupt halt very quickly. I ran 296 miles in 8 days with very little sleep, 2 of those days were completely sleepless. Running this much with very little sleep pushed my immune system to the brink and I came down with a viscous virus that landed me in an ambulance to the hospital with a dangerously high fever that wouldn’t break. Thankfully I am ok, but I had some very scary moments in the ER where doctors wanted to immediately test me for baterial menengitis by drilling a hole in my back in a spinal tap procedure. I recovered, and I learned a very hard lesson. My hope is that people will learn from my mistakes and take sleep as important as it needs to be: Sleep or Die!