Most people who drink to help them sleep think it's working. It isn't. What alcohol does is sedate you - and there's a significant difference between sedation and actual sleep. This week, Rich and Andy sit down with Sam Sidiji, one of the UK's leading sleep practitioners, who works with everyone from babies to city traders to motorsport professionals, to talk about what's really going on when your head hits the pillow.

Sam breaks down the science without the scaremongering - what poor sleep actually does to your body over time, why your Garmin's sleep score is probably not telling you the truth, and why the anxiety about not sleeping is often doing more damage than the sleeplessness itself.

They get into alcohol and sleep in real depth. What alcohol does to your REM sleep, why people who stop drinking often find their sleep gets worse before it gets better, what REM rebound actually is and why the vivid dreams aren't a bad sign - and how understanding all of this can be the difference between staying the course or reaching for a drink to take the edge off at 2am.

They also cover the cortisol and melatonin dance that wakes most middle-aged people up at 3am, whether you can train yourself to become an early bird if you're a night owl, what a genuinely useful sleep routine actually looks like for a busy runner, and why sleep might be the single most underrated performance tool that nobody talks about.

Plus Sam's verdict on napping, the 10-minute rule, and why sleep is like a cat.

Find Sam at easysleepsolutions.co.uk or on Instagram @EasySleepSolutionsUK.

Rich has ditched his watch. Not just for one run - for the entire Yorkshire Marathon training block. No Garmin, no heart rate monitor, no Strava, no data of any kind. Just running to feel, a whiteboard on the wall, and 20 years of experience to go on. He's calling it the naked running experiment, and it's already producing results he didn't expect.

Two weeks in, he ran Leeds 10K without a watch and took 90 seconds off his PB. His average pace was 4:02 per kilometre - faster than he believes he would have allowed himself to run if the watch had been telling him otherwise. No data, no limiting belief, no ceiling.

This week, Rich and Andy dig into what that actually means. Why does removing the data feel so uncomfortable to so many people? Why do we use our watches to confirm what we already know, but also to cap what we think we're capable of? Andy's Garmin has been telling him he can run a 4-hour marathon for years. His PB is 3:30-something. At what point does the data stop being useful and start being a ceiling?

And then Andy makes the connection that stops the conversation in its tracks. When Rich says people keep telling him "I couldn't do that" about running without a watch, Andy says: that's exactly what people say about going alcohol-free. And if you genuinely believe you can't go without it - whether it's the watch or the drink - maybe that's the most important reason to try.

Also in this episode: Rich's chaotic Manchester Half Marathon, Andy navigating the post-big-event lull, and what happens when your friends and family are done hearing about the race you just ran.

Yorkshire Marathon training block officially starts June 29th. One Valencia place still available - details in the show notes.

One Valencia spot still available. DM clean.break.coaching on Instagram if that's you.

FRIDAY CONNECTION CALL 1PM EVERY FRIDAY Register here - https://portal.take-a-cleanbreak.com/friday-connection-call-page

Are you interested in training with us towards you Autumn/Winter Goals - On-boarding until the end of July ONLY - Come and join the Clean Break Collective.

He's back. Andy returned from Peru having completed 230 kilometres through the Amazon rainforest over five days, finishing 17th out of 67 starters, and winning the Simon Small Award for his presence and leadership in camp. This week, he and Rich go through the whole thing.

It starts at Cloud Forest - 3,000 metres above sea level, clouds rising up from the jungle below, temperatures at 3 degrees - and the moment Andy stepped off the bus and all the fear just disappeared. He'd arrived. He was back in his happy place.

Then it's day by day. Day 1 down through five different ecosystems, insoles shifting in his shoes at 20K, running the rest of the day without them.

Day 2 into proper jungle for the first time - little rivers, bogs, mud, trees to go under and over, and ants. Ants everywhere, in every size and colour, for the entire five days.

