The World’s Fittest Humans
Chapter 5: Janu Tsöndrü Sherpa (Nepal)
My mind being empty and completely still is what is needed to have maximal awareness. On the path to maximal awareness is, first, a busy, thinking mind. Then no thoughts but not empty. Then it is no thoughts and an empty mind. Then is nothing but total awareness. I feel only pure energy when I am completely still in my mind. My mind becomes completely still and open to the sky but my body is moving fast, faster than can be explained by Westerners. I just go, no worry about getting tired, pure energy cannot tire. Only a mind focused on and limited by the perception of a physical body gets tired. The bumblebee, like me, mathematically cannot fly, but out here, connected to nature with a mind emptied of all calculation, we fly forever.
— Janu Tsöndrü Sherpa
Janu was born in Tengboche, Nepal which is a village in the Sagarmāthā National Park at an altitude just shy of 3900m or 12,500 feet. Very seldom in his life has he been below this altitude. Three of those rare times were last season: at the two competitions for Phenomic Games and some training in Kathmandu at 4600 feet. Most Sherpas go down to lower altitudes during the winter but he stays with his extended family in Tengboche. There are no roads that connect to Tengboche; travel is on foot or by yak. Sherpas do not use ponies, mules, donkeys, sheep or goats for the transport of goods, only yaks. The economy is primarily supported by a seasonal pilgrimage of trekkers that come from all over the world to trek through the region with many on their way to Mount Everest south base camp in Nepal at 5364m or 17,598 feet. Sherpas, however, depend on fees to transport loads from points of origin to Everest base camp and then to points higher up the mountains called C1, C2, C3, and C4; designations for the different camps on the ascent that provide very primitive shelter from the elements and time to acclimatize for the final summit assault.
But rest assured, this is very arduous and dangerous work. Of all the jobs known to mankind, being a heavily booked Sherpa and working the flight deck on a US Enterprise-class aircraft carrier are the two most dangerous jobs given their risk exposures. Sherpas are very spiritual people; the big peaks are perceived as deities and prayer is beckoned for safe passage, to be spared from the wrath of discontented spirits. But the harsh reality on the hallowed ground above the clouds is that when man frolics in the devil’s playground, death is the cost for all too many intrepid souls. Everest is known to the uninitiated as the world’s highest place on earth which is true but it is certainly not the most dangerous ice castle in the devil’s playground, not by a long shot. Of the fourteen 8000m peaks, Everest only ranks 10th in death rate at 5.7% which means only about 6 people die for every 100 attempts. When you die in the death zone your body remains forever because helicopters cannot generate enough lift in the thin air and humans do not have the strength or aerobic power to bring the body down. For most, just being able to walk at a slow pace with many breaths between strides is all you can muster, far short of dragging a rigid body for several miles. So the milestones of the ascents are frozen tombstones to hubris, perhaps tribute to the goddess Nemesis, retribution for fools rushing in where angels fear to tread. Nemesis is much more spiteful on K2 and Annapurna, with death rates of 23 and 38% respectively. It is such an awesome thought to grok that Russian roulette with a single bullet in a six-shot revolver has a death rate of 16.7% per attempt whereas Annapurna boasts over two bullets per attempt yet people pay over US$100,000 per head to roll the dice playing two-shot Russian roulette at 8000m on Annapurna. K2 is the most technical climb of all the 8000ers with the last two obstacles — once you visit the death zone — are called the Black Pyramid and the Bottleneck featuring overhanging seracs, ice cliffs and a narrow couloir — a vertical crevasse that is like a hinge on a coffin. The technical rock climbing sections feature rotten rock and ice for weary climbers to place their pitons to hold their dangling bodies, the only thing separating life from death and ever so precariously. K2 has never been ascended successfully during winter where the mountain gods command typhoonic snowstorms only rivaled by a cold day in hell. Yet people spit in Nemesis’ face and “just do it”, devil-may-care — and care She does, 23% of the time.
It is easy to see why Nepalese Sherpas are very religious people because they live the life of living dangerously but it is the only living available unless they leave their roots. Janu is one of only two Sherpas to summit both K2 and Annapurna and has seen in his scant 27 years many wannabe climbers along with seasoned Sherpas die taking the high ground on the devil’s playground. He of all people knows that you can play Russian roulette only so long before bad things happen. He sees a way out with Phenomic Games using the Phenomic’s Nemesis, as ridiculous and ironic as it may be, as a means to escape the most dangerous job on earth.
Last season Janu stayed in Kathmandu, a city with close to one million people and the capital of Nepal, to do his training for the qualifying round and for Turin Worlds. He received a small stipend from a wealthy organizer of a British team that he led to the summit of Everest a couple of years ago. It was enough money for a mountain bike, a Concept 2 rowing machine, and a chunk of time to train. In his estimation, that was all he needed in order to conquer the Phenomic 5. In downtown Kathmandu he found a small gym with basic weight training equipment at The Hotel Yak and Yeti. As it turned out, Janu’s estimation was correct. He qualified but just by a yak whisker. His performance at Worlds overall was sub-stellar but he caught the attention of the Swedish company Eleiko that makes the Olympic lifting bar and weight discs for Phenomic Games.
