Higher Calling

by Max Leonard

  Right, then. Increasing red cell mass is the main goal of hypoxic training – or, at least, the main goal that most athletes currently use it to achieve (cyclists are slightly different, but we’ll come to that). It’s also, as Hugh was implying, the main goal of doping with EPO. EPO, of course, is the illegal blood-thickening drug that increases the percentage of red blood cells relative to the other constituent parts of the blood. At one point WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, considered banning altitude tents, but then decided against it. So altitude tents, and altitude camps, are OK. But that still doesn’t explain the cyclists’ preference for the volcano.

  The history of altitude camps starts, more or less, with the Mexico Olympics in 1968. That year, times fell considerably short of Olympic records in endurance events and many big nations underperformed. Conversely, many of the sprint track events saw outstanding performances and records beaten. Why was this? The Olympic Stadium in Mexico City is at a height of 2,240 metres. In the sprint events people moved faster through the thin air, and because it was anaerobic anyway, oxygen availability wasn’t an issue. In the aerobic events it was simple: if you weren’t used to performing at high altitude, you were not getting enough air and were at a big disadvantage. For many nations, this was a prompt to begin a voyage of discovery that would lead, ultimately, to Colorado, Kenya or Teide.

  But not all big nations underperformed. When France won a solitary gold – in showjumping – at the previous Olympics, the 1964 Tokyo Games, it was a national embarrassment, and President Charles de Gaulle charged Maurice Herzog, his sports minister, with making sure such a national loss of face was not repeated. Herzog knew something about challenges at altitude: he was a celebrated alpinist, and part of the expedition that conquered Annapurna, the first 8,000-metre-plus peak ever scaled, in 1950. He chose a Pyrenean ski resort called Font Romeu to be the site of the new National Altitude Training Centre (abbreviated in French to CNEA). Font Romeu shares a similar altitude to Mexico City,fn5 it is blessed with a warm microclimate and plentiful sun, and is almost as far south as it is possible to go in France. All these factors made it a good bet. An architect, Roger Taillibert, was engaged, and construction went ahead. It opened in 1967; the following year, France won seven gold, three silver and five bronze, coming sixth in the medal table.fn6

  CNEA is still there and is busier than ever, a regular haunt of runners including Paula Radcliffe and Mo Farah. That it has endured shows that, even though they didn’t completely understand the science behind what they were doing, the French had landed upon something. Because the 50 years or so of altitude training research that followed has shown that there’s a bit more to it than climbing up a mountain and sitting there. Altitude is not simply a proxy measure of good training. As Hugh explains: ‘If I say, “Come on mate, we’ll really shove your haemoglobin mass up,” and I take you to Chinese base camp on Cho Oyu at 6,000 metres, yes, your haemoglobin concentrate will go winging up really quickly, but the convective delivery of oxygen is so limited by its environmental availability that you can’t train. When people get to that altitude, taking a pee or having a crap, actually, is enough. They’re written off straining at a stool, gasping for breath for 10 minutes.’

  This dip in training potential happens, albeit moderately, even at the kind of altitude cyclists encounter at Font Romeu or Teide (which is officially ‘medium’ altitude). Spend too long up there and it has a detraining effect: there is not enough oxygen to put in the big power efforts, and so muscles start to atrophy. Imagine your usual anaerobic threshold power is 400W. At 2,000 metres that might drop to 350W; spend too long training at 350W and when you get back down to sea level 400W will make your muscles scream. The lack of oxygen has limited your ability to train. In addition, recovery is slower at altitude, sleep quality drops and athletes risk getting dehydrated, which can lead to respiratory illnesses.fn7 If you go too high, your body stops synthesising protein, which consumes a lot of oxygen, to reserve what oxygen is available for more critical tasks – brain and heart function, digestion, those kinds of things. Not only will it stop making new muscle, it will also start to break down existing muscles, which partly explains mountaineers on Everest routinely lose 10 per cent or more of their body weight.

  All that said, Font Romeu is, according to many, neither too low nor too high, but just right. You can go higher up to train in even more oxygen-depleted environments, or you can drop down to levels where you can put a little more oomph in. However, some sportspeople and teams have started to follow a different philosophy. As Hugh summarises: ‘People started saying, well, maybe live-high, train-high, sleep-high is not what you want to do. Maybe you want to live high and train low. This is the idea that you go up somewhere and you pulse: you come back down, train like buggery and then you go back up; then you drop back down again, train like buggery, and go back up to sleep. You can see that it makes a lot of sense, actually.’