Day 3 - the hardest 25K he's ever done in his life. Three enormous hills in thick humid jungle at 500 metres above sea level, a final 3.7K section that took him two hours to climb in semi-dry conditions, and then it rained for everyone still out there behind him.

Day 4 brutal but manageable.

And then Day 5 - up an on it at 4.30am, 70K, a river section with 60-odd crossings, a 7K climb in the afternoon heat, blisters forming in the dark, a torch he couldn't find in his own bag, and local kids grabbing his hands and running him through the town square to a finish line with a live band playing.

He talks about the moment the jungle became a computer game in his head, and what it felt like to find joy not just in the finish, but in the hardest moments of the race itself. And then, quietly and powerfully, he connects it all back to where it started - the decision to go alcohol-free, and the belief system that grew from that one act of courage into everything he's become since.

Rich is week two into his naked marathon training block for York in October - no watch, no data, no Strava. That's a conversation too.

One Valencia spot still available. DM clean.break.coaching if that's you.

David Jacko Jackson played over 300 games for Nottingham Rugby Football Club. In 2013, a month after getting married, he had a seizure on the pitch and a small bleed on the brain. His rugby career was over.

What followed was months of emotional dysregulation, extreme fatigue, sensitivity to light, and a nervous system so disrupted he once burst into tears in a supermarket because he couldn't choose a yogurt. Doctors told him to sit in a dark room and wait. Nobody talked about breathing.

Years into his recovery, Jacko stumbled across research connecting traumatic brain injury with disrupted respiratory patterns, and everything changed. By retraining his breathing mechanics, he knocked a minute off his 5K time in four weeks. He retrained as a strength and conditioning coach, worked with the British Paralympic swim team ahead of Rio, and eventually built an entirely new career around what he'd discovered. His book, Breathe Smarter, Run Stronger, with a foreword by Patrick McKeown of The Oxygen Advantage, came out two months ago.

This week, Rich sits down with Jacko to talk about the brain injury, the recovery, and why breathing might be the most overlooked performance tool in every runner's kit bag. They get into the CO2 science, why your perception of effort is more closely linked to your breathing rate than your heart rate or blood lactate levels, and the three things that should always be in play regardless of whether you breathe through your nose or your mouth.

They also talk about what Jacko is doing next - running 200 marathons in 100 days for two brain injury charities, Headway UK and Head for Change, starting the day after his 44th birthday and taking a clockwise loop of the UK. You can join him for as little as a 5K at 25 locations along the route.

Find Jacko at thebreathrunningcoach.com or on Instagram @TheBreathRunningCoach.

Andy is calling in from Cusco, Peru. He flies into the jungle tomorrow. In 48 hours, he'll be on a start line for 230 kilometres through the Amazon rainforest over five days - four manageable days of 26 to 36K, and then a 75K final stage that starts at 4am and has taken some people 22 hours to complete.

This is the conversation they had the day before all of that.

Rich and Andy talk through what the race actually looks like, the logistics, the terrain, the cut-off times, and why 35K in the jungle can take more than 10 hours. Andy reflects on his desert race - the moment he ran out of water with 4K still to go, his hands swelling up, wedding ring bulging, collapsing into a checkpoint with 45 minutes to spare before the cutoff. And the 10K after that, when the voice telling him he wasn't good enough became the loudest thing in his head.

He talks honestly about fear. Not the fear of the jungle, but the fear of that voice coming back when he's too tired to fight it. About whether, this time, he'll finally be able to prove to himself that the story isn't true.

And then, quietly, he talks about grief. About wishing his dad could be on the end of a phone right now. About wanting to hear him say he's got this.

Rich connects it all back to the people they work with every day - the ones standing at the door, able to see what's on the other side, but not quite ready to step through. The certainty of staying stuck versus the uncertainty of change.

It's one of the most honest episodes they've done.

Follow Andy's dot at BeyondTheUltimate.co.uk from Sunday. All the BTU coverage is on their socials too.