The Eleiko Olympic weightlifting bar and discs is considered, by far, to be the finest instrument for lifting weights in the Olympic venue. Eleiko started by making electrical products and of particular note, the waffle iron. They introduced their first competition bar in 1963. Previous bars had dreadful reliability; they cracked or broke. But no longer, a bar could now survive an entire meet without breaking a sweat. In the late 1960s they introduced the rubber bumper plate; previous plates were metal and they truly crashed when they were dropped and in Olympic lifting the bar is dropped every time. In the 1980s they introduced advances in rotating sleeves which means the bar rotates very smoothly independent of the discs. The bar is famous for its whippy feel during the clean from the floor and the explosive jerk of the bar overhead plus the way the knurling feels in your hands. The knurling, if you look at it under mild magnification, has a distinctive waffle pattern. Experienced lifters have a deep feeling for how a load moves through the intricate bar path in space in tandem with the balance of the load. These people are easy to spot; they are the ones with the big trapezius muscles and thick calluses between the metacarpals and proximal phalanges of the hands, bearing witness to painstaking hours of gripping the bar while performing vertical pulling movements from the floor or knees. You may not be able to tell different varieties of wine apart but an experienced lifter can tell an Eleiko bar apart from others when blindfolded.
The speed of the movements require a precision that can only be expressed qualitatively and subjectively as poetry in motion. Indubitably, ballet is poetry in motion but so is Olympic weightlifting when in the hands of a world-class competitor using the equivalent of a hand-crafted samurai sword — the Eleiko Olympic lifting bar and discs — something to behold and cherish by the sport’s aficionados. It has been used to set over 1,000 world records, nothing comes close. An artist and his tools of the trade — featuring a palette of red, blue, yellow and green rubber bumper plates and a 7-foot steel brush — blur indistinguishably under fleeting movement, blending lifter and lifted together as if painted by impressionist virtuoso Monet, tracking as a complementary unity when wielded by those few with mastery and aplomb.
Eleiko offered Janu a special form of sponsorship: a complete set of Olympic lifting gear, an allowance for other weight training equipment and the services of a coach. Everything except a waffle iron. What budding weightlifting samurai residing in Tengboche could ever wish for more? Eleiko sent Amandus Nyström, a Swedish trainer that was a national caliber coach in both weightlifting and rowing. That was great but he spoke Swedish and English, not Sherpa, which is a dialect in Nepal totally unintelligible to other Tibetan peoples and not at all understood by Swedish weightlifting coaches such as Amandus. Through painstaking and yeoman effort of Google searches in concert with the magic of six degrees of separation, a trekker was found in The Netherlands that understood Swedish and Sherpa, such is the magnificence of the internet’s long tail plugged into the power of sparse networks. She had working knowledge of both, that will have to do. She jumped at the opportunity to live in Tengboche for several months with the local Nepalese and brush up on her Sherpa skills while seeing the magnificent sites of the breathtaking Himalayas soar in the background while Zenning out on pristine, razor-thin air. So both Johannsen — the interpreter — and Amandus — the coach — are now officially members of Team Janu.
When Janu got word of the generous offering from Eleiko, he praised Sagarmāthā, the Tibetan name for Mount Everest literally meaning “Goddess of the Sky” or “Forehead in the Sky”. The village locals had seen Janu take on last season’s Phenomic Games’ Nemesis and concluded that the equivalent goddess of Tibetan Buddhism to the Greeks’ Nemesis would be far crueler; they scratched their heads why the mountain was so diminutive compared to the omnipresent Himalayas. Maybe Nemesis left the Greek pantheon long ago and took up residence on K2 and Annapurna. But the fact that Janu destroyed the field and put Nepal on the world’s radar for ultra- endurance performance was a huge feather in their cap and source of national pride for all of tiny Nepal. The village got together and cleared out a space in a wooden structure used as a warehouse of some sort for Janu to use as a gym. It is doubtful there is a higher gym in the world than Gym Janu standing tall at 12,500 feet.
UPS handled the shipment from Halmstad, Sweden to Kathmandu and from there to Chaurikharka but that was the end of the road literally and figuratively. The packages were dissembled and then repackaged for transit by yak. The Eleiko competition bar was meticulously packaged to prevent moisture from getting anywhere near those precious bearings. It took 14 days to go halfway around the world from Halmstad to Chaurikharka and will take 2 more days to go 12 miles to get to Tengboche provided the yak cadre all have strong backends. The yak carrying the 25kg red bumper discs was grumpy the whole way especially considering the vertical gain of 4042 feet and bad footing even for sure-footed yaks. But it all arrived to everyone’s amazement without a hitch.
Coach Nyström instructed the village denizens to build a 4 by 4 meter lifting platform out of wood and rubber mats roughly to International Weightlifting Federation specs. A week later there was a bizarre sight that captured the village in awe even to the point of diminishing the mighty Himalayas to a groveling Shakespearean foil; a particularly buffed and stout yak — a Peterbilt yak, a phenomic yak — arrived carrying a glute-ham bench from Hammer Strength, a company that specializes in making extremely heavy duty equipment for the likes of the NFL, NBA, Division 1 college teams and any extant Tyrannosaurus rex out there with a VISA card. Now it resides in Gym Janu in Tengboche. This is an essential piece of equipment for training the frontend of the Phenomic 5 and weighs a ton or looks like it does. The yak never said a word or displayed bitterness but its body language projected Macbeth, not The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Amandus had other equipment show up and within a couple of weeks there was a very functional gym fully operational at the top of the world. Janu could now work on his frontend with the right tools for the first time in his life. He was about to take a crash course in technique using just a broomstick, not even an empty bar. From there to the bar with a pair of 5kg Eleiko training discs which have the same diameter as competition discs but super light weight so that the starting position has the same joint angles as the real McCoy.
