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Archived from Outside magazine, January 1996
Matt Carpenter
A Lung in Men’s Clothing
By Todd Balf and Paul Kvinta (with Brooke DeNisco, Martin Forstenzer, and Eileen Hansen)
Matt Carpenter pitched his usual psych job at his mountain-running rivals
before last October’s Everest Skymarathon — he wears an air filter that renders
him a dead ringer for a praying mantis — but he needn’t have
bothered. The two-time defending champion already had his opponents shaking in
their sneakers when he scored off the charts in a battery
of physiological tests administered at a high-altitude research center in Nepal.
“I knew I adapted quickly to altitude,” says Carpenter, who once
held the U.S. Olympic Training Center record for VO2 max, a
measure of the body’s ability to process oxygen. “But I didn’t
know I adapted that quickly.” Not surprisingly, the Coloradan easily completed
his Everest threepeat, finishing the marathon — at an average of 17,000 feet,
the world’s highest — ten minutes ahead of fellow American Robb Reece in
3:22.
Copyright 1996, Outside magazine |