First 2 weeks in Premanon- recap

Starting tonight, we will spend 16 hours a day (yikes!) in our rooms, which have a special ventilation system that lowers the percentage of oxygen in the air to simulate high altitude.  The air pressure remains unchanged though.  There is a control group that won't be in hypoxia, but its a double blind study so no one knows who is control and who isn't.  Hopefully I will be at altitude!

Aug 30 - Sep 12


My first 2 weeks in Premanon were spent riding and doing a lot of baseline tests.   The testing consisted of one muscle biopsy and two each of VO2 Max, Submaximal effort, and CO Rebreathing tests, one round of tests each week.  This was to measure our physical abilities before going into the altitude rooms, so the researchers can see exactly how things are affected by our time in hypoxia.  All of the testing was done at a small hospital in Le Brassus, Switzerland, about 15 miles from the altitude facility where we are staying in Premanon.  We drove to the hospital in a van with a big trailer for our bikes.

8/30-8/31: Riding!

Bridges near Morez

Went on some cool road rides with Gordon Smith, Canadian (eh), pro roadie, cool guy.  Gordon runs a business designing websites... He can go anywhere in the world to ride and race and still be able to work.  What a great setup!








The 30th was a pretty short ride, up through Bellefontaine onto some cool forest roads (logging access basically) along a ridge and down into Les Rousses and home.  Nice introduction to the area!

Aug 31 route

On the 31st we went on an amazing ride, beginning with a ripping 10 km descent to Morez, then a rolling 20 km or so on this tiny little one lane road barely wide enough for a car, then onto a larger, smoother road for a super fast fun descent into the picturesque city of Saint-Claude.  Up the Col de Lamoura climb from Stage 7 of this year's Tour.  It was really long - 20 km or so, mostly gradual climbing but rather steep for the first few miles, gaining about 800 meters and overlooking an amazing gorge with beautiful rock formations and mountains all around.

St-Claude

The climb begins...

Rocks on the way up

9/1: Test 1 - Submax


My testing began with the Submax test, the most grueling one. This basically tells you the amount of power you can produce for an hour.  However, the amount of glycogen, blood sugar etc. in your body decreases over this long of a time, so its not just an hour spent riding a trainer and recording your average power.  Instead, we rode a computer simulated 26.1 km time trial course, which took about 40 minutes, and the hour effort is computed from this information. We rode our own bikes, but swapped our rear wheel for a  Powertap rear wheel (which measures power... if you didn't know) on a computer controlled indoor trainer.  The trainer was a Tacx system, which alters the resistance over the time trial course, to simulate climbs, descents etc.  But, before getting down to the real test, we did some pre-test tests...

 Nicolai and Victor were the motivators for the Submax,
there was a lot of encouragement going on...

First, maximal quadriceps contraction was measured, and would be repeated after the time trial.  Two electrodes were placed on my right quad and my ankle was strapped to a force meter.  The voltage was raised until the contraction force reached a plateau.  If you've never been electrically stimulated, its pretty interesting.  Grab an electric fence.  Then, I performed three 5 second maximal contractions of the leg, with an electrical pulse applied during and after the contraction.  The force for all these contractions will be compared to the force after completing the TT.

Next, the Wingate.  This is a 30 second long maximum effort to see how many Watts you can produce for a short time... So, all out pedaling on a stationary bike, kill yourself for 30 seconds.  This was very unpleasant, but luckily very short!  I got up to about 800 Watts max and 650 average on the first try... I felt like I should have been able to do a lot better, but you have to stay seated, and also the test was set up with a rather low resistance so I was pedaling at about 160 RPM.  I have trouble pedaling at a really fast cadence.  I think higher resistance and pedaling slower would have suited me better, but apparently that causes the average power to decrease.  Whatever...

Finally, the real test began.  The simulated course started off with a short flat-rolling section followed by a hard, steep 6 km climb and steep descent.  The middle was a long rolling section, then a 6 km medium grade climb to the finish.  It took me 43:30 to finish the course on the first try, with an average wattage of about 275... Ok, not great, about average compared to the other cyclists in the study.

As soon as the TT was done, I had to immediately do another maximal contraction with electrical stimulation. I think the force was actually higher than the initial try, probably due to all the adrenaline.

After this test, I was pretty exhausted, so got a ride back to Premanon in the van, had lunch and took a nice long nap.




9/2: Test 2 - CO Rebreathing
This test is a very accurate way to measure the total count of red blood cells in the body.  This was by far the least strenuous day of testing, all I had to so was sit in a comfortable chair and breath some poisonous gas...  A blood catheter was put into one of the veins in my arm, then I sat in the chair breathing pure oxygen through a mask for about 5 minutes.  Then 5 small blood samples were taken and tested for initial carbon monoxide concentration.  Next, about 200 ml of carbon monoxide (about the same as smoking 2 cigarettes..) was injected into the closed breathing circuit.  After breathing through the closed circuit for 8 minutes, another blood sample was taken.  Somehow, comparing the final amount of CO in the blood to the initial amount can be used to calculate how many red blood cells are in the body...  Anyway, that was all for today.  Took a nice bike ride back to Premanon.

