playing lab rat, again...

As a poverty-stricken grad student I spent a lot of time in the research hospital rooms at Vanderbilt. I’d let them stick me with this or that, or agree to take some mystery tablet for a month, or whatever, for a few hundred bucks here or there. Apparently I’ve gotten so used to laying my body upon the altar of science that upon moving to the commonwealth I promptly volunteered for another experiment…but forgot the most important part: getting paid.

So for the past several weeks I’ve been letting myself be punished by a dude over in exercise science. He was looking for cyclists (that’s me!), so I signed up. Fun, I thought. I get to do some spiffy little workouts in his lab, add variety to my winter workouts, meet new people, learn more about my body, enjoy myself and all that. It was most of that.

The first week was jolly—a standard step test to physiological failure. Dr. B measured VO2 max, among a host of other things. So that was cool. I mean, who doesn’t want their VO2 max measured once in a while? It was in the weeks that followed, through the normal test protocol, that the experience took a turn.

This was my protocol (presumably loads are some factor of some baseline measure, thus it is my protocol, rather than the protocol):

07:45…arrive at lab having not eaten since the day before
A few minutes warm-up at like 50 watts.
150 watts for 3 minutes.
220 watts for 3 minutes.
280 watts for 10 minutes.
Five minutes rest.
325 watts for 1 minute.
One minute rest.
325 watts for 1 minute.
One minute rest.
325 watts for 1 minute.
One minute rest.
325 watts for 1 minute.
Five minutes rests.
325 watts for 1 minute.
One minute rest.
325 watts for 1 minute.
One minute rest.
325 watts for 1 minute.
One minute rest.
325 watts for 1 minute.
Cool-down.
10 minutes running on a treadmill at 7mph.

During all of this I can drink water, but nothing else. Keep in mind I also wasn’t allowed to eat anything since going to bed the night before.

Then I get one liter of a mystery liquid. I’m to drink it within 15 minutes of the run. Then I come back to the lab two hours later. This is the rest of the protocol (still no eating):

150 watts for 3 minutes.
220 watts for 2 minutes.
280 watts for 30 minutes! (This, for me, is extremely painful.)
If I make it through those 30 minutes, the load is increased five percent. Ride until exhaustion.

Anyway, today was my last go. On the previous two efforts I failed 1-3 minutes into the five percent load increase segment at the end. Today I failed 23 minutes into the 280 watt interval. And my legs hurt now. As I’m writing this. Throbbing, really. And I’m really glad I’m done, but pretty disappointed I failed so early today.

So…why did I fail early?

Well, you remember the one liter of mystery liquid? That’s the experimental component, of course. Being blind to the experimental conditions I at first figured, logically, that I must have been prescribed a less potent brew on this third trial. But it turns out that wasn’t the case. Too spent to even spin a few cool-down rounds at the end of the trial, I sat on the floor hugging my knees and gnawed greedily at a PowerBar while Dr. B filled me in. On the first trial I had only flavored water, but on the next two trials I had a six percent carbohydrate solution—about 250 calories total; about the same as drinking a liter of Gatorade.

So why did I fail so much earlier today than in my first two trials? Who knows… But I think, perhaps, that the experience gives some insight into why the sports physiology literature is such a complex entanglement of contradictions and inconsistency.

I’m only one data point in Dr. B’s study, but from the data my riding produced, we would have to conclude that drinking a carbohydrate energy drink has no benefit over water in a time-to-exhaustion exercise test. But of course that doesn’t make any sense. So we’re left only with the intensely unsatisfying conclusion that I will make here: Bodies—us human bodies—are unimaginably complicated. There’s just too much noise, too many confounding variables to get a good read on a seemingly simple matter—pretty much any simple matter.

Science. Ah yeah…

Also, my legs hurt. Throb, really.