Amandus and Janu — via Johannsen — had difficulty communicating for the first couple weeks while Janu got a feel for real Eleiko steel and its famous waffle-patterned knurling. They quickly devised a new quasi-dialect called “Swedepa” which was some kind of code for the different commands and cues mandated for pointing out proper biomechanics and movement patterns for lifting and rowing. Amandus had a leg up on Janu’s training and results from last season and knew in advance this is going to be a tall order. He may have barely qualified for Worlds last year but that window of opportunity is closed forever. There is no way a frontend-only Ivan or a backend-only Janu will make it through qualification this season; the level of competition is so much greater that one or two-trick pony specialists will be screened out until they bring more meat to the table. You must be serious across the board with no more than two relative weaknesses balanced out with one or two relative strengths. That will get in but not win. Amandus figured as much and knew that Janu’s clean and jerk needed to make an Everest-sized leap but seeing his histrionic form it was very doable. A Sherpa does a lot of heavy lifting and twisting with odd-shaped objects and that work over many years builds great trunk strength, rotational integrity and leg and hip extension, the anatomical weapons needed for the clean and jerk, The Burn and The Erg. Janu’s backend was already jacked. His rowing form was equally laughable but it was very clear that Janu has an unbelievable aerobic motor but the cylinders needed a better distributor to get the timing right; but this was fixable by Continental qualifiers. A long way to go but it can get done. One thing is clear: Janu is no paper tiger and has bottomless motivation. Amandus salivated at the opportunity to build the world’s first phenomic Sherpa.
Assessing Janu’s strengths and weaknesses was the easy part. Amandus next put together a periodized plan of attack targeting for a solid performance at the Continental qualifiers. He needs extensive practice on his BMX bike learning the technique of the start along with improving balance and motor control. There is no shortage of different grades to train on close to his home. Janu will be without the services of a cycling coach so Amandus makes a few calls and got some advice from two of his Swedish contacts back home. One was a domestique in the Tour de France for the Dutch Rabobank team and the second acquaintance finished 4th in the world in mountain bike cross-country. Janu is going to put concentrated effort into long out-of-the-saddle climbs which will directly improve The Climb and also The Burn which is 100% completely out-of-the-saddle for the entire, excruciating minute. Secondarily this will help with recovery between The Climb and Nemesis if his competitors seriously want to test their mettle and go mano a mano with Janu on Nemesis. He will back off from his mountaineering volume both horizontally and vertically and instead pump volume into the mountain biking and BMX drills. As the Continentals approach he will do interval training of short duration with extremely high intensity on the bike that will be synchronized with rowing intervals. But the clean and jerk is his best ticket to seriously gaining a big chunk of overall ranking, which is the bottom line of Phenomic Games. The second best opportunity is The Erg. There is low hanging fruit for both of these events to be plucked by improving technique and assembling an efficient training module that captures the biomechanical and metabolic overlaps.
And so Amandus quickly tuned into all of the Phenomic 5’s training overlap areas. The Phenomic 5 is a biomechanical and metabolic pentathlon that comprehensively addresses critical movement patterns and the all of the power spectrum’s metabolic gears and their switching points. Nemesis is 1st gear, The Climb is 2nd gear, The Erg is the first aspect of 3rd gear, The Burn is the second aspect of 3rd gear and the clean and jerk is 4th gear. These movements are the top of the pyramid being the primary disciplines that the crowd sees and experts scrutinize but only compose the tip of the iceberg of the complete training pyramid which is the Adjunctive Tool Pool or A.T.P.
Amandus knew that each sport composing the Phenomic 5 has accrued over the decades by expert practitioners a library of movement tools like resistance training, flexibility/mobility training, strength-endurance training, etc. that are used as adjuncts to precisely target weaknesses in each of the actual competitive events. The only limits to each of these libraries of protocols, sequences, exercises, equipment, etc. is the limits of the knowledge of the trainer, coach, exercise physiologist, physical therapist or practitioner. But when you expand and integrate all of these A.T.P.s together you get a massively broad and deep pyramid that will include agility drills, balance practices, yoga, Pilates, Gyrotonics, powerlifting, resistance band training, suspension systems, the entire gymnastics realm, the entire kettlebell realm, the entire martial arts realm, the entire dance realm, tai chi and qigong. And this list is never a final, perfected list; only what’s state-of-the-art today. If you were to try to map it, it would have a striking resemblance to downtown Boston, not just because Boston is convoluted but because the map is organic, creative, messy, and unruly in a way that leads to new species of movements, new genres of seeing things, and new domains of learning the intricacies of the human form. The A.T.P. in the hands of an elite phenomics coach is an ecosystem of training ideas, a spawning ground for creative solutions. The bigger the A.T.P. is and the more you have a working knowledge of its grand scope, the better you are at finding just the right tool for the weakness you have right now because any weakness in the critical path to ΔP stops you cold. Kaput.
Your measure of being full-spectrum conditioned — the world’s fittest human — is reflected in your Phenomic World ranking. It is naive to believe after a couple years of training you can just show up and win, however gifted. It will take several years to learn the technique of the clean and jerk and rowing. Just being able to biomechanically execute the positions will mandate drawing from the A.T.P. for mobility: yoga, stretching, physical therapy. As a guiding principle, whatever you are weak in — whatever obstacle is in the way of ΔP — that is what you are to focus on using whatever tool is best suited to address the problem; this requires engineering focus and discipline. As you become more advanced phenomically you are forced to draw from a deeper A.T.P. than as a beginner or intermediate. In the quest for ΔP, the margin of error for adaptive yield diminishes. As you become more advanced the mountain’s summit where the Phenomic 5 live is taller with the mountain’s base vastly wider; that base represents the increased number of tools, methods, and breadth of expertise to support ΔP at the top. They are the roots that support the foliage and the flowers. As you adopt more diversity from the A.T.P., you become much more versatile, you become ready for any possible challenge — all in the service to ameliorate decreasing marginal returns of adaptive yield as you converge on your performance ceiling.
