Janja Garnbret climbing in Austria

[rcjordan]

https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1ozre18/janja_garnbret_climbing_in_austria/

[Brad]

That is just amazing.  Crazy, in a good way, too.  Good for her.

[ergophobe]

Janja is pretty incredible. Her speciality is indoor climbing and she utterly dominates there like nobody has ever.

Climbing is becoming this weird sport where it is becoming harder and harder to be good both indoors and out. Some of the top competition climbers rarely touch actual, outdoor, mineral rock. Some go years without doing so.

The only one in recent years to be a great climber outdoors and also win comps was Adam Ondra. He thought that with his dominance outdoors he could just walk into the comps and win. He did well, but found he needed to train for it exclusively. So he trained for a year, won the World Cup, then quit competitions because he thought they were boring.

The most respected climbers, by the way, mostly don't enter comps at all. I would say that other than Janja and a couple of others, most climbers could not name a top World Cup competitor but most could quickly name a dozen top outdoor climbers.

[rcjordan]

What Kilian Jornet Packs to Climb Every 14er in the Mountain West in 31 days | WIRED

https://www.wired.com/story/kilian-jornets-mountain-conquering-starter-pack/

[ergophobe]

The 17you accused me of being a "Kilian superfan."

We traveled to Truckee for three days this summer just to see him run by. He's superhuman.

[ergophobe]

BTW - finally home and looked at the article in full. It's basically an ad. It mentions only the shoes made by Kilian's company, the watch and flask by his major sponsors, and the outrageously expensive probiotic (Lyvecaps) that he most certainly gets for free and is probably paid to promote.

BTW, this is simply not borne out by science and sounds like something from RFK:

Jornet is such a fan that he noted that he never even drinks filtered water in the backcountry. "If you have a good immune system and good bacteria in your stomach, I have never had problems," he said.

[ergophobe]

>> Kilian Jornet

Study on Kilian's calorie burn, calorie intake, food choice, grade-adjusted pace over time, core body temperature (via an injested temperature sensor that sends temperature data to a recording device every minute), and renal function while running the Western States Endurance Run in temperatures of up to 40 degrees (about 103F).

https://journals.physiology.org/doi/epdf/10.1152/japplphysiol.01048.2025

Not sure anyone else finds this interesting, but one cool part... How in the world do you measure calorie burn? The classic way to do this only works in a lab hooked up to a metabolic cart that can do indirect calorimetry based on gas exchange.

A fairly recent technique is using doubly labelled water, which has two water isotopes, one with a labelled oxygen (i.e. a specific isotope of O₂ known as ¹⁸O₂) and one with a labelled hydrogen. Using methods I don't understand, they are able to calculate calorie burn quite accurately.

In this case, Kilian burned over 16,000 calories in a bit over 14 hours. That's higher than any runner or cyclist measured thus far. Or, more likely, any cyclist publicly measured, since I would bet most of the top riders in the peloton at the Tour de France have had this measured, but nobody releases it.

Part of what makes Kilian interesting is that he is still able to compete at the highest levels and at least attempt to win (came in 3rd in the race in question), but because he's won so many races, he mostly is looking for interesting experiences at this point. So he's the only athlete at this level who releases all his training data (you can look at every training session in the year leading up to the race) and is willing to let scientists study him and publish the results.

[rcjordan]

With the loss of body mass, I wonder how much of that was due to dehydration?  This has to be hell on kidneys  (people can & do kill their kidneys by doing extreme exercising )...but they did say they were taking urine samples.

2 Teens Hospitalized with Kidney Damage After Doing 1,000 Squats Apiece
https://www.livescience.com/66054-teen-girls-rhabdomyolysis-squats.html

[ergophobe]

> dehydration

Probably most of it. This is a VERY hot event, but there are also physiological limits to how much fluid you can take in during an event like this without puking it out. Since Kilian has been at the absolute top for almost 20 years, he knows.

Also, he did some pretty extreme heat acclimation training ahead of time.

> hell on kidneys

Yes. And no.

Yes, markers of things like creatinine kinase tend to be high and this puts stress on kidneys. This is why NSAIDS are banned in sport. They stress the kidneys and then the activity itself stresses the kidneys. The combo can be super dangerous.

And no. The kids doing the squats, the numerous people who have died during CrossFit are typically rhabdo deaths. This is typically caused by eccentric contractions (so the down phase of the squats or the landing phase of a running stride).

People like Kilian and all the top pros incorporate what David Roche calls "Just Say No To Rhabdo" workouts. There is something called the "repeated bout effect" in exercise. For example

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12641640
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3967433/

In short, a novel stimulus with a lot of eccentric load causes huge muscle damage. At the extreme end, it causes rhabdo. But a repeat bout after just a single first bout within a week or so results in way less muscle damage and therefore way less chance of rhabdo.

So the Just Say No To Rhabdo workouts involve bombing downhill on slightly steeper hills at slightly faster pace than expected in the race plan pace. Doing that once a week 3-5 times before a big event results in way lower risk of rhabdo.

Generally athletes avoid these workouts because it's also a huge load on the body. So the standard prep for this long, hard events where kidney stress is a real risk, is to build to bigger and bigger eccentric stress in the last weeks of prep to the point where it doesn't cause major muscle soreness, which is a pretty good proxy for damage.  Many coaches suggest these downhill workouts even for flat events because, at the end of the day, every stride involves a short fall (that's why we call them "footfalls")

> urine samples

And thus the urine samples - they are trying to find out just how much damage and how much kidney stress there is and how well someone like Kilian is able to mitigate it. One thing to note is that Kilian's numbers were better than the average middle-of-the-pack runner from other studies. So that tells you that it's not the distance (which is the same) or the load (which is higher for Kilian), it's the training and prep. But it also tells you there is substantial load and this is not going to be fun for kidney transplant patients.