Of course I am referring to altitude here :-). Altitude training forces your body to create more red blood cells in order to make up for the lack of oxygen in the air. The idea would be that when you go to sea level you would have an advantage since those people living at sea level would not have all the additional oxygen carrying red blood cells. This is similar to what some illegal drugs do. Except this way it is done by your body in a safe and normal manner. Boulder is just loaded with professional endurance athletes because of this fact. How come sprinters do not train in Boulder you may ask. Well, the downside of living at altitude is that you can not train as hard. Your lungs can not keep up with the high demand for oxygen when going all out. So for sports were it is all about maximal effort it will not be good to train at altitude. This is also a problem for endurance athletes when doing speed work. For Sprint and Olympic distance racers there may be a drawback here, but in races like the Ironman were total maximal effort is not as crucial I think it is not a problem. The advantage of altitude training more than overcomes the lack of maximal effort in speed sessions.

The best way to train for all endurance athletes would be to live at high altitude and get all those benefits but come down to a lower elevation to train. That would be ideal. Some companies have invented these chambers and tents to simulate altitude at low elevations but some research done by the Olympic training center shows that they are not as effective as the real thing.

Next spring I will be moving to live at near 9000 feet and I plan to come down to 5000 feet to do some training. We will see how that goes. The problem of course is that living at 9000 feet would not be great for hot weather training. This will be a problem since the goal is to race in Kona. So I will have to recreate heat training somehow or take sore trips to the hot climate areas.

Today I swam masters and had a good swim. Since I trained in Chicago last week my muscles felt real good. Your muscles take a beating when training at sea level as an altitude trained athlete. So that helps me when I am back at altitude. I was not sore at all today.

I also road 30 miles and almost got caught in the dark. Days here in Boulder are getting shorter and shorter. Real soon I will have to start my rides really early or ride the trainer. Tomorrow I travel to Salt Lake City to meet with my team sponsor TriGeniX Sport Nutritionals.