There is a Zen saying: “To completely understand a frog you must understand the entire universe”. Ergo, “To be the world’s fittest human, you must master the A.T.P.”. Amandus instinctively knew that. Janu needed to train his posterior chain, which constitutes the hamstrings, glutes, erector spinae and trapezius and its complementary opposite, sometimes called the anterior chain — principally the abdominals and hip flexors but the pectorals are in the mix along with the intercostals, serratus and obliques. The truth is, no trunk muscle can be left behind or you will be left behind. These muscles are the key motor elements that stabilize the axial skeleton and being able to stabilize the trunk is mission critical for not only the clean and jerk, The Burn and The Erg but also for the backend’s The Climb and Nemesis. Yes, injury prevention goes without saying, but the physics of energy flow dictates that flow is maximized through a rigid kinetic chain; a weak or soft link is tantamount to energy leakage, the kiss of death. The training overlaps because if you decompose the Phenomic 5 biomechanically the individual A.T.P.s for those five events are five intersecting Venn diagrams with the muscles commanding the axial skeleton being ground zero.
But do coaches in those individual events use the tools in the same way or have they arrived at different applications, different sequences, different rationales? That is what the phenomic A.T.P. provides: a complete knowledge base of modules that plug into different applications including the one you need right now. Software development teams have battle-hardened, time-tested, object-oriented software modules in their libraries to build programs, a big LEGO erector set. That is what the phenomic ATP is except it builds humans to kick ass in the Phenomic 5. The result of big gains in control of Janu’s axial skeleton will create seismic gains in ΔP for his frontend, precisely what Janu needs to eat his competitors. He also needs to develop more explosive strength. The A.T.P. is the source for that. Thus, that is how you determine what will be the center of gravity of your training: matching the correct modules, elements and sequences from the phenomic A.T.P. to the athlete’s biggest potential contributors to overall ΔP.
Of course, there are also A.T.P.s for mental conditioning, recovery and nutrition and they are mapped to the training A.T.P. so now it looks like a 3D map of Boston or a thin slice of your cerebral cortex, whichever is more knarly. This global process of digging, mixing and matching in the three A.T.P. sandboxes never ceases; what were once weaknesses in a year or two become strengths which consequently exposes a new layer of weaknesses. You get smarter, you open your mind up, and you are not afraid to tinker, experiment, concoct, be out there. A steady diet of sacred cows leads to discovery, breakthroughs, virgin territory, new performance envelopes, and manifestation of phenomes that have never been seen before. A phenomic Sherpa — such as Janu — would be a great example of a new human phenotype, a new human life form to study like a drop of pond water under the microscope of Phenomic Games.
Janu just got word from the lama, the local spiritual leader of the Tengboche monastery, that a couple of people from the London Herald, Dr. John Beasley and a cameraman, were flying in to do an interview with Team Janu in five days. Janu is wondering if these aliens have ever seen a yak before because they most certainly will get to know one well.
John and Ralph Towers will be flying into Kathmandu and from there to Lukla and the Tenzing-Hillary Airport, rated the most dangerous airport in the world. There are only a couple of types of planes allowed to take-off and land from there because if you miss the runway at either end it is a long way down. They will be coming in on a sure-footed De Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter. The airport is named after Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, the first people to summit Everest in 1953 and they were instrumental in getting an airport build so close to Everest south base camp, only 8 days by yak express.
They hired a porter and loaded their gear on a yak and off they went. Lukla to Tengboche takes 3 to 4 days. The trail from Lukla to the Sherpa capital of Namche Bazaar follows the valley of the Dudh Kosi river and takes a couple days. There are several river crossings and you quickly learn to stand on the mountain side wherever it is steep and narrow meaning not with your back towards the edge while waiting for the big, grumpy, furry fellas to pass by. Yaks have been known to misstep. Also, take care not to step in a generous helping of yak dung on the narrow goat paths; just not an experience belonging on anyone’s bucket list. John knew his job would be exciting and he would get to see the entire world but never imagined himself doing anything quite like this. But that is what it takes sometimes to get a great interview with an astonishing view of the top of world and a cup of home-grown Tibetan tea.
John and Ralph arrived around noon local time and were fried. They just finished a bone-crushing, four-day hike with serious vertical gain but this is a walk in the park to the locals and would be considered practically four vacation days compared to Sherpas punching the clock. They met with Janu, Amandus, and Johannsen and came to the realization that this is going to be a real strange way to do an interview. John spoke plain English, Ralph spoke Olde English, and Johannsen spoke some sort of English with a Dutch or German spin. Janu spoke Sherpa. The Sherpa part wasn’t the problem as much as the English accent part. They would make it work. John and Ralph needed a very long nap.
Everybody rendezvoused at 4 pm at Gym Janu. First they shot a short video of Janu doing sets of 3 repetitions of the clean and jerk positioned so that Everest and Lhotse were in the background. Janu had no problem with 110kg (242 lbs.). Coach Nyström grinned like a proud dad. Janu has come a long way; his form is now pretty good but still rough around the edges. Eleiko will put the footage to good use. Janu’s inspirational story is a fine investment, no doubt.
