You know the kind of heat that slams in to you like a 6-ton truck when you walk out of an air-conditioned room, leaving you immediately weakened? As a tourist, it isn’t much of a problem. After a few days you get used to being sweaty, sticky and lethargic, symptoms alleviated by spending hours at the pool-side bar drinking iced tea. But when you’re a competitor…
Energy is life. Energy is power. And power is what we need to run, mountain bike, paddle, climb… As the basal metabolic rate is the smallest amount of energy required by the body purely to keep you alive at rest, an additional quota will enable your body to react to environmental stressors like heat and cold by sweating and shivering to regulate body temperature and to perform work.
Rapid ascents and massive elevation gains are often incorporated into adventure races. Rarely will you pass through an area without visiting the peak of the highest mountain, scaling the slope of an impressive volcano or traversing a sky-high ridge.
You’ve put in weeks of training and preparation ensuring that your legs will hold up to hour after hour on the bike and trekking up hills. You’ve worked your upper body, ensuring that you’ll have the strength for climbing, rope ascents and paddling. But now, 3hrs into the race, you’ve developed developed a niggling blister on your little toe and heel.
The Little Mermaid, in love with a prince she rescues, makes a deal with the Sea Witch to exchange her intoxicating voice for a potion that transforms her fishy tail into legs. Little Mermaid drinks the potion, takes to land and meets the prince; mute, she dances for him, even though with every step it feels like she is walking on knives; a near-debilitating side-effect from the potion.
In adventure racng there is one element of the sport that terrifies even the most hardened competitor – sleep deprivation. There are many runners and triathletes who are eager to compete in an adventure race but perhaps the single biggest reason not to do so is the very idea that they could spend days without sleep.
My interest in sleep initially stemmed from my ability to sleep anytime and anywhere and then later from AR – particularly with regard to sleep cycles, duration and deprivation. AR-induced sleep deprivation is of special interest because in events it is easy to observe how each person responds differently, some having higher levels of tolerance than others.
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