Mt. San Jacinto Outdoor Recreation

I'm a medical student working with Dr. Gary Foster at the Loma Linda VA Hospital. We are working on a research project that is looking at the effect of a novel preconditioning treatment on exercise performance at altitude. We are looking for participants to run a 7.5 mile trail to the peak of White Mountain (14,252ft). Two trips to the mountain will be required and transportation will be provided. Any interest, please contact.

Brenden Matus
bmatus@llu.edu
616-502-2424

Well, I won't be running at 14,000+ feet any time soon, but it sounds like a great study.

Brenden, if you haven't already, you might want to put a similar notice on:
http://sangabrielmnts.myfreeforum.org/
http://members.boardhost.com/sgva/
http://www.whitneyportalstore.com/forum/ubbthreads.php
http://www.summitpost.org/phpBB2/
On that last link, you might want to add your post to the "California" sub-section.

Zip, Perry, this sounds like it'd be right up your alley. Scott Scott you too, yes? Joe, what about you? Florian?

HJ

I'm not sure if I can run that far right now. Out of shape.

I used the term 'run' too loosely. I doubt many, if any, will be able to 'run' the whole course. The more fit, the better, but the baseline need is simply participants that can for sure finish the 7.5 miles. Also, the dates we are looking at are July 31st or Aug 20th for the first trip up and Sept 11th or 12th for the second trip. And for convenience sake, the preconditioning will need to be at the Loma Linda VA Hospital, so the closer you are to it the better.

Thanks for the comments so far.

Brenden

Hi, sounds interesting. I'm wondering how you plan to account for possible variations in temperature between the two dates? For me personally, the temperature is a huge factor. If it is 77 degrees Farenheit I'm going to do a lot better than if it is 86 degrees. If I interpret the temperature charts in this report correctly (page 13) it appears to me that the high temperature can vary between 25 and 30 degrees Celcius.

http://www.wmrs.edu/projects/cerec/pdfs ... nCEREC.pdf

It's true there will definitely be some temperature variation. The study design is set up to randomize the treatment versus nontreatment groups. This means for each given trip there should be a roughly 50/50 split in the groups. This will not solve all of the problems, but should serve to minimize any bias or confounding factors contributed by learning, conditioning, and hopefully weather. Thanks for the thoughtful comment and attached study. We tried to design the study as consistent as possible, but certain logistical items simply can't be avoided. Scrutiny can only help in this matter. Thank you.

Hey Brenden, do you know Serena, she was mentioning something about this as well. It does sound interesting. August 20th is a Friday though.