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May 23, 2015
Emailed transcript to the LONDON HERALD for the weekly column:
Portraits of The World’s Fittest Humans: Preparing for The Phenomic Games
Janu Tsöndrü Sherpa, winner of the gold medal in Nemesis at The Phenomic World Championship in Turin, Italy
Dispatch from Tengboche, Nepal
— — — — — — — —
by Dr. John Beasley, PhD
Scientific Journalist
My mission is to track down the leading contenders for next season’s Phenomic Games World Championship in Whistler, Canada and bring their dreams, beliefs, and training approaches directly to you every Saturday.
Who are the world’s fittest humans?
What do they do to prepare?
Why do they do it?
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Janu Tsöndrü Sherpa
Phenomic Human Ranking: 40 , 38 (male)
Age: 27
Height: 5–7 (1.70m)
Weight: 165 lbs. (75kg)
Birthplace: Tengboche, Nepal
Education: n/a
Occupation: Sherpa
Background: summitted Mount Everest (4 times), K2, Lhotse, Makalu and Annapurna; many other climbs to Camps 3 or 4 on several 8000m peaks
Started training for The Phenomic Games in 2013
Favorite event: Nemesis
Most challenging event: Clean and Jerk
Favorite exercise: step ups
Coach: Amandus Nyström
Diet: mostly vegetarian with occasional meat that is not intentionally killed (Nyingmapa sect of Tibetan Buddhism)
Favorite food: shakpa (stew)
Status: married
Children: 6 year-old daughter
Current residence: Tengboche, Nepal
Nickname: none
Interview
Note: translated from Sherpa by Johannsen Joosten
Dr. John Beasley: In the background is Mount Everest, the highest point on Earth. With me today is Janu Tsöndrü Sherpa, the gold medalist of Nemesis at The Phenomic World Championship last season in Turin, Italy along with his Swedish coach Amandus Nyström. Janu, we all remember how you ran away from an elite field of athletes on Nemesis. Nobody could understand how that was possible. It looked easy…was it?
Janu Tsöndrü Sherpa: I think for me you have to understand that climbing and trekking all day is what I have done since I was a boy. It comes naturally to me. When I work as a Sherpa I am often carrying loads that weigh 45kg (100 lbs.) in places where it is steeper, higher, and with poorer footing than Nemesis. I do this for several days at a time, sometimes much longer.
Dr. John Beasley: So, for you Nemesis was not that challenging. How did you train for it? Any secrets?
Janu Tsöndrü Sherpa: [Janu laughs loudly] I never heard of training before last year. For me, my life is training, there is no difference. For me, the hard part of Nemesis was remembering to go faster than my usual pace, but that was made easier by not having 45kg on my back and with the ground not being so steep, high or slippery! [Janu smiles and laughs and then everyone laughs]
Dr. John Beasley: Coach Nyström, I guess Janu had been training for Nemesis for 10 years by carrying added resistance at altitude and then he came down to compete on an easier course closer to sea level, just like other endurance athletes do in other sports?
Coach Amandus Nyström: John, that is a way of looking at it from an exercise physiologist’s perspective but after learning more about the Sherpa lifestyle and upbringing, that isn’t how they see things. Janu has never seriously trained a day in his life until I got here. Sherpas do not “train”. They are living here like they did in the 1500s when their ancestors migrated through the Nanga La pass from Tibet; Sherpa literally means “people from the east”, from eastern Tibet. It is the geography and primitive lifestyle which makes them great on Nemesis, that and a recently discovered genetic advantage. Researchers at UC Berkeley discovered that about 87% of Tibetans have a variant of the EPAS1 gene, the so-called “superathlete” gene, that raises hemoglobin when ambient oxygen concentration drops below a certain level but not too much like the common gene which thickens the blood beyond the point of causing problems.
We know that athletes coming up from sea level to acclimatize have metabolic shifts in aerobic metabolism from carbohydrate to protein because the body produces more ATP from protein sources than carbohydrates or fats per liter of O2 and it is oxygen concentration and energy demand that regulates fuel use. When Westerns come up here for several weeks they lose incredible amounts of lean mass in their upper bodies. The Americans Chad Kellogg and Steve Untch both noticed how profound this effect is but does not happen to Sherpas; their body composition is relatively stable. Given the speed of Sherpas and the duration of their efforts they must be getting enough O2 to the working muscles to use fat; they must have extremely high maximal lipid power levels compared to Westerners. This has never been verified but there is no other explanation given our current understanding of energy metabolism. The energy production calculus doesn’t add up; there is something mysterious going on. That much energy for so long has to come from somewhere. Obviously their lifestyle caused natural selection to modify their genetics and epigenetics and the physiological benefits carried directly over to both Nemesis and The Climb given Janu’s tiny exposure to mountain biking and his great performance.
Dr. John Beasley: Aren’t we talking about a difference in endurance training? In other endurance sports you don’t really have a vertical emphasis except in climbing stages or short climbing time trials in stage cycling. Competitive Nordic skiing has hills but is not dominantly vertical. Running, swimming, and speed skating are horizontal. Ultra-endurance running races often times have a lot of vertical. Is there something special about vertical endurance?
