Comment by voisin
3 years ago
> Combining this with the fact that Everest climbers are apparently eating 10K+ calories a day and then up to around 20K on summit day, I have to wonder how these facts jive...if they can really temporarily push the limit, for how long, etc.
I think a lot of these stats are myths meant to accentuate the difficulty of the task. Pontzer’s book discusses Michael Phelps and the lack of an actual source to the rumours he was eating gargantuan amounts during training.
So I'm not sure about everest climbers, 20k sounds pretty crazy.
But I can speak first hand as a former athlete who has had access to NFL players and Olympians. 8-10k during peak active training happens all the time
Long term average might be 4-5k.
You have to remember that these people are often on PEDs that allow them to train all day.
Shit I was a serious powerlifter back in the day and would routinely eat 6-7k calories (weighed) during 2adays depending on how my weight was fluctuating. Add some more height, PEDs, and cardio and I'm almost there.
I think the difference between what is mentioned in the article is #1 obviously PEDs #2 body breakdown and recovery, which might be more in e.g. lifters and swimmers than long distance runners
I believe him. As a nowhere-near-olympics division 1 swimmer, I had developed a major weight loss problem my freshman year. I actually was required to log my calories and meet with a sports nutritionist weekly. After 6000 calories a day, I was shoving so much food in my mouth, I felt like it wasn't possible to eat any more than I did. She prescribed Snickers bars as a way to top off my calories every day without contributing too much to feeling full. I was targeting 7000 calories a day, and I don't think I ever consistently reached that goal, but around that time my weight stabilized.
There are a lot of people who maintain a high degree of fitness, and for them I can imagine 4000 calories is about right. But there are some types of training that are consistently pushing your physical limits. I don't have any sort of data to back this up, but it has long been my theory that the reason why elite athletes can burn so many calories is because they aren't actually burning them in the traditional sense of cells oxidizing chemical energy to create work...they've crossed over into the territory of muscle tissues being torn up and resynthesized so much that your body can no longer do so efficiently.
As an analogy, typically in manufacturing there are always efficiencies that can be extracted. But in very mature industries where there aren't any easy efficiencies to eek out of the system, you have to start making tradeoffs. One common tradeoff is throughout vs yield. You can increase your throughout, but in order to do do so, you have to cut corners on processes and subsequently increase the total amount of waste in the process.
And as a "maybe this is related" data point: 82% of marathon runners suffer from Acute Kidney Injury. Your kidneys have one job: waste disposal. It would be easy to infer that at the boundaries of human conditioning, the kidneys aren't up to the task of processing all of the waste that the body is producing.
https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/marathon-running-and-...
Michael Phelps directly says in one of his auto biographies that he was eating 8-10k calories a day. I don’t think you can call that a rumor.
Of course he could be off a bit, but it seems unlikely that he’s off by a factor of 2.
He lists the foods that he ate, and it definitely sounds like it was close to 10k calories. His coach also discussed his diet, and backs up his claims.
I've read a decent number of books about climbing big peaks. In all of them they said they were so nauseous on summit day from being in the death zone, they could barely force down a protein bar.