First Paula 2:15, now Ritz 12:56 in a few months of track training?????? BAN ALTITUDE TENTS!!!!

oh, and one more thing, there are plenty of negative side effects from EPO. So just because altitude tents effect recovery, epo can make blood too thick and reverse positive effects.

done right, they both offer a big advantage

It's hard to give credibility to your argument when you say "2) breathing in synthetic air to boost your epo, is no different than injecting a synthetic substance to boost your epo. And yes, it IS synthetic air, as in rAIR."

An altitude tent doesn't give you synthetic air. In fact I don't think that even exists? An altitude chamber changes air pressure. Big difference when you are talking about injecting EPO.

silly thread wrote:

Sagarin wrote:

Does anyone know if Mottram ever used an altitude tent? Also, the obvious question, before anyone else asks it, is, how much faster would Bob Kennedy have run if he had used an altitude tent? One can only speculate.

Bob trained in Boulder under Dieter "The Cheater" Hogan. Mottram has trained extensively around the world at high altitude.

This thread is really silly. Are you guys really just now opening your eyes to the use of high altitude/tents? The best in the world are doing it. Anyone who tries to do it all at sea-level (cough cough, the Hansons) is kidding themselves.

I'm not arguing the ethics of this. I simply believe that the OP has a valid point. You are kind of making his point for him, though I doubt Kennedy lived at 13,000' while training at sea level concurrently. I am merely agreeing that Ritz probably is somewhere around a 13:03 +/- a couple seconds athlete without the tent, but it's all conjecture and it may be merely leveling the playing field as I've said.

Moreover, as geeked up as everyone is over this 12:56 now, this all COULD potentially backfire, the tents, the training too fast in practice with others, etc. That's why I think Ritz should strike while the iron is hot NOW. Because it may not stay hot for long. Here's hoping it does.

Mottram sure seems to have fallen off the radar.

WTF is rAIR? it's been used repeatedly, but wtf does that mean? i'm inclined to give this troll thread 9/10. good work.

Charles Atlas Shrugs wrote:

See, there is where you are wrong. There is NOWHERE on earth where one can reasonably sleep at 12-13,000 feet and the in a blink of an eye be at sea level to train. Your jet idea is silly, and would never occur, and again, you know it, but chose to be silly. And guess what, IF someone did indeed do that, then bravo, they are not breathing in man-made synthetic air, they are breathing in air real air ("thinner" when they sleep).

Why is it hard to see that breathing in synthetic air that boosts EPO while you sleep is hardly any different than injecting a little synthetic substance that boosts EPO??? At the very, very least, you should see that the tents are a dark gray area.

While living in Flagstaff, wejo would regularly sleep at 12,000 feet and make a 70 min drive to Camp Verde to train at 4000 ft... Obviously, training Hi/low without altitude tents is inconvenient but it's not impossible.

Yes! and while you are at it ban, intervals, tempo runs, long runs and 100 mile weeks. All of these have been shown to help as well and we all don't have the time to do them.

Sorry ass post and thread.

WADA decided that the altitude tents were acceptable in a world where high altitude living/training is available to some people, but not to others.

What's natural about people flying thousands of miles to get to high altitude training venues for months and then flying thousands of miles to get back to race at sea level venues?

open your eyes kids wrote:

What concerns me is that fact that Ritz has been using EPO cocktails for years now like everybody else and suddenly he has this jump in performance.

Are these cocktails on the rocks?

Calling a spade a spade wrote:

Sorry ass post and thread.

I think it's an entirely reasonable topic of discussion. If you look at the history of banned practices in athletics, you will see that there have never been any principled bright-line distinctions between what has been allowed and what has been banned. The use of altitude tents (or, perhaps more specifically, the use of nitrogen-enhanced "air" to induce increased endogenous EPO production) is well within the range of practices that have been banned in athletics. Many of the dismissive responses to the original poster, focusing on such things as the advantages that altitude-based athletes have over sea-level athletes, do not seem to appreciate the many considerations that go into actual decisions about which practices to allow or ban. Those considerations typically have much to do with cultural norms and enforcement costs, and very little to do with much of what has been discussed in this thread.

I can see excellent reasons for banning altitude tents. The biggest reason that I see for not banning them, aside from a background presumption against promulgating prohibitions, is that such a ban would probably be more difficult to police than most other bans that are currently in effect, so that people who are inclined to cheat would tend to displace people who are inclined to obey rules, which would degrade the sport as a whole. (In economics, this is a phenomenon that is sometimes discussed in the context of "Gresham's Law" or, in more recent literature, Akerlof's "Market for Lemons.") That's a pretty big reason, of course.