Coach Amandus Nyström: I have been thinking about that. My background is not endurance, it is strength and rowing but I understand nervous system recruitment. I see three dimensions to endurance: temporal, horizontal and vertical. The combination of these dimensions affects fuel regulation and capacity which is all about energy, it also greatly impacts force and torque production along with power output. The nervous system is central to adaptive response given the specific stress profiles presented. I looked into the speed records for Everest and was just blown away by what I found. It will rattle the cage of the endurance world and should stir the pot pretty good for strength guys, too.
Normally from south base camp at 5,364m [Ed. 17,598 ft] a South Col summit route attempt going at normal speed is four days to the top at 8,848m [Ed. 29,029 ft] and this includes supplemental oxygen. The oxygen lowers the effective altitude substantially. Understand that these climbers have trained and are highly motivated and it takes them four days to be able to do it at all; the last thing they are thinking about is some kind of speed record when they are not sure if they can make it to the summit or even survive the trip up and have enough juice to come down safely. Most deaths occur on the descent due to zombie level fatigue. The current record with supplemental oxygen is 8 hours 10 minutes in 2004 by Pemba Dorje Sherpa. The previous record was 10 hours 56 minutes. Now without supplemental oxygen the record is 20 hours 24 minutes in 1998 by Kazi Sherpa and that to me is just astonishing and beyond incredible. I don’t know what the horizontal is in miles is but the vertical is 3,484m (11,431 feet) or 170m/hr (560 feet/hr) from 5,000 to almost 9,000m for 20 hours and 24 minutes! That’s sort of like climbing a 170m rope every hour, a 170m staircase, or almost 2 soccer fields straight up per hour for almost an entire day and night and that isn’t factoring in the horizontal. Kazi climbed all day and night until he reached the top of the world. Janu, what do you think about your fellow Sherpas doing that?
Janu Tsöndrü Sherpa: I know Kazi and I found his accomplishment inspiring. For me, I want to do something to bring more attention to Nepal and the life of Sherpas by taking our physical ability to other people in the world so they can see what we do in an environment they understand. Outsiders do not understand our world, they do not know the mountain spirit, they do not comprehend our compassion for all beings. This is not about me or what I can do or ego. It is about Nepal and what I can do for my family. I heard about this competition that featured a long trek up a mountain and that caught my attention.
Dr. John Beasley: I see what both of you are saying. When people think of endurance they think of the temporal and horizontal dimensions of endurance such as a marathon or Ironman being 26.2 or 140.6 miles and 2 to 3 hours and 8 to 12 hours temporally, respectively. These races do have some vertical challenge but usually it is not substantial relative to the horizontal. The big marathons are essentially flat. Only in the Tour de France does climbing factor in and it is the endurance dimension that separates the yellow jersey from the also-rans, if you cannot climb you cannot win. Even great time trialists cannot win unless they can climb at the world-class level. Would you say that to be a complete endurance athlete you must master all three dimensions of endurance?
Coach Amandus Nyström: Yes, absolutely. You have to commend the Phenomic Secretariat for including in the Phenomic 5 an endurance event that captures all three of the endurance dimensions pretty well. The cosine of the grade angle times the hypotenuse equals the horizontal distance and the sine of the grade angle times the hypotenuse equals the veritical distance. The hypotenuse is roughly the path you take. Who ever wins Nemesis is a special athlete. Twelve hours is a minimum duration to assess the depth and quality of one’s endurance mind and the fuel regulation capacity to burn fat for fuel. You need to have world-class maximal lipid power to go fast for 12 hours; a big carb-burning, high VO2 max guy will run of gas in just a few hours. It has the horizontal to test speed for trail running or speed-hiking economy, meaning biomechanics and gait efficiency. And the vertical endurance to test hip extension under sufficient loading and duration to evaluate sustained power output under load, meaning your own body weight. In physics, vertical movement is doing work directly opposed to gravity where work equals mass, which is your body weight, times the gravitational acceleration of 1 g times the vertical distance [Ed. Work (energy in joules) = mass (body weight in kg) x g (acceleration due to gravity (m/s^2)) x height (vertical climb in meters)]. Just doing stadium stairs is considered brutal but what do you call it doing in for over 20 hours straight moving in the death zone? Nemesis is just a scaled down version of that. Nemesis is beautiful in a very ugly way except for a guy like Janu. Strength athletes and anaerobic guys are chum for Nemesis.
Dr. John Beasley: It seems to me that endurance has a totally different side to it when you examine culture, lifestyle and human’s migratory roots. That is very much the case here in Nepal where you don’t even have wheels because there is no place for them due to the terrain and no roads. Everything is carried on the backs of yaks or people.
Coach Amandus Nyström: No question about it. We from the West with technical backgrounds try to shoehorn everything into our existing theories about how the body works but in a place like this those theories fail. Sherpas have endurance in every phase, aspect, or possible way of experiencing “endurance”. Just to survive in the village to have enough food to eat is extremely hard labor. All time scales for them define endurance in survival terms like they are fractals with one layer of endurance built on another layer of endurance each with a different challenge. Sherpas must endure on all levels: from growing up and learning to be a Sherpa, to making it through a hard winter, to coming back alive from a two-week climb. What I mean is nothing is easy for them throughout their lives. Nothing. Living is enduring — survival and endurance are two sides of the same coin. They breathe and embody endurance, whereas Westerners interrupt a mostly contrived, less-than-pedestrian life that is intentionally over-the-top domesticated to do a three-hour bike ride or a hard gym workout and then convince themselves they are more badass than a Cro-Magnon cage fighter. They wouldn’t endure out here! Those life paths end up in very different places with very different phenotypes.
