A scientific approach for Mt. Whitney hiking (3)~ A better strategy to hike 14,00 feet class mountains

The summit of Mt. Whitney (September 2014)

Hiking to higher altitude

Mt. Whitney hiking is one of good examples to apply “heart rate base pacing”.   Because the popular “Mt. Whitney Trail” is very long trail, the round trip is about 22 miles.  Most of hikers to make their trip around a few days.   So, it usually requires a very long day at least.   The other factor is Mt. Whitney is 14, 505 feet height and almost all hikers could get “high altitude sickness”.  The high altitude effects makes people to get a right pace.

Indication of impact for the altitude

The symptom of high altitude sickness is vary.  Also, the altitude people feel they have high altitude is vary as well.   Even if the same person, it might be different each time.  That is one of difficulty to deal with the symptom.

It is known that a human will be able to adopt low oxygen environment to a certain altitude.   So many expeditions like climbing big mountains in Himalaya have a strategy how they adopt the altitude.  The expedition is long enough to do.   However, hiking to 14,000 feet Class Mountains is a bit different situation.   Many cases the duration of hiking is not long enough to adopt the low oxygen environment.   Most of cases, people will complete their hiking within a few days.  So the strategy for climbing mountains in Himalaya cannot be applied.  I think we need to think about different way to deal with this.

A pulse oxy meter is used for expedition to mountains in Himalaya.   It indicates saturated oxygen ratio which is almost 100% in a typical environment in our daily life or lower altitude.  The measured number is going to lower when people are in high altitude.   Then, once the people adopt the low oxygen environment it is getting higher.   So the value is used to quantify the adoption in a sort of longer time range.   In a short period, it may be useful, but it is hard to make judgment if it is all right or not.  The value is getting lower anyway, but how low a person is all right to continue to going up.  Off course if the value is extremely low, people could tell it is not a good situation.   So it is not very useful in a short period hiking.  Only way to use this equipment could be to learn how we can breathe.  If we change the way to breathe, the reading value of pulse oxy meter will be changed as well.   Just looking the reading value and people will be able to learn what would be a good way to breathe to keep the value higher.  It may help to minimize the impact of low oxygen environment.

On the other hand, the heart rate could be a good parameter to understand the impact of the low oxygen environment.   It is a normal reaction of the human body to adjust the heart rate based on the demand of oxygen.  I think we can apply the concept of heart rate based training / pacing metrology from the running world.

(To be continue)