Recently (within the past year) a number of events occured indicating that my resistance to hypoxia had grown worse. These events include passing out on a commercial flight (in a cabin pressurized roughly to 8,000ft), feeling symptoms of hypoxia while flying at 6,500 ft, and trying to buy a shoe rack which required walking all over Seattle looking for a store that I was sure I could find even though I forgot the directions at my apartment and suddenly feeling quite faint and dizzy and terrible and nearly passing out but arriving at a McDonalds (down on the waterfront) just in time to eat something and feel better.
Now, as many of you already know, I have, all my life, both flown commercially, and had plenty of random adventures wherein I cover great distances on foot by the end of the story. Therefore, I knew that something was unusual. The likely culprit, I thought, was the moldy food in my fridge. Having no real medical knowledge at all, the best experiment I could do was to stop eating moldy food (or anything from the fridge) and see if I felt better. I also cleaned the fridge. You know, it turns out they are really easy to clean. I mean, it took like 5 hours, but it wasn't much of a challenge. Except for when I tried to put one of the food bins in backwards--that was a bad situation. But I digress.
Here is the interesting part: ever since I passed out on that red eye to philly, I have been quite fearful of passing out again. In fact, now when I fly the fear of hyperventilating and passing out actually makes me start to hyperventilate and get lightheaded. A really nasty cycle. I managed to fly to vegas and back without any incident, however, I noticed that reading my book made me really sleepy. Oh, and then there was that girl who was flying back to Cali, and she was all worried because she thought she only had ten minutes to make a connection because she didn't know about time zones, and I should have been like "hey now that you have all this extra time want to get a coffee in the terminal?" but I didn't because my previous experience talking to girls had gone so horribly. Well, and because she appeared to overreact when I told her I was a programmer and where I worked.
Anyway, the point of all this is...I started researching what it would take for a person to improve his (<-- see there! male pronoun used for both guys and girls! femenists kiss my ass) tolerance for being at high altitude. Not getting sleepy on commercial flights is not the only benefit; there is also the unpressurized cabin of the Mooney M20K that my flight club owns which can reach flight level 240. I'm a long, long long long loooong way from flying the mooney, especially now that I just added up how much money I spent in vegas, but it is nice to have goals. Also, people who do outdoor stuff on mountains would benefit. And my one Aunt and Uncle live on a mesa. So anyway, here is the results of my survey of waits to improve your high altitudeness.
Rent a cabin on top of the mountain. I first thought of this, actually, when I went to Crystal Mountain with Luke and the sheer altitude made me tired roughly 20 feet into the run. That was a long day. Thus, I began to fixate on this fantasy where we go up and rent a cabin the night before we go skiing, and I would have tons of energy the next day, and also girls would come to the cabin with us and play monopoly and hang out in the hot tub. Unfortunately at Crystal, the cabins are at the bottom of the mountain, which will not help with the acclimating. A rigorous (at least 20 minutes) set of google searches failed to reveal any cabins above 8,000 ft for rent in the Seattle area.
Exercise. I haven't found a single reliable source that claims exercising will increase your ability to absorb oxygen at altitude, however I figured there must be a positive relationship there, and I need to exercise anyway. Especially since I get winded after walking for half an hour. So I started walking to work. It is uphill both ways. Literally. In fact, if you plan your route wrong, its like uphill twice in the same direction. Visit Seattle and try to walk around this place and you'll find out what I mean. Oh, and I started swimming. Swimming is fun and relaxing. Except for the part where the only board shorts I wear are mostly white, and I discovered that the wet-t-shirt phenomena actually works with men's swimwear. I don't know why anyone would make mens anything that becomes uncomfortably translucent when wet, but I am the unfortunate owner of such an item, so I try to only swim late at night. Actually, I was already swimming late a night just because I am antisocial towards the people in my building, but now I have two reasons.
Altitude Tent. Ok, hold on, its coming. Wait for it. Amazon affiliate link go
! Wow that was easier than I remember. Anyway, so apparently a lot of athletes use these devices that reduce the amount of oxygen in the air, as a way to simulate living at altitude (which causes the body to make extra red blood cells). Unlike blood doping, sticking your head inside a tent and trying to suffocate yourself with an expensive machine is not considered illegal by most sporting associations. In the long term, I am thinking about buying these, especially if I start flying small planes above 8,000 ft. The machines that reduce the percentage of oxygen in the air cost thousands of dollars though.Something about a mountain. Yeah, so I visited Mt Rainier on Saturday. The plan was to hike up to 8,000 ft, and try reading a book and see if I passed out. If I didn't, that would mean that exercising and not eating moldy food had paid off. Long story short, it was a retarded plan.