9/3
Now I had a day without testing, and figured it was time to check out the local mountain biking.  I rode down to the local bike shop in Les Rousses, and picked up a fairly detailed map showing routes through the Jura mountains, which we are right in the middle of.  The map is pretty incomprehensible, but I kinda figured it out; there are some main routes for hiking and biking through the mountains, called the GTJ (Gran Tourisee de Jura), then local routes, then unmarked trails- which must be the hot ticket if I can find them. I went out and rode some of the GTJ, and although some short sections were very cool, apparently they log the forests everywhere around here, so I was constantly winding up on ripped-up, destroyed, mud-pit dirt roads through the woods, very frustrating.  There would be a mile of fun rippin' trail or dirt road then bam, back out onto the destroyed logging road again.  Maybe there is some good mountain biking around, but I haven't found much yet.  I did ride this 5 mile long section of super cool single track, but only after slogging through about 10 miles of mud-pit road.  Another mountain bike experience involved going through lots of cow fields (the trails just go through the cow fields), riding next to cows, around cows, through cow pies, and over cow fences every hundred yards or so.  And getting the crap shocked out of me by the electrified cow fences... Oh and by the way, in France MTB is called VTT- Velo Tous Terrain or something like that.  It was invented in Amurica, gawd darn it, and we call it mountain biking, but I guess the French have to be special and call it something else lol.

I decided to stick to road biking for the time being until I get a good chance to ask someone who speaks l'anglais where the good trails are around here.  The road biking, luckily, is fantastic, not nearly as mind numbingly boring as I'm used to.  Tons of awesome looong insanely fast descents down switchbacky roads with beautiful scenery all around, 3000 foot climbs that are 10 miles long, and some cool flat valley riding when you get tired of going up and down all the time.  There are roads so small a car will barely fit on it that are tons of fun to ride.  Plus, the drivers here are actually pretty courteous and respectful to cyclists, imagine that!  In fact, after riding here for 2 weeks, today was the first day I've been angrily honked at and flipped off by some dude going 90 mph.  That's a daily occurrence in good ol' USA! (Except of course its a redneck in a big beat-up pickup, not a euro dude in a Mercedes...)

9/4: Test 3 - VO2 Max

If you're not a cyclist or don't know what this is, VO2 max is the maximum amount of oxygen in milliliters that one can use in one minute per kilogram of body weight (ml/kg/min).  To perform this test accurately, you must breathe through a mask that measures how much oxygen you inhale and how much you exhale.and the difference is how much your muscles are using to burn fuel. The test can be for running, XC skiing, whatever, but for us of course it was cycling.

This is a very tough test, but doesn't last long, so its not too bad. I rode a special stationary bike with an adjustable workload that is controlled by the researcher.  First, there is a 10 minute warm-up, 5 minutes at 150 watts and 5 at 200.  Then, the test begins.  Starting at 225 W, the power is increased by 25 W every minute until you can't turn the pedals anymore.  At 400 W, it started to get hard.  425 and it was all I could do to keep turning the pedals for a minute, by this point I was sucking air every pedal stroke, wheezing like an emphysema patient with my head hanging down lolling back and forth.  I got up to 450 W and had to stop pedaling after about 3 seconds.  Its weird, 10 seconds at this effort felt like a minute.  My VO2 max came out to 72, pretty good for my age, especially since compared to most cyclists I have a lot more mass in my upper body (due to my massive bulging arms and pecs... yeah, hope you have a ticket to the gun show) which is just sitting there doing nothing in this test.  If I could drop say, 5 kg of upper body mass keeping my legs the same, my VO2 would be 77.  If I could lose 10 and get down to real emaciated stick man cyclist status, it would be 83, which is huge!  But, 72 is really good and until I go on the starvation diet (yeah right) it'll do.  This concluded the first round of tests, hooray!

Decided to ride back from the hospital on my mountain bike, still looking for the good trails.  I had some luck, with some nice sections of trail and beautiful scenery and weather.

I rode through a field past some very nice looking cows.  I must admit, these are the best looking, happiest cows I've ever seen!  They are white where they should be white, and brown where they are should be brown.  They are also everywhere!  The number amazes me, pretty much every field you see has a bunch of dairy cows in it.  Consequently, there is cheese everywhere.  I knew France was renowned for cheese, but did not realize the sheer quantity before arriving here.  We are served cheese for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert.  I have had to stop eating cheese this past week to let my digestive system recover and begin producing solid waste again...

Found a nice trail that went through the woods along the base of these cliffs.  According to my map there is one along the top, too.  This will definitely require some more exploring ;-)

My route took me through downtown Bois d'Amont, past the start of Stage 8 of the Tour this year.










