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Science of Sport: They Keep Going To Altitude To Train - But Why?

By Owen Anderson, Ph. D. (Copyright © 2004-2006)

Many high-level runners still venture to altitude in hopes of improving their performances. The question we have to ask is: Why are they doing so?

One answer is that Meb and Deena do it. Meb took silver in the Athens Olympic Marathon, and Deena captured bronze; both spent significant amounts of time before the Olympics training in Mammoth Lakes, California at altitudes of over 8000 feet. Hey, if Meb and Deena do it, it must be optimal, right?

That darned scientific research is not kind to the idea, though (trust science to spoil everything). A full training bag full of scientific inquiries dating back to the 1980s reveals that endurance-trained athletes lose aerobic capacity when they go to altitude and end up training more slowly than usual. That hardly seems to be the way to reach one's true potential.

The latest incarnation of this kind of research was carried out in excellent fashion recently by Jon Peter Wehrlin and Jostein Hallen of the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences in Oslo. Wehrlin and Hallen asked eight well-trained endurance runners to run at 107 percent of vVO2max at six different, simulated altitudes - 300, 800, 1300, 1800, 2300, and 2800 meters above sea level.

This landmark Norwegian study showed that at just 800 meters (about 2500 feet) VO2max was already significantly lower, compared with 300 meters (1000 feet). In addition, the rate of decline of VO2max in the runners between 300 and 1300 meters (1000 and 4000 feet) was exactly the same as the rate of fall in aerobic capacity between 1800 and 2800 meters (5500 feet and 8500 feet). Overall, VO2max dropped by around 6.3 percent for each 1000-foot increase in altitude (above the baseline of 1000 feet). As VO2max declines, workouts at high-quality paces become much-more difficult to handle.

These were not sedentary runners under study by Wehrlin and Hallen; one was an internationally elite competitor, and average VO2max (at sea level) for the eight individuals was a pretty nice 66.

For these well-trained harriers, altitude-related losses in performance were even greater than the declines in aerobic capacity. At just 2500 feet, for example, running time to exhaustion at 107 percent of vVO2max was already significantly reduced, compared with exhaustion time at 1000 feet. In addition, the rate of performance decline between 1000 and 4000 feet was no different from the rate of loss in performance between 5500 and 8500 feet. Overall, the athletes were able to run for about 10- to 14-percent less time at an above-vVO2max intensity with each 1000-foot increase in altitude.

This means, of course, that an athlete training at any altitude of 2500 feet or above would be very likely to complete a lower volume of intense running per quality workout, compared with a runner working out at sea level. Athletes at altitude could attempt to compensate for this effect by shortening work intervals and including longer recovery intervals within sessions, but this would dramatically reduce overall training quality.

Interestingly enough, altitude did not harm the ability of the athletes to run slowly. When the runners ran at the measured pace of just 55 percent of vVO2max at increasing elevations, heart rate increased a bit and oxygen saturation of the blood declined somewhat, but the actual rate of oxygen consumption stayed the same, and the runners handled the "soft" exertions without problems. Their real difficulties were encountered when they attempted to run in a quality way.

One of the beauties of the Norwegian study was that it showed that even mild increases in altitude (from sea level to just 2500 feet) are linked with reduced aerobic capacities and fall-offs in performance. The Norsk inquiry also demonstrated (remarkably) that the downturn rates were the same between 1000 and 4000 feet as they were between 5500 and 8500 feet.

All of the altitude situations were simulated (in special laboratory chambers), and the athletes were not informed of the oxygen pressures in which they were actually performing, so any psychological effects associated with training at altitude can be ruled out as mitigating factors in this study.

The highly vaunted Team Running USA, the stated mission of which is "to return American distance running to its former glory," spends a significant part of the year training at Mammoth Lakes, Califoria, at elevations above 8000 feet. The question we have to ask is - why do they do that? It is difficult to imagine that American runners will begin to dominate competitors from the rest of the world when the Americans' training sessions are conducted at more-modest, altitude-influenced tempos.

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Copyright © 2006 Running Research News, All rights reserved. Posted with permission.