  It makes a lot of sense to cycling teams. The Parador Las Cañadas del Teide hotel is only 45 kilometres from the seafront – a freewheel down and a long hot slog back up. That means teams can roam the island to train on the abundant beautiful roads and tough climbs nearer sea level, then return to altitude to recover. Live high, train low. There is also ample scope for training high thrown in, which is necessary for those looking to acclimatise before a big race. Acclimatisation – getting used to performing at altitude – is what the French built CNEA for, remember. And acclimatisation is the other important aspect to altitude training for Grand Tour cyclists, who will have to put in their best performances at altitudes of 2,000 metres or more (Radcliffe and Farah and the rest generally race at low altitudes, and therefore are looking principally for the boost to their red cell mass). In Michael Hutchinson’s book Faster, Hutchinson reports a conversation with Team Sky’s head of athlete performance, Tim Kerrison, in which Kerrison is very pro-acclimatisation and fairly dismissive of altitude as red cell boosting: ‘It’s just getting acclimatised to training at altitude,’ Kerrison told Hutchinson, ‘because the big Tours are decided in the mountains, and if you go straight to altitude you lose 7 per cent for every 1,000 metres up, and the highest finishes might be 2,500 metres. It’s not really about looking for a haematological effect.’

  Team Sky came to Teide in 2012 to prepare Bradley Wiggins for what would be a winning tilt at the Tour. As a destination for pro cyclists it was at that time out of favour. In the early 2000s, Lance Armstrong’s US Postal (and then Discovery) squad would come, among others, and Dr Ferrari was a regular visitor with many of his clients. That died down around 2006, and the visits tailed off – perhaps the pure, high air of Teide seemed tainted by association. For cycling’s continentals, who are used to being able to travel by land to most places if they need to, Tenerife can seem remote and hard to get to (perhaps this is why Ferrari liked it). For Brits, used to the idea of going on package holidays to the Canaries for winter sun, it probably seemed pretty handy. Gradually they came back: the Liquigas team started using it again, and then Wiggins came. Wiggins’s preparation at the Parador was crucial. He spent weeks up there subjecting himself to the heat, the mountains and the altitude – three things identified by Kerrison that Team Sky needed to master for Tour success. The top section of the climb, Sky’s head coach Shane Sutton told the photographer Michael Blann for his book Mountains: Epic Cycling Climbs, is ‘what made him a winner’. Shane continued: ‘Teide became our world for weeks at a time … Your whole life becomes about getting to the top as fast as you can. All you can do is ride, recover and sleep. I remember sitting there, one day, thinking that we’d found a place where we can go deeper.’

  Exactly how effective is altitude training? This is the million-dollar question, and a very hard one to answer, Hugh tells me over that cup of tea. Partly this is because of the secrecy that surrounds it. ‘The data to support it are thin, because most elite sportspeople who do this, their governments and countries, don’t go publishing their data. Take Team Sky – I’m sure they’ll
have data on things like this, but they won’t be revealing it,’ he says. ‘It’s partly suck-it-and-see, and it’s partly a non-science, because a lot of the data aren’t actually out there. But we know everyone’s doing it, right?’ Lack of data aside there’s yet more uncertainty for anyone on a quest for that magic combination of height, environment and training patterns that alchemically turns leaden efforts into gold: ‘The second thing is, of course, the individualisation of it, because people’s responses to altitude radically differ by their genetics. We don’t really know much about why that is,’ Hugh continues. Hugh has two partners with whom he conducts his high altitude research on Cho Oyu and other mountains. Physically, he says, they’re almost the same: weights, heights, VO2 maxes, all of that: ‘We are so identical that we had only one dinner jacket and suit in the office, because when we were doing the show and tell and the meet and greet it didn’t matter which one of us took it, it fitted.’ However, their experiences at altitude couldn’t have been more different. ‘Matt absolutely cannot function at high altitude. Just can’t do it. And I can … I can get there. I plod my way up. But you watch Mike at altitude and it’s like watching someone have a little potter in north Wales. He just wanders up and down hills at great speed, completely unworried.’

  I ask Hugh to describe his gruelling training regime to prepare for the huge feats of high-altitude endurance he undertook during these expeditions: ‘My personal training for high altitude doesn’t involve long-distance running or whatever. I do 10 minutes on a stepping machine at the highest possible work rate until I cannot breathe, and I fall off it,’ he says. ‘I do that a couple of times and then I go and have a pint and go home. Because actually what I’m doing is telling my body: you’d better learn how to cope with no oxygen.’

  Backed by an eminent professor no less, George Mallory II’s secret weapon, stairwell-running, suddenly seems eminently reasonable.

  There is something rather monk-like, still, in the cyclists’ pilgrimage to Teide. The hotel lobby is very quiet. Among the dark wooden fittings and the plush green carpets of the lounge, a kind of enervated calm reigns. Three Astana riders spreadeagle horizontally, long bodies across small chairs in the manner of bike racers in hotel lobbies everywhere, a position that emphasises the heaviness of limbs and the exhaustion of work done, smartphones poised above the head illuminating sun-darkened faces. The pose embodies the unimaginable ennui of waiting for red cells to multiply. You know I said that there was more to altitude training than just going up a mountain and sitting there? Well, yeah, all that is true; but also, it turns out, there’s not much more to it than that, either. In between the training blocks, there really is nothing else to do other than sit around. I knew this already, having visited Isola 2000, the ski resort near Nice where Joe and his local friends sometimes go for altitude training when they have a gap in their schedules. There, the typical day was something like: go down the hill; train more or less hard depending on what the programme said; go back up the hill. Have a massage, if you’re lucky, cook something simple and maybe watch a movie. Go to bed early and repeat.

