It feels rather ironic to be sat in my living room listening to Bob Dylan and wearing a giant plastic facemask attached via a long clear tube to a machine sat humming quietly in the corner. I'm currently sitting quite comfortably at 6560m breathing in oxygen at 78% being pumped into my lungs from the 'hypoxicator' and am now in the second 10-minute segment of a 90 minute long intermittent hypoxic training (IHT) session.
The fingertip pulse oximeter, attached to my finger glows, providing an 82% blood-oxygen saturation (%SpO2) reading and pulse rate of 68... All this to help with my acclimatisation on Everest and to reduce the potential for Acute Mountain Sickness - more commonly referred to as 'AMS' or 'Altitude sickness'...
''Place this plastic mask against your face and try to relax,'' said Richard Pullan, the Director of the Altitude Centre in Covent Garden as he handed me a clear-plastic surgical mask. The mask was linked via an omnious thin tube to a greyish white box about two-foot square called a "hypoxicator", which micro-filters the air to reduce oxygen and remove impurities. ''It is the purest air in London,'' he promised, switching on a widescreen television directly in front of me and as I felt my heart start to race.... I felt as if I was part of a strange science experiment as two lines on the console in front of me plotted my pulse (a red line) and the percentage of oxygen in my blood (a blue line) on a graph. The blue one was dropping fast: 98 per cent, 97, 90, 85 … I stared at it anxiously as I tried to relax wondering if it had been a wise move to trust a relative stranger with control over one of the most critical elements - oxygen- reqired to keep my body going...