Do Oxygen Tents Boost Athletic Performance?
When a zipper shows up in a mid-life crisis, there’s usually a private investigator outside a motel window with a telephoto lens. But the only thing I was cheating on was my athletic destiny. Or I thought I was. The zipper in this case was of the floor-to-ceiling variety, enclosing me in the oxygen-starved weirdness of an altitude simulation tent from Colorado Altitude Training. There, in the basement, wedged between the bookcase and my 7-year-old’s wooden railroad empire, I spent four weeks of not-so-restful nights trying to sherpa-charge my cardiovascular system for a road bike race up Colorado’s 14,420-foot Mount Evans. Altitude-simulation tents are enclosures hooked to the back end of an oxygen generator, so they suck O2 out of your air instead of pumping it in. They don’t duplicate the air pressure difference — you would need a steel tank for that — but an athlete’s cardiovascular systems is still forced to work as if it were at altitude, causing the proportion of oxygen-carrying
