High Points: Nap time

“Just back from Leadville,” said a friend this past week. “Scouting the route for the 100.”

About 20 minutes later, I bumped into another friend: “Yeah, we pedaled up to the Pine Creek Cookhouse for lunch. You can’t believe all the gapers on their electric bikes. Lunch tastes better when you put in the work.”

Yes, everybody here in Aspen is doing something. If you’re not working, then you are likely working out. Getting out amongst it and doing some sort of physical activity, pushing the limits. After all, nobody wants to say, “Yeah, I just took a nap.”

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Whaaaatt? A nap? That word is anathema in this town unless you’re a baby or a puppy.

But I’m here to tell you that of all the summer activities that you can do, few can be as downright satisfying as a healthy nap. Just taking the time on a hot July afternoon to lay your head back and take a load off your feet is time well spent. How do I know? Because I just awoke from my mid-week sojourn to dreamland.

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There I said it … I took a nap.

That’s a pretty bold admission in these parts where doing stuff 24/7 is the gold standard. But I make it with the knowledge that we can all benefit from getting 30 or so winks in just about any season but especially in these long days of summer.

Don’t take my word for it.

An article in the American Council on Exercise noted that “Sleep in general, and nap sleep in particular, help to consolidate memory, especially for newly acquired skills.” Dr. Charles Czeisler, the director of the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a man known in the NBA as “the sleep doctor,” said this was proven in studies involving animals and mazes. “What happens is that certain brain cells fire when they hit certain points in the maze. We’ve found that the mice are rerunning the maze in their sleep, and when they awaken, they can more quickly negotiate the maze. The animals were ‘practicing’ during sleep.”

And naps can do more than just improve your time in a maze. A piece on the National Institute of Health website stated that “Prevailing findings indicate that following a normal sleep night or after a night of sleep loss, a mid-day nap may enhance or restore several exercise and cognitive performance aspects, while concomitantly provide benefits on athletes’ perceptual responses.”

Heady stuff. And a multitude of other medical sources report a plethora of added benefits. The trick to getting the most out of a nap, the scientists and physicians say, is limiting the duration of the nap to about a half hour. A power nap if you will. More than 30 minutes you run the risk of feeling tired for the rest of the day or interfering with your evening sleep patterns.

While culturally Aspen-ites frown on the idea of slowing down for even half an hour, there are still some places where the afternoon nap is accepted as a part of life. Spain, while not as strict an adherent to the concept of the siesta as it once was, still largely shuts down for an afternoon repast. And they just won Wimbledon and the Euro Cup on the same day. In Tuscany, Italy just try to find an open shop during the Riposo at mid-day. These are cultures that respect the art of taking time to dream a little dream.

Consider this article as permission to take a nap. You’ll be better for it.