Tour de France riders are inhaling carbon monoxide in 'super altitude' recipe
escapecollective.com
escapecollective.com
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.
I was just trying to point out that if they wanted to induce hypoxia, there's better gases to be inhaling.
[1] https://www.indsci.com/en/blog/carbon-monoxide-vs.-carbon-di...
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.
I did a little more googling after the above comment, and it seems like another factor that (in theory) plays into the issue for the anecdote is that their blood can get thicker from doping. So it's a recipe of very low heart rate + extra viscous blood to pump that = danger.
Regardless, it's some pretty interesting/freaky stuff!
It's interesting to see it play out in an "official" sport, rather than just individual workout/ "aesthetic" tournaments. Maybe they should add some more skill elements to major cycling races.. perhaps a slalom through the orange cones of a construction site every few miles? lol
I see the "argument" as: in sports like soccer or basketball, skills like dribbling or shooting accuracy don't have a skill "cap" and are generally uncorrelated to physiology. This is compared to the skill of descending a mountain at speed, which is dictated by how fast you can actually make yourself go, which is a matter of physiology.
It's not that strategy and skill don't exist in cycling, it's that raw power output (Watts per Kg) is ultimately the deciding factor once cyclists get to the skill cap of piloting their bike down a mountain.
So basically, could I cycle down a hill at 50-70mph? Absolutely not. But among the people who can, then the competitive advantage becomes how fast you can make yourself go down that hill.
The real advantage is how fast you can navigate dangerous mountain roads which are narrow and have many hairpin turns.
If you're on a bike, that competitive edge "engine" is the cyclist own physiology. Yes, how fast you can navigate the roads is part of it, but is it not the acceleration/max speed out of the hairpin turn that represents the lion's share of overall time? Rather than the fractions of seconds gained/lost in the timing of accelerations at the turn? I guess it depends on the length/ frequency of turns in the course.
Just out of curiosity, would you be defending the skill required to do cross country as vigorously as you are for cycling?
I didn’t say you were, you were saying that there’s less skill involved, which is outright untrue.
> in sports like soccer or basketball, skills like dribbling or shooting accuracy don't have a skill "cap" and are generally uncorrelated to physiology.
Skill is highly correlated to physiology at the higher levels. Plenty of people practice as much as Messi, yet haven’t a fraction of his footballing ability.
> It's not that strategy and skill don't exist in cycling, it's that raw power output (Watts per Kg) is ultimately the deciding factor once cyclists get to the skill cap of piloting their bike down a mountain.
You’ve not watched the famous Pidcock descent then.
> the competitive advantage becomes how fast you can make yourself go down that hill.
Very little pedalling is involved at 60mph, it’s 100% skill.
This is counter to your thesis. Messi's dominance doesn't come because he has elite physical characteristics. He's dominant because his level of skill with the ball at his foot is an outlier even among elites. It's not because he's pushing the physical limits of the human body.
There might be some variance in skill for elite riders, but I would guess the density curve of skill in that cohort is a very narrow bell curve, ie. low variance with relatively few outliers. This is what I mean when I say pure skill is not the major factor in success in cycling. Most riders are going to be pretty closely matched skill-wise, and the winners are going to be those that can generate the most power for a sustained amount of time.
It’s not a knock, I still enjoy those sports a lot, often more than wider skill bell curve sports.. oh well
No, we’re taking umbrage with the fact that people are saying cycling requires less skill, when this simply isn’t true. It requires different skills, that’s all.
It's not that it requires less skill, relative to an average person. It's that skill is not the differentiating factor among elites.
There’s plenty of amateur footballers more skilful than professionals, yet can’t make it because they lack the physical attributes (speed/strength/stamina). I’ve watched high skill teams shredded by a team that just shoved them off the ball and outran them. Barcelona’s style under Pep wasn’t mostly skill, it included a HUGE amount of physical fitness to maintain a press to win the ball back.
A massive part of Rooney’s rapid decline was his shit lifestyle reducing his fitness and speed as he grew older.
No, it’s because his skill is deeply tied to his body’s physiology. I wager you’d find physical traits that you simply must be born with. His height, balance, reaction times. Physiology.
> Most riders are going to be pretty closely matched skill-wise
This is true for all sports.
> winners are going to be those that can generate the most power for a sustained amount of time.
Strategy comes into it a lot, just like most sports.
Also, there’s plenty of talented footballers that will never go pro because they lack the ability to run fast or maintain that intensity for 90 minutes (fitness).
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.
Venom actively damages your cells, CO just restricts oxygen access.
> 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.
Not necessarily. It’s not like EPO where more is better, the benefits likely cap out long before you reach a dangerous level of CO, so going to “the limit” isn’t something that’s likely to happen.
> It’s CO. there’s a reason the government is always telling people to make sure they have carbon monoxide detectors.
Yes because your boiler might leak an uncontrolled amount of CO and, because it’s odorless, you don’t know if you’re breathing too much before you pass out and, subsequently, die. That’s a different situation than being in a controlled environment where you can set the dosage quite easily.
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.
To make matters worse unlike PEDs this may be very hard to catch.
It just floors me that someone who knew about the similarity between high altitude and partial CO poisoning not only decided to try it but got others to go along.
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.