Dealing with High Altitude on Your Vacation

It’s the middle of July and you’re already gazing at the mountains through your office window, looking forward to your winter skiing vacation. You’ve saved, spent countless hours online, mapping out all of the details: flights, hotels, rental cars, lift tickets, equipment rentals, restaurants, what to do with the kids, etc. You finally arrive at Mount Nirvana, having just zoomed up from sea level to 8,000 feet in one day. And then it hits you. You spend the next three days in your hotel room trying to recover from the altitude, years of sedentary living and all of the drinks you had on the plane.

Anyone that’s spent any time outdoors can relate. Altitude does some pretty creepy things to the body. Regardless how good an athlete you are at sea level, your body rebels at altitude. That’s because your body is a finely tuned mechanism that is designed to operate under some fairly static conditions. As soon as you change one thing, like the amount of oxygen you breathe, the body responds by making some pretty radical adjustments in other areas.

Whether you live at sea level or at high altitude, all of us process oxygen in the same way. We have mouths and lungs that bring oxygen into the body and we have blood that transports this oxygen to our muscles and tissues. At sea level, your blood is approximately 97% saturated with oxygen. As you rise in altitude, the air becomes “thinner”, meaning that there is less oxygen taken in with each breath. At 12,000 feet above sea level, the blood is around 90% saturated. Climbers on Mt. Everest (29,000 feet above sea level) have blood that is only 42% saturated. At elevations over 1200 meters (approximately 4,000 feet), the body begins to respond to a decrease in oxygen by increasing the ventilation, or breathing rate; both at rest and during physical activity. In addition, the heart needs to work harder to accomplish the same amount of work, so the heart rate goes up as well. This is what is happening to you as you feel your heart pounding through your chest while you’re walking through the hotel lobby.

Skiing at high altitude can leave you breathless

Credit: Jack Affleck

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