Hiking the Three Passes route in Nepal’s Everest region

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As of September 2017, new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Check out my bestselling new book on the science of endurance, ENDURE: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, published in February 2018 with a foreword by Malcolm Gladwell.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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Mount Everest viewed from Kala Pattar

We now pause for a short bit of self-promotion: my article in Sunday’s New York Times travel section is now available online. It’s about the trip to Nepal Lauren and I took last December, where we hiked a route called the Three Passes — a way of seeing the Everest region without spending all our time in the traffic jams along the route to Base Camp:

PERCHED on a narrow platform 17,500 feet above sea level, we paused to snack on boiled potatoes and the spicy Tibetan dumplings called momos, and to drink in the view.

We were at the top of the Renjo La, the pass that is the lowest point along a knife-edged ridge separating two valleys. Behind us, looming above a turquoise glacial lake, was Mount Everest. In front of us, an immense stone staircase led down into a valley dotted with roofless stone shelters and the occasional yak — a ribbon of green hemmed in by the soaring gray and white of Himalayan rock and ice.

Stunned into silence by the panorama, we descended the staircase and hiked on in a reverie. It wasn’t until we reached the banks of a fast-flowing river a few hours later that we noticed that the landscape no longer corresponded to the lines and dots on our map. We’d hiked for five hours without seeing another living soul, and, perhaps in part because of our solitude, somewhere along the way had taken a wrong turn…[READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE]

There’s also a nice slide-show accompanying the article, with some pictures from the trip.

Walking in a forest reduces blood pressure

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

As of September 2017, new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Check out my bestselling new book on the science of endurance, ENDURE: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, published in February 2018 with a foreword by Malcolm Gladwell.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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I present this research half in jest, and half seriously. There have been a bunch of studies lately purporting to show the magical benefits of spending time with nature, most of which qualify as pretty soft science. Still, even if the studies are full of uncontrolled variables and confounding factors, I like to think there’s a kernel of truth in the basic premise. So here are the details of this latest one, published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology by researchers at the Nippon Medical School in Tokyo.

They took 16 volunteers, and took them on two day trips a week apart. In one, they walked for two hours in a forest; in the other, they walked for two hours in “an urban area of Tokyo.” At 8 a.m., 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. on each of the days, the researchers took a boatload of measurements, including blood and urine samples. The simplest and clearest result was in blood pressure, shown here:

As you can see, blood pressure was lowered significantly by the forest walk compared to the urban walk. Why is this? The researchers suggest that the forest works its magic “by lowering the activity of the sympathetic nerve and increasing the activity of the parasympathetic nerve.” In support of this idea, they found that noradrenaline in the urine samples — a marker of sympathetic nerve activity — was lower after forest walking. So far as good. But how do forests do this?

We speculated that phytoncides (wood essential oils) from trees may have beneficial effects on blood pressure. Dayawansa et al. (2003) reported that cedrol (cedar wood oil) inhalation induced significant reductions in systolic and diastolic blood pressure compared to blank air together with an increase in parasympathetic activity and a reduction in sympathetic activity in humans.

Well… I suppose that could be the mechanism. But on the other hand, a far simpler possibility is that walking in a quiet, peaceful forest is more relaxing than battling the cars and pedestrian mobs of downtown Tokyo. It seems to me that the first order of business for this apparently burgeoning field of study is to look into some of these more obvious variables: noise levels, crowds, the chance of being flattened by a wayward bus. Until it’s clear that there’s some phenomenon that can’t be explained by these obvious factors, I don’t think we need to spend too much time pursuing magic tree oils.

(I suppose this is where I point out that the study was funded, with no apparent irony, by Japan’s Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute.)

Blogging from 5,500 metres

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

As of September 2017, new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Check out my bestselling new book on the science of endurance, ENDURE: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, published in February 2018 with a foreword by Malcolm Gladwell.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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Just a heads-up that I’m heading to Nepal for most of December, leaving in… about 15 minutes. I will still be updating the blog from the road at least a couple of times a week, but sporadic Internet access means that I probably won’t be able to respond to comments and questions while I’m gone. Needless to say, I’ll catch up on any comments, debates and so on as soon as I get back

(And if you find yourself disagreeing with any I write over the next few weeks, just assume that the lack of oxygen has gotten to my brain!)

Hiking in Papua New Guinea on the Kokoda Track

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

As of September 2017, new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Check out my bestselling new book on the science of endurance, ENDURE: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, published in February 2018 with a foreword by Malcolm Gladwell.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

***

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That’s a pic from Papua New Guinea, where Lauren and I went hiking a couple of months ago. It was a fantastic trip, and my article about it is now available on the New York Times website:

[…] We had been warned over and over to prepare ourselves for two things: mud and hills; hills and mud. While the highest point on the trail is a modest 7,000 feet, the accordionlike ridges and gullies mean you climb and descend more than 20,000 feet in total.

But it’s not the vertical that can break your spirit, we soon realized, it’s the horizontal — seeing the trail almost within arm’s reach in front of you, then realizing that you have to clamber 200 feet down a steep and muddy decline, wade through a stream or tiptoe across a slender log, then haul yourself back up the other side on wet clay. [READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE]

A few more pics from the trip:

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How to run hills, part 2

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

As of September 2017, new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Check out my bestselling new book on the science of endurance, ENDURE: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, published in February 2018 with a foreword by Malcolm Gladwell.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

***

So much for the theory of hill running – now I have some practical wisdom to impart, after participating in my first World Mountain Running Championships on Sunday. For instance, sometimes walking is better than running…

slovenia-parade

The race was in Slovenia, just outside the town of Kamnik, on a course that climbed more than 1,200 metres in 12 kilometres. With the exception of a few hundred metres of steep downhill about two thirds of the way up, it was pretty much relentlessly uphill from the outskirts of town to a rocky peak at the top. It took just under an hour for the winners to climb (and definitely over an hour for me!)

I’m still not entirely sure what my limiting factor was. There’s no doubt that my legs were burning as we climbed, but I was also breathing very heavily. After about four kilometres, I slowed to walk a particularly steep section – and found, to my surprise, that I didn’t lose any ground to the competitors around me who were still trying to run. After that, I mixed in quite a few short stretches of walking. Not something I’d anticipated or am particularly proud of, but it just seemed like the fastest way to the top. I ended up in 91st place out of about 150 competitors – not quite what I was hoping for, but a good first attempt at the discipline. The Canadian men’s team placed 13th out of 24 teams, led by a fantastic 30th place finish by Kris Swanson. Maria Zambrano led the Canadian women with a 23rd place.

The next day, my teammates and I hiked up Mount Triglav, the highest peak in Slovenia (and one that, apparently, all Slovenians “must” climb at some point in their lives). We ended up jogging up (and down) a significant portion of the route, allowing us to finish what would otherwise be quite a long hike in under eight hours and get back to the cars in daylight. Surprisingly, my legs felt absolutely fine – which tells me that it was (lack of) aerobic fitness that was holding me back during the race, not my legs.

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