Source: Olympic rower who is a friend.
Elevation: 6k ft and next to Peaks Pike at 14k feet.
I used to go there in the late 80's as a cyclist to train.
They'd follow you in a car as you rode up PP, honking at you to go faster.
Many athletes also sleep in altitute tents. Basically something you wrap around your bed or a mask, that simulates being at altitute.
But anyway, that requires doing the exercise inside the controlled atmosphere. I'd guess the lure of carbon monoxide is that you can breath it, go out and exercise on a normal atmosphere. (That is, if you don't die on the first step.)
But then, if I had to guess I'd say the fact that the effects are long-term would reduce the athlete's performance. So yeah, I'd guess wrong.
That's the crazy thing about high level sports. Either it's banned or everyone does it. There is no in between.
I don't think I would mess around with that stuff.
I knew immediately what had happened as I coughed in duck noises.
Surely it was the go-karting and the team-bonding...
I get wanting to win at all costs but this is nuts.
Other sports like baseball/tennis/etc seem to have some issues with like general steroids. But the level that cyclists go to always seems to exceed them by orders of magnitude.
I don't know how true it is, but I've heard that some cyclists had/have to set alarms throughout the night so they wake up to do jumping jacks to get their heart rates back up above the "artificial" 15bpm that their training + cocktail of drugs has caused.
Even as a casual runner (top 20% in a marathon, def not competitive), I have had to silence low heart rate alarms on my apple watch because my heart rate regularly drops below 40bpm at night. When I’m in peak condition for a race, I’ve seen it drop as low as 30.
Professional cyclists have the highest VO2max of any athlete. Even without drugs I would be completely unsurprised if their heart rate gets to 20bpm in deep sleep.
If someone is well-informed (the key point here - but I assume professional athletes are well aware of what they're doing) and still wants to do something weird and/or dangerous to their body, without harming others in the process - who is to deny them their bodily autonomy, and on what basis?
> and that people would do it in the first place
Two words: professional sports. Those folks willingly (I hope, or that'd be insane) risk their health for money, fame, and advances of medical science. Although the entertainment industry really tries the weirdest thing that I really don't understand - trying their best to shift the focus away from the science advancement as much as possible, even though this is the only actually valuable thing in professional sports.
If this is what athletes do to get to the top of the sport, then it soon becomes a pseudo requirement. If the sport regulators don’t clamp down on it then they’re basically forcing people to do something insanely risky if they want to compete.
Plenty of professional sports have banned things for simply being too dangerous even if they do give an edge.
If doing this makes it possible to perform better, people are going to push the edge of the amount that’s “safe“. Right up to the limit. Tip toeing over the limit.
People will get seriously hurt/die if they do it wrong.
It’s CO. there’s a reason the government is always telling people to make sure they have carbon monoxide detectors. It’s not because they might get too good at sports.
I’m not sure this is dangerous, per se, as long as the dosage is measured. As you learn in school, CO is only poisonous because it replaces oxygen in your blood. There’s no negative long term effects as long as the dose never reduces the oxygen mix of air beyond what a human can survive on.
This is being used to simulate altitude training, so I don’t see how you can ban it. It’ll just mean all teams go back to altitude training instead. We don’t consider altitude training doping because that would be an insane position to take. Would you ban riders from mountainous regions from cycling?
That second point also means it’s not being dangerously configured because we know the oxygen % levels at different altitudes.
An interesting article, nonetheless.
> Other details like optimal dosage are still very much in question as well. [...] Aside from the risk of death, acute carbon monoxide poisoning can cause lasting health problems, including delayed neurological damage. [..."]But if you inhale carbon monoxide, the half-life is 300 minutes. If you get toxic levels, you’re really screwed” because the gas can’t leave your body for hours. [...] And in especially acute cases, victims would need access to a hospital equipped with a special hyperbaric chamber for treatment.
So it makes sense for them to paywall it; it's not meant for a broader audience, but people who want a lot of high quality bike news.