I did make it to 6300 feet though. Here are some pictures. There was a cloud layer below me, maybe around 3,000 or 4,000 feet. It looked really cool in person. Unfortunately for you these pictures suck. If you can see it, the clouds are that white stuff below the mountains in the background.
Yeah, this one especially looked amazing in person:
And then on my way down, a deer walked right up to the path:
Oh thats why these pictures suck...because I had to text them from my phone to my email and they got all ugliefied in the process. Well, you don't even want to hear what happened when I plugged the data card in my computer and tried to just copy them.
So anyway, during my research, I learned about this thing called The Death Zone, where you are so high you can never acclimatize and will die without oxygen. Exciting! It starts at like 26,000 feet. I have felt symptoms of hypoxia as low as 6,500 feet. So...maybe someday.
[Some other notes]
1. Jessica's speedometer reads high. I discovered this when I looked over at the speed my gps was reporting. All this work I put into evading cops, and it turns out I haven't been exceeding the speed limit by as much as I thought.
2. There is a store in Ballard that sells art that I actually like. I discovered this when I went drinking with Gwen and her boyfriend after getting back from the mountain.
3. I may be wise to stop telling people that I like corsets. Or not. I guess there's a couple different ways you can take that. Its probably not a normal thing to say--I also discovered this while drinkign with Gwen and her boyfriend saturday night.
[Life Balance]
There appears to be a zero-sum game between projects, such as getting various piloting licenses, attempting to come up with a polynomial time solution to 3-sat and building Serenity out of Legos, and my social life. Time spent on one takes away from time spend on the other. Also, too much of either can be detrimental. When I spend too much time on my projects, my social connections slip away and I get incredibly lonely, depression, and obsessive-compulsive. When I spend too much time with people...I feel incredibly rushed, like I'm not getting anything done. So I need to find some kind of balance...maybe if I could learn to do things without obsessing over them and letting them take over my life. Or I could stop going to work and also never sleep. I mean, how am I going to find time to build an R2 unit? Oh, speaking of which....I thought of another way to talk to the hot girl at work: bring in doughnuts (or some other food) and pretend I'm sharing them. I appologize for the bold, that is only so I can find that sentence again.
[A new friend]
I started reading the craigslist ads again, because none of the girls on PlentyOfFish respond to my messages. Met up with this one girl who posted in the "friends only" section because I need more friends. I'm tired of making up silly names for girls I meet here, but still want to protect their names, so instead I took an md5 hash of her first name: 8d560f307b46b1662ac4ec3a4f747bb9. I'm going to call her BB9 for short. Anyway, me and BB9 met up in a coffee shop and talked for a while and then went back to my place and played most of the way through Castle Crashers all afternoon. I was the Blue ice guy--who, by the way, is totally awesome. His magic thing freezes enemies, which is ridiculously useful. Anyway, I have no plans to attempt sex on a regular basis with this girl, and she is unfortunately one of those girls that hates other girls and most of her friends are guys, however she likes to dance (salsa, swing, ballroom) and she likes to party so she's a keeper. BB9 also likes videogames, except unfortunately most of the games she likes are console first person shooters (FPS). I tried to hide my disdain for console FPS's. Seriously though, if you have ever had the pleasure of using a keyboard and a mouse to play a first person shooter, playing the same game with a gamepad is like going to second base while wearing mittens: I don't see the point and I don't understand why other people like it.
[Poker night]
I played poker tonight at a friends house. It was fun. Also, I won. That was awesome. I am so tired. I was going to go on about how I just realized I'm the awkward one in that group, which is new because in most of the social circles I've been in there as always been someone else with the least amount of social skills--someone who annoyed everyone more than I did--someone who was that guy. Well, now I'm that guy. Well...either that, or they all think I'm really cool. Its really hard to tell the difference between those two. I'm going the skip the exhaustive analysis because I want to go to bed. I really shouldn't have written all this; I should have just gone to bed an hour ago. I don't think I'm even going to proofread it. Seriously, if you've read this far...you need a hobby. I recommend Legos, but thats just me.
[Edit]
Kev's wedding has a web page!
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