A Lung in Men’s Clothing

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