Gab Stone had it all mapped out from the age of 14. Loughborough, sports management, his own agency, 22 athletes at London 2012 - 13 of them medalling. He was 29 years old and at the centre of one of the greatest sporting moments this country has ever seen.

And behind all of it, he was living a double life.

Gab has battled a gambling addiction since university - one that followed him through the highs of his career, took everything he'd built, led to a criminal conviction, and eventually landed him in a prison cell. And it was in that cell, on his first morning inside, that he put his watch on the windowsill, closed his eyes, and ran a 5K around Regent's Park.

This week, Rich and Andy sit down with Gab for one of the most honest, gripping conversations they've had on the podcast. They cover the early warning signs nobody spotted, what online gambling does to remove every last firewall of resistance, the quarter of a million pounds, the Sunday papers, the court case, and the four and a half months inside.

But mostly, they talk about what comes next. Eleven years clean. Running as recovery. And a plan to run 30 marathons in 30 days throughout June to raise awareness around gambling harm - starting in Mayfair on the 1st and making his way up to Newcastle and back.

If you're in Leeds on June 15th, Rich will be running with him.

This one will stay with you.

Follow Gab - https://www.instagram.com/gabstone9/

It’s just the two of them this week, and they’ve got a lot to get through.

Rich and Andy kick things off with some genuinely exciting news - the Valencia marathon experience that became the highlight of Rich’s year is back in December 2026, and this time they’re opening it up. They’re giving up their race bibs, offering a six-month coaching programme, and taking a small group on the whole journey with them. Twelve people expressed interest within 24 hours of it going live.

There are race reports too. Client Ed ran 3:47 at the brutally hilly Leeds Marathon - only five minutes slower than his Seville time on a completely different beast of a course. Andy ran the Bristol Half with his son Johnny on his 18th birthday and crossed the line holding hands in 1:42. Rich used Leeds Half as a glorified training run, executing 12K of race-pace intervals while trying not to fart on people.

But the heart of this episode is Mental Health Awareness Week. Rich opens up about where he was five years ago - sitting at his kitchen table, not wanting to be here - and traces the slow build that got him there: the values misalignment, the coping mechanisms, the things he was avoiding. It’s honest, raw, and the kind of conversation that reminds you exactly why this podcast exists.

Andy talks about the emotional regulation rollercoaster of ADHD, what it really means to chase contentment instead of highs, and what it felt like to watch the ripple effect of eight years of choices play out in real time on a finish line in Bristol.

Oh, and Andy’s off to run 230 kilometres through the Peruvian Amazon jungle in ten days. Training’s done. The zip lines are being built as we speak. The foot cream has arrived.

This one’s got everything.

To join the Valencia Marathon Waiting list go here - https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeXj3TJDplFq-83-VlYZj_PwfGBjKDzn_3t0cqR_Z2nurhPHA/viewform

Send us a DM and start the conversation - https://www.instagram.com/clean.break.coaching/

Rich is joined this week by the wonderful Louisa Evans therapist, hypnotherapist, CBT practitioner, and someone who stopped drinking three and a half years ago and hasn't looked back since.

Louisa's story isn't about rock bottoms or dramatic turning points. It's about the slow, quiet exhaustion of a decade spent trying to moderate, the physical signs her body kept sending that she kept ignoring, and the moment she finally decided she was done negotiating with herself.

Since then, her life has changed in ways she genuinely didn't see coming. She's lost 3.5 stone, cleared up her rosacea, completed a Master's in Psychology, and is about to embark on a PhD exploring the link between neurodivergence and alcohol use. Oh, and her husband Dale — who said he'd join her "just for a year" never went back either.

This is a conversation about what it really means to be a grey area drinker, why moderation is harder than it sounds (especially if you've got a busy brain), and how understanding yourself - your patterns, your triggers, your neurodivergence — is often the thing that finally makes sobriety stick.

Honest, warm, and genuinely inspiring. This one's worth your time.