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

altitude tents are more comparable to sleeping with a pillow over your face than injecting epo. its basically just restricting the oxygen you allow into your body. so i guess on my list of things to also ban are holding your breath, breathing through your nose, and being congested. are you suggesting we raise a generation of superkids?

LL

He could achieve the same thing as a tent by sleeping with his head in a pillow; decreasing oxygen levels in his body, thus causing his body to create more EPO and in turn more red blood cells. Granted it's risky, heh, but would that be considered illegal? I THINK NOT. SO TENTS SHOULD BE LEGAL TOO.

Right. It is totally unnatural, in stark contrast to the naturalness of spending 8-12 hours every night in a $20,000 tent that is equipped with a mechanism that displaces oxygen with nitrogen.

There are also millions of people around the world with much higher than normal levels of testosterone. If I am not such a person, and I have the money to buy testosterone, why can't I use it and then compete in athletic competitions? After all, testosterone is a natural hormone, and I am merely putting myself in the same position as those with the genetic benefit of high testosterone levels.

I am not convinced by the argument either, but it strikes me as a lot less absurd than the arguments you are making.

What if I take a drug that stimulates EPO production? I'm not talking about injecting EPO directly into my bloodstream; I"m talking about taking, say, an oral drug (and such drugs exist) that my body will respond to by manufacturing more EPO. It appears that you think that such a drug provides a "training stimulus."

This just begs the question. The entire point of the OP is that an altitude tent is an "unnatural means" of improving one's performance.

three make one wrote:

So you take the position that altitude benefits have little to do with the athletes from Kenya and Ethiopia, but should a sea level athlete sleep in an altitude tent for 8 hours a night it results in inordinate gains and needs to be banned? Doesn't that seem somewhat illogical?

I didn't say that "altitude benefits have little to do with the athletes from Kenya and Ethiopia," and I didn't say that the use of altitude tents results in inordinate gains and needs to be banned. I simply took you to task for asserting that "altitude benefits" constitute the entire basis for East African superiority in distance running. The evidence is strongly to the contrary.

But since you pose the question: Although those two propositions may seem logically inconsistent to you, they are in no way logically or physiologically inconsistent. First, as I've explained before, the use of so-called "altitude tents" by sea-level athletes to simulate oxygen transport conditions typically found at altitudes of 12,000 to 13,000 feet produces quite different physiological effects from those produced by living and training at altitudes of 6,000 to 7,000 feet in Kenya or Ethiopia. The former is likely to stimulate greater production of EPO and increased red blood cell mass while maintaining sea-level blood plasma levels, whereas the evidence is, at best, equivocal as to whether living and training at altitudes of 6,000 to 7,000 feet results in any increased EPO production or increased red blood cell mass when compared with sea-level numbers, while the evidence is pretty clear that blood plasma levels decrease as one moves from sea level to 6,000 feet or higher. Also, the training itself is different when done at moderately high altitude rather than at sea level -- which is, of course, one reason that some people with a choice between the use of "altitude tents" and "altitude training" will choose the tents. In all of those respects, the use of "altitude tents" by sea-level athletes is much more akin to the use of EPO injections than it is to living and training at moderately high altitude, although one can obviously inject more EPO than one can get the body to produce endogenously.

Second, even if the physiological effects of the use of "altitude tents" were not substantially different from the effects of living and training at moderate altitude (a false assumption), there would be nothing illogical about banning the use of "altitude tents." There are many practices that are banned (for example, the use of exogenous EPO injections, autologous blood-doping, or testosterone supplementation) even though, physiologically, they may do little more than "level the playing field" for athletes who, for whatever reason, don't have the same advantages that other athletes have.

Questions about whether to ban particular practices are not properly resolved by simple syllogisms and crude analogies. They are ultimately policy questions that involve a number of considerations about the nature of sport. When questions about banning "altitude tents" were raised years ago, the advocates of such a ban did not publicly make a compelling case -- certainly not the sort of case that they could have made. I would like to see a higher level of discourse, from both sides, on this and similar topics relating to performance-enhancing practices.

Do they have tents that will make me 5' 6" and 122 pounds?

Charles Atlas Shrugs wrote:

watching VS right now wrote:

are weightrooms cheating too? treadmills? track spikes? unless there is any kind of concern that altitude tents pose a health risk such that feeling compelled to use them to stay competitive would be potentially detrimental to the health of the athletes, why would they be banned? do you want caffeine back on the banned substance list? not saying you're right or wrong about the benefits, but why are should they be banned?

