Suffering for science

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This is the G-Trainer adapted by the University of Colorado for Alena Grabowski's running study.

From the waist down I'm enclosed in an air-tight pressurised "pod" that Alena adjusted to defeat gravity by varying degrees. This is one of the seven-minute repeats conducted at a mere 25% of my bodyweight: it was a fantastic leg-speed workout; you feel virtually no impact and the job becomes one of relaxing and spinning the legs fast enough to keep up with the treadmill.

I'm hooked up to a blood gas analyzer which assesses the air going in and then calculates how much oxygen I pull out at various speeds and anti-gravity effects. This is NOT the standard set-up for a G-Trainer!

Alena put ten runners through sessions on the device for her study on the effects of reduced weight and running speed. The finished project will be worth reading, as it will throw some more light on how much of the metabolic/energy cost of running is down to our efforts to overcome gravity versus maintenance of forward momentum.

More here: http://www.yourrunning.com/blog-its_running_jim_but_not_as_we_know_it