Altitude

A lot of people I talk to ask what impact altitude has on my training and performance. The Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs where I train is somewhere around 6300 feet (1900 meters for all you metric fans out there). When you spend a considerable amount of time at altitude, your body physiology starts changing. Your body responds to the hypoxic conditions by turning up the production of red blood cells to increase your oxygen carrying capacity in the reduced oxygen environment. You never really feel good at altitude though, you just get used to the lack of air and your fitness level goes up. Many Olympians come train at the Olympic Training Center specifically to increase their fitness and prepare for sea level events. Michael Phelps and his team are currently out here getting ready for the Olympics.

The big perk of training at altitude comes when you go back down to sea level. Your body is geared up for a reduced oxygen environment, but now you have a lot more oxygen going through your system. Imagine waking up one day and suddenly being able to run faster, have more endurance, and overall feel stronger and that is what going to sea level is like. It feels great to train and compete at sea level, but over time your body realizes you have too many red blood cells and reverts back to a lower count.

So if it feels great to go to sea level, imagine the exact opposite when we come home. This last trip kept me at sea level for four weeks, long enough to substantially reduce my oxygen carrying capacity. This is a well known consequence of spending time at low altitude and we plan for it, but the first week at altitude is never fun. This week has been really rough as I am trying to get back into altitude training and begin my final push toward the Olympics. I am swimming around 4 miles every morning and averaging around 9 miles of running in the afternoon. It has been a struggle to simply finish the workouts, but the hypoxic feeling should be gone by next week. In the mean time, I have to intake a tremendous amount of iron supplements so that my body can produce enough red cells to compensate for the altitude.

In a future blog I will discuss some very advanced training that we have developed to compensate for the altitude without going to sea level. It’s a revolutionary training technique called Supplemental Oxygen Training designed to maximize the benefit of altitude.