Bad examples.

b) yes, of course altitude tents could be dangerous if you used them too long, or put them too high setting. Certainly you could cause health problems

altitude tents are not very dissimilar to epo. Each is unnatural, a big advantage, and potentially dangerous.

This is the exact information I wanted. Very valid argument. However, you said that it is only dangerous if it is used too long or used on too high of a setting. That's the way it is with lots of natural substances and even foods. But if everything is being used in a way that is not going to badly affect your long term life, I see no problem with it. The OP didn't really address the tents being dangerous short or long term and that is the ONLY reason they (or any substance) should be banned

You said, "you can take the east african out of east africa (Meb, Abdi, Lagat, Kipeter, Mo Farah,), but you can't take the east africa out of the east african (the genes remain, even if the environment changes)." Sure, the point is that altitude adaptations over generations continue despite relocation. But it is the altitude adaptation that is the primary driver for increased running performance. I doubt that sleeping in a tent will overcome that for a sea level athlete - that is, someone whose ancestors have lived at sea level for many generations. Nevertheless, I'd wager that the sea level athlete will have a latent ability to benefit from exposure to altitude and this seems to be born out when you see athletes travel to and from altitude or live at altitude, as have Radcliffe, Drossin, Hall, Ritzenheim and many others.

The impracticality of altitude travel is undeniable. The relative ease of a tent makes it possible for sea level athletes to get an altitude effect. If there is the notion that is brings added improvement (something that I think is total conjecture at this point) let's remember that the tent is available for purchase for those who already live at altitude.

Simply, it is fairer to allow both sea level and altitude athletes benefits of altitude by not banning the tent.

Great Thread inspite of an overly-punctuated, capitalized title.

Going through each post and page, Avocados Number really has the edge on the issues big time. Not to mention very good (and inspiring) spelling and syntax skills.

I wanted to post something along the lines "if altitude training is the need, why don't we build more mountains? LOL!" with a dumbass handle but i am just not in the trolling mood today.

Thanks for the read: thorough and wide-ranging.

three make one wrote:

Sure, the point is that altitude adaptations over generations continue despite relocation. But it is the altitude adaptation that is the primary driver for increased running performance.

. . .

Simply, it is fairer to allow both sea level and altitude athletes benefits of altitude by not banning the tent.

Again, you're just making stuff up and asserting it as scientific fact. What basis do you have for asserting that "altitude adaptation" is the "primary driver for increased running performance"? The fact that many of the world's best distance runners are from tribes whose members happen to be located largely in high-altitude regions in East Africa does not mean that "altitude adaptation" is the "primary driver for increased running performance," any more than the fact that virtually all of the world's best sprinters have genetic roots in western or central Africa means that adaptation to some particular aspect of the climate of western or central Africa (heat? humidity? an abundance of mosquitoes?) is the "primary driver for increased sprinting performance." In fact, even within the various tribes of Kenya, there are all kinds of hypotheses about why, for example, the Nandi tend to produce more world-class runners than other high-altitude Kalenjin tribes (one theory is that there was a vigorous "natural selection" of better runners among the Nandi because, as a tribe, they survived for many generations largely by running around and stealing cattle from other tribes) or why the Kalenjin tend to produce many more world-class runners than the much more populous Kikuyu, whose homeland is primarily in the high-altitude region between Nairobi and Mt. Kenya. Moreover, as I've already pointed out, a number of world-class distance runners from East Afica, such as those from Djibouti, have no obvious high-altitude origins.

Your final statement that it is "fairer" to allow the use of altitude tents is typical of the unanalytical nature of so many arguments about the regulation of performance-enhancing practices. Permitting the use of so-called "altitude tents" (a more accurate description might be "EPO-stimulating devices") simply benefits a particular group of competitors -- those who have a combination of extraordinary wealth (by world standards) and the physiological predisposition to benefit more than others from the use of such devices.

As I've indicated before, a proper analysis of these kinds of issues involves the consideration of many factors. One significant factor that I haven't yet mentioned here is the use of regulations (or "bans") to increase what economists sometimes refer to as "x-efficiency" and philosophers typically refer to as "utility." Simply put, regulations and bans can reduce costs to the competitive pool as a whole through collective action; if everyone is going to spend thousands of dollars or take certain health risks in an unregulated competitive environment, it can make sense in certain situations to reach a collective agreement not to allow anyone to proceed down that expensive or risky path, thereby benefiting everyone. Of course, the economic model for "collective action" solutions assumes certain parities among competitors that are highly imperfect approximations of the real world. In practice, rich competitors will typically prefer regulations that permit the use of monetary advantages while discouraging the use of advantages that are not easily purchased, while poor competitors will prefer a different set of regulations (for example, tighter regulations on expensive practices, and looser regulations on payments for athletic performance). Men with naturally high testosterone levels may prefer bans on testosterone supplements, while men with low testosterone levels may prefer no regulation of testosterone supplements. Regulations tend to be most easily justified when they provide substantial benefits to all competitors. The use of protective helmets in ice hockey is a good example of this, as Thomas Schelling (who won the Nobel Prize in economics for his application of game theory to real-world problems) has pointed out.