Dr. John Beasley: Yes, those phenomes are very different because the environment from the organism’s perspective are very different. Given time — over several generations — you have to expect different capabilities that might be interpreted as strange, beyond the meaning of outlier. We try to explain what Janu does from a framework of a Western endurance athlete and just scratch our heads. We have to accept there are mysteries that science just cannot wrap its theories around. For a long time scientists could not explain how a bumblebee could fly yet it flies without effort in a strong wind. Amandus, perhaps explaining how a Sherpa can summit Everest in 20 hours is a bumblebee flying without it knowing an algorithm to prove it can’t. Much of it just may come down to the Sherpa mind which is, when you think deeply about human origins, an authentic endurance mind. Janu, what is your mental state out there on the mountain?
Janu Tsöndrü Sherpa: John, when I climb I am not thinking and my mind is empty; you can also be not thinking but with your mind not empty, that is a distinction that is important to our religion. In the Nyingma sect, the oldest of the four sects of Tibetan Buddhism, it is important to understand the inseparability of the clarity and emptiness of one’s mind. I want clarity when I climb, that is when I am connected to the life force of the mountain. All Sherpas feel this connection as I say. There is nothing exceptional about me. “It just is”, and that is very, very different in meaning than “it’s all me”. Not a subtle or nuanced difference.
Each moment I feel alive, I know I am alive without thinking about how alive I am. I live in the present moment enough to where the sense of what a moment is disappears, forgotten. One moment the sun is coming up blinding me at the start of the day and the next moment the sun is setting and it gets dark fast. When this happens, I am Awake on a deep level, there is a big difference between awake and Awake.
Dr. John Beasley: Do you lose sense of time?
Janu Tsöndrü Sherpa: When I climb my mind is empty which means empty of thought. All that remains is pure awareness. I don’t feel this or that part of my body, the feeling of parts goes away. You discover that your body is not a reality and the feeling of the body is just like all the physical senses, an illusion and barrier to what is real. I just feel energy, not my energy but one energy inseparable from me, pure energy, and awareness of pure energy. I am energy. This energy is spiritual energy, and that spiritual energy is clarity of mind. When thought goes away time goes away with it.
My mind being empty and completely still is what is needed to have maximal awareness. On the path to maximal awareness is, first, a busy, thinking mind. Then no thoughts but not empty. Then it is no thoughts and an empty mind. Then is nothing but total awareness. I feel only pure energy when I am completely still in my mind. My mind becomes completely still and open to the sky but my body is moving fast, faster than can be explained by Westerners. I just go, no worry about getting tired, pure energy cannot tire. Only a mind focused on and limited by the perception of a physical body gets tired. The bumblebee, like me, mathematically cannot fly, but out here, connected to nature with a mind emptied of all calculation, we fly forever.
Dr. John Beasley: I don’t understand what you said about feeling…
Janu Tsöndrü Sherpa: Feeling replaces thought and extends beyond the body. I feel the mountains, the spirit of the mountains. I experience a deeper, extended feeling that has nothing to do with my body. It is a different form of feeling altogether, most people feel only their body and that is an illusory feeling; the form of feeling beyond the body is the feeling of nature, a deeper feeling of reality, the feeling of energy, spiritual energy. Awareness and energy are not separate; awareness IS energy and is the source of my energy in a way that I just become one with it and flow with it, letting go with full trust. With no resistance, body is long gone, ego-me is gone. Body and ego are only a dream, not real. The deeper feeling is always there but is easily veiled by a noisy, busy mind like when I am in the village. That is the best I can explain it. When you experience such a feeling all the time, not just on a special occasion but all the time, your relationship to nature changes forever. It is described in the ancient texts on meditative states. I can only tell you my experiences, I am not a lama, I cannot recite the ancient texts. It becomes a powerful sense, more truthful than eyes or ears. I trust it most when my life can be taken like in a storm on K2. I don’t just see a storm, I feel the storm’s energy. Its energy has a different feel than the mountain. Its energy is beyond my words.
Dr. John Beasley: What happened on K2?
Janu Tsöndrü Sherpa: We had made the summit and were coming down. It was getting late and one of the climbers in the summit group was starting to get sick, he was getting dizzy. K2 is very steep and you must have full attention on footing, rope, and positions of support. K2 and Sagarmāthā are very different. I sensed a change in energy, the energy I felt was at first pulsing in and out and then became more violent, crazy. I could not see a storm, I just knew it was coming. I told the others we must hurry to get down to Camp 4 or we will not live long. They did not believe me because they saw no danger. They did not listen until they heard a weather report from base camp of a storm coming in fast that will blindside us before we could make C4. But now it was too late to live.
Dr. John Beasley: How did it turn out?
Janu Tsöndrü Sherpa: The weaker climber lost his balance and fell to his death. The rest of us got caught in the storm but we made it to C4 and waited two days. The storm’s energy was fierce for over a day and night. The spirits let us live. Two of the climbers lost toes from frostbite. I have seen many die over the years but this was the most danger I have experienced.
Dr. John Beasley: K2 is the second highest and is not in the Himalayas, it is in the Karakorum range bordering Pakistan and China. It has different weather patterns. K2 is much taller base to summit than Everest and is very vertical, over 2800m of vertical relief in 4000m horizontal.
Janu Tsöndrü Sherpa: People need to understand that K2 and Annapurna are much more difficult to successfully climb. Westerners get caught up with the numbers of height, not difficulty. Few people will ever climb K2, many will climb Sagarmāthā. Westerners view the mountains as objects to be conquered like some trophy. Sagarmāthā, being the tallest, is the main trophy. The mountains we know are part of us and are sacred whereas Westerners dump their empty oxygen canisters in a big pile along with their trash. They don’t care as long as they make the summit. There is now tons of garbage that has collected for over 50 years. It makes us sad. It is painful.
