It's lunchtime the day before my first real altitude trail run. I already feel the nervous excitement building in anticipation. This will be my last mountain run before I begin my IHT ritual.
IHT is short for Intermittent Hypoxic Training, which is essentially conditioning your body to operate more efficiently in an environment with significantly less oxygen... like a high mountain top. A fellow Scouter, Dave Mestre, turned me on to this concept when he was training recently to climb Mt Kilimanjaro. The idea is that you breathe through this apparatus that filters the oxygen out of the air for an hour each night while hanging out. Your body recognizes that it is regularly getting less oxygen so it begins to create a substance called EPO to help your lungs and blood be more efficient about using the oxygen you do get.
Yes EPO is also what cheating cyclists illegally inject to gain an unfair advantage in the major tours around the world, but there is nothing wrong with simulating altitude to get your body to produce it naturally. The WADA has approved training at altitude and using altitude simulation devices as legal even for world-class athletes (which I am not).
I am bringing a pulse-oximeter with me tomorrow to measure my blood oxygen content before I leave my hotel room, when I leave my car in the 100 degree heat, and when I reach the summit. I have also been measuring it when I do my hill workouts down here in the flatlands and it never goes below 96% at very strenous levels and hovers at 98-99% at rest. This baseline will help me measure whether I actually see benefit from using an IHT program by the time I reach Pikes Peak.
Think of me tomorrow while I am out there on the trail, TTFN! (That's a Tigger-ism for those of you without young kids)
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