Altitude camps sell a physiology most runners never bank

Three weeks up a mountain changes the blood a little and the training quality a lot, usually for the worse.

The pitch is thin air, more red cells, better oxygen delivery, faster races. The mechanism is real. The arithmetic underneath it is much less impressive than the brochure.

Start with the timeline. Meaningful increases in red cell mass take weeks, not days, and a camp shorter than about three weeks is unlikely to produce much of anything beyond a suntan and a sense of commitment. Then the effect fades once the athlete comes down, over a window that is short enough that the timing of the return relative to the target race turns into a guessing game with a large downside if you get it wrong.

Now the part that gets underplayed. At altitude the athlete cannot train as hard. Absolute paces drop, the intense sessions become either impossible or disproportionately costly, and if the camp is run without care the athlete spends three weeks losing the very speed the season was built on while gaining a modest haematological benefit. Trading a certain loss for an uncertain gain is not obviously a good deal.

Which is why the more thoughtful setups do the live high, train low thing, sleeping at altitude and driving down for the hard sessions. That resolves the tension properly. It also requires a mountain with a road, a vehicle, and enough money to keep the whole arrangement going for a month, which puts it outside the reach of nearly everybody who reads about the benefits.

And there is a responder problem that the literature keeps running into. A meaningful proportion of athletes show very little red cell response to altitude exposure at all, for reasons involving iron status, individual biology and factors nobody has pinned down. A camp that transforms one training partner does close to nothing for the one next to them, and neither of them finds out which they are until afterwards.

My honest view is that for most club and even national level runners the camp works largely through the other channel. Three weeks with no job, no commute, good food, an afternoon nap and other serious people to run with. That is a training block that would improve almost anybody at sea level.

Call it what it is. The mountain is a device for getting people to take their own training seriously for a month.