Dr. John Beasley: Yes, I have read about it and seen pictures. Plus all the dead bodies up there. They do not decompose because they are frozen and there is no bacteria at that altitude. There is no way to get the trash down?
Janu Tsöndrü Sherpa: Sherpas have gone up to remove some of it but it collects faster than it can be removed. It is hard to bring much of it down.
Dr. John Beasley: Amandus, tell us your approach to getting Janu ready for the Phenomic Games.
Coach Amandus Nyström: Janu has a stellar backend. No question about that. The number one priority this season is to build an Olympic lifter starting from square 1. For several months we targeted technique not just in the clean and jerk and rowing but all the assistance exercises I selected from the adjunctive tool pool. A big question mark coming here was trying to figure out Janu’s potential for strength and explosiveness. He is like a supercharged diesel cranking up heavy loads up the mountain all his life but with Olympic lifting you need explosive force development. Ideally that takes two physiological traits in tandem: a high type IIB fast twitch muscle population in the prime movers and also a nervous system that fires all those motor units and the fibers they control simultaneously. Sherpas move incredible loads considering the number of repetitions they do but does that equate to a big single lift, meaning 1-RM? [Ed. one relative maximum, the most you can lift for 1 repetition] Well, no, it doesn’t. A normal person can lift 10 reps at 80% and 5 reps at 90%. Janu’s strength curve is really flat. There is very little drop off as the rep count increases but on the other side of the curve there is very little strength increase as the rep count decreases. He is finely tuned to lifting moderate loads for incredibly high reps at least in hip extension and knee flexion.
Dr. John Beasley: Is Janu trainable to increase more strength?
Coach Amandus Nyström: I think from the nervous system side we can improve the recruitment count, rate coding frequency and move the curve to the left so it all happens faster. That is the software portion. The hardware is a much greater challenge; maybe some change but not much. There is an old saying that you can make fast twitch into endurance but you cannot make slow twitch into strength. So we can improve efficiency through technique and get more gain from the nervous system. We may do some eccentric training where we just lower the weight through a movement at over 100% of the load he can lift concentrically. That directly targets the nervous system recruitment programming. We are doing plyometrics. We are going to experiment. But there is plenty of upside we can tap into. He has made great progress. Mentally we are going to practice visualization and limit strength drills. I know we will get some ΔP [Ed. delta performance] there.
Dr. John Beasley: How about The Burn and The Erg?
Coach Amandus Nyström: We want to transfer Janu’s properties of a supercharged diesel to all of the Phenomic 5 with the greatest possible leverage by being creative with the adjunctive tool pool. The Burn is in the part of Janu’s strength curve where the rep-force relationship is just beginning to close in on the outer fringe of his sweet spot but does not quite get there. The Burn is 100% out-of-the-saddle so we can capture as much of the hip extension and knee extension and flexion joint angles as he uses to climb. In rowing we are going to build out his upper body endurance so that we can get very close to having him go wide open throttle the whole way. He is not a super high carb burner so doesn’t accumulate excessive lactic acid. The supercharged diesel is fully in play in The Erg and of course in The Climb. Janu will be a phenomic Sherpa by Worlds.
Dr. John Beasley: Janu, what does it feel like to train for the first time in your life?
Janu Tsöndrü Sherpa: This is a completely new experience. I really feel wonderful being able to do something now that I could not do last year or even a few months ago. It has opened my eyes. I am using my mind in a different way. I have had situations on big climbs where I needed great strength like when someone slipped and I had to belay him and part of the protection is lost. This takes great strength and the mind to do this is as Amandus describes in limit strength survival conditions. I now use that for lifting the barbell. It is a challenge. I am well aware that the power of the mind has no boundaries. This is a lesson I do not need.
Dr. John Beasley: Thank you so much for sharing your life with us and your intimate view of high-altitude climbing. I am sure the audience has gained a new understanding of this unique and beautiful land and its people. I look forward to seeing the world’s first phenomic Sherpa!
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The World’s Fittest Humans ©2015 James Autio. All rights reserved.
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Next Saturday John will be in São Paulo, Brazil to meet Gabriela…
If you recall, Gabriela blew everyone’s mind with her stunning Latina beauty and the physical horsepower to back that up with the Bronze medal for overall female at Turin Phenomic Worlds. What her fans didn’t know is that her brain outweighs her body almost 2 to 1, she is that smart!
She is one academic year shy of her PhD in neuroscience in the sub-discipline of embodied cognition with her dissertation being: “The roles of perception, cognition and motor function in adaptation to physical conditioning”. She is going to take you on a wild tour through time on an unprecedented scale and piece together all the milestones of synergistic, evolutionary, biological inventions that catalyzed the snowballing mind-body relationship from amoebas to man. Why? At the end of this rabbit hole is the mother lode of fitness: what fitness means to organisms at the deepest level. That is, it is not about your “of-mice-and-men” thinking, it is lock, stock and barrel about body thinking.
Gabriela by the time she is done will have re-defined fitness in a completely new framework: mind in terms of body and body in terms of mind. John knows this is going to be a great interview. As for you, you can count on it.
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PHENOMIC GAMES and PHENOMIC 5 are trademarks of James Autio.
James Autio | doctorgo@gmail.com
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