9/5: Another day off


So... more riding! nice...  My plan was to do a 50km VTT Rando (randonneuring) today, which apparently is a group mountain bike ride.  I figured this would be a great way to find some local trails since I hadn't been too successful on my own.  The ride started at 7:30 AM in Morbier, a small town about 10 miles away, so I got up at 5:45, was dressed and ready to go by 6:30 to have time to ride my bike there in time to register etc.  Got down to the storage room where we keep our bikes, and it was locked!  This was a new development... Prevented from getting my bike, I was pretty pissed and went back to sleep.  Later I found out that Paul and Robbie (2 of the researchers) both had a key and I could have woken them up to get my bike, but didn't know this at the time.

It wasn't a total loss though, I went on an awesome road ride with AJ Baucco, a triathlete from Arizona.  We took a small paved forest road out of Premanon down to Longchamois, south into St-Claude down at 400 meters, and back up a long 10 mile climb to 1000 m, through Lamoura and back to Premanon.  Not a huge ride, but really nice and it was great weather.

9/6-9/12:  2nd Round of Tests

Arterial plumbing...

This week's testing was a lot like the first, with the CO rebreathing and Submax tests exactly the same as the first.  This time, I got 60 W higher on the Wingate, and 287 W on the Submax - a 12 W increase, yay!  The difference was, this week I would have to give a muscle biopsy and also do an arterial VO2 max test, which was a lot more involved.  A blood catheter was put in one of the veins in my arm, no big deal, but another was placed in the artery of my right wrist.  This was more involved, I had to be anesthetized first, and poked at for a while to find the artery.  I made the mistake of looking over at my arm while this was being done and noticed that the doctor was sticking a big needle in my wrist and there was blood dripping everywhere... Luckily, I got the more skilled doctor than some of the other guys and it only took him about 5 minutes to find the artery and get me hooked up.  The arterial catheter was attached to a pressurized bag of saline to keep the blood from coming out, so I had to pull the 

Getting wired

Today I would be doing 2 VO2 tests with about an hour break in between.  The first at regular altitude, just with blood sampling and electrodes all over me recording nerve impulses, even one on my head recording brain waves.  For the second run through, I would breathe low-oxygen air through a mask, simulating an altitude of about 8000 feet.  The first was the same as before, getting up to 450 W, but the second I could only manage 400 with the hypoxic conditions.

A well deserved lunch break

This was, by far, the most strenuous day of testing yet. I left Premanon at 730 and didn't get back until 3 in the afternoon, and had to eat a packed lunch in between tests.  I wasn't allowed to go for a ride in the afternoon because of the chance of the increased blood pressure causing the punctured artery to start bleeding, but that was fine with me because I was exhausted.  I took a 3 hour nap when I got back to my room.

The only thing left now was my muscle biopsy.  I was one of the last people to have it done, and I had been dreading it all week.  This was a needle biopsy, the least painful kind, but it still made my stomach queasy thinking about it.  First my leg would be anesthetized at the site, the lateral edge of my left quad, then a small incision would be made in the skin.  Next, a big needle, 4mm in diameter, really long and scary (I didn't look at it) would be punched repeatedly into my quad to remove a nice chunk of steak errr... muscle.  

This all sounded quite nasty and had me pretty worried, especially seeing everyone else come back from the hospital for several days with bandages wrapped around their legs.  After all that, it was a bit anticlimactic for me.  Things went pretty smoothly.  Carsten is a real pro at doing these, apparently he's done about 1000 of them, and he made it as un-unpleasant as possible.  After the initial prick of the needle for the local anesthetic, I couldn't feel the incision.  He warned me that he would be taking the biopsy, and told me to keep the leg muscle completely relaxed.  I accomplished this by closing my eyes, gritting my teeth and flexing the sh!t out of my opposite leg.  The needle being punched into my muscle didn't hurt exactly, due to being completely numb, but it felt verrrry gross.  The best description I can give is a tiny sharp fist or vacuum nozzle punching me in the leg and sucking out a chunk of my muscle.  It took 3-4 good hard jabs to get a big enough piece, then it was over.  I wasn't sure if the thing was still stuck in my leg or not, so I asked Carsten, who assured me it was not, then he taped the skin back together, put on a bandage and compression wrapping, and I was done.  A few seconds of stomach turning gross-ness, but not that much pain.  Afterwards, it felt like a bad charlie horse.

Post biopsy ride:  they are smiling, it couldn't have
been too bad...

 I was able to walk back up the stairs and get my cycling clothes on, then took an easy ride around Lac de Joux with 2 of the other biopsy victims, Gaby and Shaun, then back to Premanon.  I even stood up and hammered up some small climbs and it felt ok, just a little tight when my leg was bent sharply.  Robbie has had 10 or so biopsies, and told me the harder I could work the leg that day, the faster the muscle would heal. Its been 2 days now, and my leg feels fine.