The Science Behind the Climb

Before we left home, the team abided by a 3-month “sleep high, train low” protocol, sleeping at a simulated over 15,000 foot elevation by our departure date. The ability to simulate altitude exposure during non-waking hours was thanks to access and the use of Hypoxico's Altitude Training Systems. Access to these systems came from collaboration with one of our research partners Dr. Patrick McKnight, Professor in the Department of Psychology at George Mason University.

Altitude tent to simulate oxygen levels at elevation

Altitude Tent Equipment

As you can see from the below graphic generated by Jake Quartuccio (JQ Scientific, LLC), we are incrementally lowering the oxygen levels during our sleep to allow our bodies to adapt to low-oxygen environments.

Note in the graph as we climb in simulated elevation our oxygen saturation tends to drop, indicated by smaller size circles in the graph. Looking closer, our oxygen saturation seems to adapt at each elevation gain over time; the circles seem to get larger at each simulated elevation. There has been considerable debate in the literature on the usefulness of normal pressure, low oxygen simulator, but our team thinks we have a way to cheat acclimatization even at sea level. Better performance in low-oxygen environments would be a critical advancement in high-altitude mountaineering but could also potentially be of benefit to the as a mitigation strategy in case a pilot experienced oxygen source failures.

Our conclusions about the effectiveness of the altitude tents will be limited because our

primary goal is to develop a better protocol for evaluating the altitude tents. We intend to

do a much more through analysis of our data after our return to the United States as well as antenatally compare our performance to other climbers on the mountain. The current research on the effectiveness of the altitude tents is limited since the other protocols only lasted a few days while we are developing a protocol that lasts several months and we are also interested in evaluating higher elevations.

In other words, our self-experimentation is a setup for a randomized experiment we assign some climbers to use the altitude tent and other climbers to only use conventional training through a lottery. The climbers with the altitude tent will need clear guidelines on how to properly use the tents and we only feel confident giving a protocol after having done the altitude training ourselves. Further, we have learned about the range of physiological values (i.e. SpO2, heart rate variability) to expect when doing this kind of training and what those values ought to look like on a mountain.