Griffith Pugh

You know, what, what can we measure that's useful in terms of predicting their performance and in terms of optimizing and prescribing their training? So, you know, it was, it was quite methodological in that regard.

Now, we've known for a long time, you, you go back to Griffith Pugh and even before that, that there's a-- there's air resistance when you run outdoors, and the faster you go, the greater is the energy cost of overcoming that air resistance.

And therefore, if you run on a indoor treadmill on the flat, then the energy cost, the oxygen cost is gonna be less than running outdoors.

Now, at slow speeds, it's gonna be kind of negligible, but the faster you go, the bigger that difference will be between running on a level treadmill and, and running outdoors.

So we wanted to sort of investigate that.

As I said, Griff- Griffith Pugh had shown that if you run behind a single runner, uh, then the oxygen cost is less.

So if you're, you know, the drafting sit- situation.

So we know that if you draft, the energy cost is less, and that's because you've got less air resistance.

But at the time, searching for the Yeti ooze what made the big bucks, and we've all got to pay the bills somehow.

The fact that Edmund Hillary and physiologist Griffith Pugh were eager to organize a long expedition in the Himalayas, where they would spend the winter at high altitude to acclimatize themselves before attempting a summit without oxygen.

Hillary wanted to do more climbing, while Pugh wanted to study the effects this would have on the human body.

Nobody seemed interested in funding their project, though, and then along came the Field Enterprises Educational Corporation, publishers of the World Book Encyclopedia, and said, "What if you also look for the Yeti while you're there, boys? Then we'll give you the money." And they, of course, agreed, and off they went to the Himalayas.