06 Feb 2020 - It takes heart...

As many of you will appreciate, doing anything at extreme altitude places a huge stress on your body, your cardiovascular system in particular. To put this into context, anything above 2,500m is considered to be "high" altitude where the equivalent O2 has dropped from 20.9% at sea-level to 15.3%. At just shy of 5,400m, Everest Base Camp (where we relax) is on the cusp between "very high" and "extreme" altitude, with equivalent O2 down at around half what it is at sea level. From just above Camp 4 comes the "Death Zone" (8,000m+) where nothing survives without oxygen and what oxygen we do have is not enough to sustain us, it's merely trying to give us a big enough survival window to "dash" to the top and back down again safely. At the Summit, we're looking at 7.2% equivalent O2.

Needless to say, therefore, we're mandated to have a full physical before any of us head out, including a particularly nasty test which is a Stress ECG - effectively, let's push your heart to its maximum to make sure it doesn't go pop, placing you on a treadmill that gets faster and steeper every 3 minutes.

With my thanks to the Circle Reading Hospital and Dr Neal Ruparelia, I am pleased to say that I both passed the test and apparently hit a level which they didn't know the test even had, lasting for 19 minutes rather than the usual 12! Needless to say, I am chuffed with the results and now feel confident that when things get tough on the hill, my heart has got my back.