  It’s not much different on Teide, and Joe, in the Parador, confirms it. The camp has been something of a smashfest, he says, a succession of six-hour rides, many of them finishing with a team attack up the road back to the barren volcano high above. Then they ride their bikes around to the back of the hotel, where they’re stored ready for the next day, shower and eat and … ‘And the rest of the time you literally just sit in bed and read books and watch series,’ Joe finishes. ‘There’s nothing else going on in your life.’

  This is the final team camp before the Giro, where he will be one of the key mountain players helping Rigoberto Urán, Cannondale-Garmin’s designated leader in the 2016 race. Previously, Urán has won a Giro stage and the young rider’s jersey, and finished second and seventh overall, and he is, according to Joe, in good climbing form. But it wouldn’t be hard to believe that Urán has had something of a head start, climbing-wise: he is Colombian. The nation’s cycling stars have benefited from a magic fusion of genetics and environment that has, since they first broke into the international peloton in the 1980s, helped to forge their reputation as fearsome climbers. Much of the cycling-mad country is mountainous or at high altitudes: Urán’s home town is at an altitude of 1,830 metres; Nairo Quintana’s, a thousand metres above that.

  The first scientific studies into hypoxia, in the 19th century, took place in South America, and subsequent studies have shown that many individuals in populations that have long been living at high altitude, be that in the Himalaya or the Andes or the Ethiopian Highlands, have higher concentrations of haemoglobin in their blood than lowland natives. These high-altitude natives are more fertile and suffer less infant mortality, and if they have a higher red blood cell mass in their blood (i.e. their blood is consequently thicker), they are not as prone to heart attacks or strokes as lowlanders with the same increased viscosity. In the past decade there has been considerable interest from geneticists and, although the studies don’t always agree (some say Andeans and Tibetans produce more red blood cells, others that Tibetans also breathe faster, and nobody’s quite sure yet about the Ethiopians) it is clear that there are some specific genetic adaptations behind these observable advantages.

  Basically, it means that Urán was on an altitude camp his whole childhood, and that everyone else on this two-week stint is just giving themselves whatever small environmental stimuli they can to catch up.

  Joe, while not a native of the Andes – he’s from Virginia – is lucky enough to be good at high altitudes. That leaves him in an interesting and specific situation: ‘Most guys are the complete opposite to me. For them the question is, how do we get the weight down? How do we get as much O2-carrying capacity as possible? [And the answer to that is], go to altitude. You know, there are guys that really don’t deal well with it but sometimes they respond really well [to altitude training] and at sea level see a significant performance increase. And then other guys that are really good at altitude but they don’t really see that much of a bump.’

  Joe is the second of these hypothetical guys, and so this winter before the Giro his training has taken a different approach. Jonathan Vaughters, the Cannondale-Garmin team principal, took over his schedule and prescribed a programme full of weight sessions in the gym. ‘I talked to JV and he said, yeah, if you want to continue being the best in the world at a three-hour-long uphill time trial, then you can do that. But the only time that really would pay is a high-altitude climbing race. Even on a 25-minute climb you don’t quite have that pop, if it’s at sea level, to follow all the accelerations, so you’re kind of limiting yourself.’

  It’s here I remember that thing about training that the rest of us (who aren’t striving to be the best) are apt to forget: specific work gives you specific results. Sometimes you have to do precisely the opposite of what you like doing and are good at to achieve your goals. Personally, I am probably up there with the best in the world at a nice, leisurely three-hour loop in the mountains at exactly my pace and with rigorous coffee stops and Instagram breaks, but nobody’s going to give me a medal or an eyewear endorsement deal for that. And while being the best in the world at a three-hour-long uphill time trial sounds impressive and even desirable, Joe’s objective isn’t to get up a theoretical hill the fastest: Joe wants to win stages – and stage races. Hence the gym work, which is designed to keep him in contention in that crazy surge at the bottom of the climb, and also to improve his time trialling and performance in crosswinds on the flat. It’s a fairly radical overhaul of his body.

  I point out to him the suckiness of the fact that he has to spend all his winter in a gym working for this performance boost while his teammates just have to sit in a comfy hotel and eat fish and salad, but he is undeterred. He did some tests, he says, that showed his 15-second anaerobic max power – i.e. what he can do flat out for 15 seconds – has gone up by 60 per cent. And when someone tells you data like that, s
omething you can grasp and that you know is going to be useful, you can build your confidence and your preparation around that. Aside from that, he says, ‘It’s been a cool project. In the off season I found it was nice too, as it’s gave me a bit more of a chilled-out time, where I think before I’ve been a bit gung-ho, going out smashing rides in November.’

  At the previous training camp, which was in Girona where most of the team is based, Joe had some very uncomfortable days. ‘JV basically said at that camp, “You’re going to finish some of these rides kind of bonky, because we’ve done all this anaerobic stuff and you’ve gotten your muscle fibres used to feeding on sugar all the time, doing all these short, punchy efforts,”’ he says. ‘I thought, OK, this isn’t ideal, I’d like to not feel like shit at the end of the rides, but we set out to do something and we knew that that was a side effect, temporarily. It almost proves that what we set out to do actually worked.’