Dumbass: Iquique is less than an hour by plane from La Paz.[/quote]

Have fun sitting in customs in La Paz for two hours every day.

have fun doing your workouts in diesel fumes at 12,000 feet on the days when your flight gets cancelled(often). Have fun entering and exiting Bolivia on a visa only good for one entry and three months of stay per year. Geographically it is possible, as I am sure it is in some other parts of the world also, but it is far from feasible in many different ways.

Obviously an altitude tent is basically cheating as EPO

injections. Rodal criticized 10 ago the Norwegian CC skiers

for using AT and he considered it cheating. He was spot on.

In particular Daehlie was insulted. It is now banned.

There should be an asterisk behind the AR by DR - or better

yet it should be marked by AT.

altitude tent cheats out! wrote:

Your point appears to be:

Those born at altitude have a genetic advantage over those that don't. So we are now allowing anything that will close that gap?? Some are born with more testosterone production than others? Why not allow testosterone injections? Synthetically it is virtually the same was the body's testosterone. So is synthetic EPO. In fact, both are more similar to the natural versions than the synthetic air in alt tents is to natural high altitude air. Why not allow blood transfusions from your own stored blood. IT'S YOUR OWN BLOOD! That seems more natural to me than does an altitude tent.

No medical augmentation of the body's hormones or blood will ever be allowed in sport. Ever.

Adding nitrogen to your air is a far cry from injecting yourself with recombinant EPO. As I have said before (and you have ignored), going by what is "natural" is not a good way to go about things. If you do that, then we'd have to ban advil and legalize ephedra.

Instead of an altitude tent with "synthetic" nitrogen, how would you feel about an altitude chamber that simply pumped air out to simulate the pressure (and hence oxygen partial pressure) at 10,000 feet? there's nothing "unnatural" about that. In fact, there's no difference at all between that air and the air in Flagstaff.

trytoflytolapaz wrote:

Dumbass: Iquique is less than an hour by plane from La Paz.

Have fun sitting in customs in La Paz for two hours every day.

have fun doing your workouts in diesel fumes at 12,000 feet on the days when your flight gets cancelled(often). Have fun entering and exiting Bolivia on a visa only good for one entry and three months of stay per year. Geographically it is possible, as I am sure it is in some other parts of the world also, but it is far from feasible in many different ways.[/quote]

1) You're sleeping in LaPaz and training in Iquique.

2) A visa with multiple entries can be obtained.

3) What can you tell me about LAN's reliability? Even if what you say were true, Nike has private aircraft available and/or charter flights.

4) I'm sure customs is 2hrs all the time no matter how many people are in line.

Then put an asterik next to all the athletes who train and live at altitude or ban them too. Why should they have the alititude edge and no one else?

It's true that the tent creates a low oxygen environment by increasing nitrogen level of the air, but nitrogen provides no fitness boost and makes up 78% of earth's air anyways.

This is so inane, but I've got to get another cup of coffee in so I can get "prepared" to run, if you know what I mean, so I'll clarify why it's not feasible to high-low La Paz-Iquique.

1) You're sleeping in LaPaz and training in Iquique.

2) A visa with multiple entries can be obtained.

3) What can you tell me about LAN's reliability? Even if what you say were true, Nike has private aircraft available and/or charter flights.

4) I'm sure customs is 2hrs all the time no matter how many people are in line.[/quote]

re:1: Yes, so the days you can't fly down to Iquique because of cancellations/road blockages/work stoppages and strikes. These happen often.

re:2: You'd need to get a work visa, which I guess could be possible if the right palms were greased.

re:3: It's not about LAN, it's about the insane weather that occurs regularly up there at 12,000 feet, causing cancellations quite often, in addition to the local riots which stop all business. You'd be stuck in Iquique or La Paz on a regular basis.

re:4: Yes, standing and waiting in customs could easily eat up 2+ hours of your day, every day. Bolivia is probably the most inefficient country in the hemisphere(I've been to all but 5, not including the stupid expensive little islands)

A possible alternative could be to train low(and very hard) for a week, then go high for a week and do easy jogging. I've considered this, as there are places in Bolivia you can easily get to 13,000-14,000 feet, while not being too far from low altitude(about 12 hours by bus). It's a goofy idea though, so for now I'm just going to keep sleeping in my alt. tent and running a bunch.

i live in California at about 1,000feet, every year i go back to Colorado for about 4-5weeks , and i start at 5,400feet and move my way to about 7,000-8,500feet. i love to come up here to get better w/ my natural EPO. most of the time at the last 2weeks , i will live at 8,236feet and go down to 5,436feet for my workouts, they feel easy, i only do this 2 times per week, i take the bus from 8,236feet and get to 5,436feet in 20min. when we get back to Calif we can run longer and faster.

camarillo brillo wrote:

Altitude tents ARE an artifical stimulus.

for the sake of argument, what's the difference between using them and being forced to move to high altitude if they aren't available?

Should everyone who competes in championship meets have to live at sea level?

I think the alter-G treadmill gives as much if not more of an advantage.