Regarding "altitude tents," I don't have superstrong views about bans, although I'll admit that I've become increasingly sympathetic to a ban as I've read all of these whiny protestations by pampered athletes from rich societies about the need to compete on an equal footing with people from such unfairly advantaged countries as Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, Djibouti, Eritrea, Uganda, and Sudan.

When I stumbled upon this thread, I assumed that the OP was a troll, and I thought that the idea of banning altitude tents was silly,

However, after reading the staggeringly bad defenses of altitude tents in this thread, I have actually become more sympathetic to the idea of banning altitude tents. Do the posters here not realize that their defenses of altitude tents would logically justify blood doping, taking HGH, taking testosterone, and a whole slew of banned practices?

I haven't had time to sort through this brouhaha but why is everyone stuck on Iquique?From just outside of La Paz you can drive from 16,000 ft in elevation to 1,000 ft in 40 miles. Of course it's called the Most Dangerous Road in the World but it wasn't that bad, I rode it on my motorcycle in under 50 minutes (downhill)- just watch out for trucks hugging the inside line.Unless this "synthetic" air that everyone is referring to has performance enhancing capabilities there is no basis for banning the tents.

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]

Jefe in the CO wrote:

Unless this "synthetic" air that everyone is referring to has performance enhancing capabilities there is no basis for banning the tents.

That's still up for debate. I commend you for taking the trip though.

The reasoning behind EPO and all other PED that are illegal, is not because they work. It is because they are dangerous to use. They cause adverse side effects and put the user in harms way. That is the cold hard fact. Sleeping in an altitude tent is not dangerous there for it should not be banned.

You know, I could grind up antelope kidney (kidney is involved in renal metabolism, EPO production, and vitamin D metabolism, which overseas about 200 enzymes involved in regulating the immune system), and if I could get access to a centrifuge, I could spin it, separate out the lysate I need, and merely rub it on my arm (thereby not injecting it). It would be partly absorbed, and there would be complete ambivalence with regard to what exactly the body is doing with it via a cell-messaging cascade, though it will likely raise EPO levels, but not so much as to kill a person (the body would compensate). Now, should that be considered illegal? That's really the debate we are having here.

You are using natural organs from highly aerobic animals (human organs would be a completely different ethical issue) and applying them extraneously. Heck, it's the cell signaling cascade that matters, not the ointment, most of which wouldn't even be absorbed. I wouldn't be surprised if someone had already tried this, kind of like paleolithic man used to eat live organs for ailments.

Yup. Every other banned PED has health concerns. Plenty of people have died while taking EPO- can the same be said for altitude tents? Of course not. An altitude tent just allows you to max out your body's capabilities. Other PED's take you beyond naturally achievable levels, making you effectively superhuman.

It is the difference between a bodybuilder eating tons of protein and beef to increase testosterone levels, and taking testosterone levels. One will get big, the other will get HUGE. Since Ritz ran 12:56 and not, say, 12:37, it's pretty safe to say that the benefit didn't take him outside of the human realm.

King Author wrote:

Since Ritz ran 12:56 and not, say, 12:37, it's pretty safe to say that the benefit didn't take him outside of the human realm.

Sorry, you were doing ok until that last part. Plenty of guys have taken EPO and not run faster "than the human realm." THAT is not the standard on whether or not something should be illegal (only if takes one "outside the human realm.").

As far as the dangers? The tents may not be as benign as you suggest. Read this short article and the final two concluding paragraphs. The authors conclude that the tents are very capable of posing health risks and being abused.

Not to be too grim, but: Who will be the first athlete (if it hasn't happened already) to be found dead in a hypoxic tent?

This might just be the best troll! Ever!

bboxbonn wrote:

The reasoning behind EPO and all other PED that are illegal, is not because they work. It is because they are dangerous to use. They cause adverse side effects and put the user in harms way. That is the cold hard fact.

So if an athlete uses EPO under the supervision of a doctor, then the EPO use should be allowed, right?

The OP is ignorant.