acclimatize

Lessons learned as an extreme athlete to help my start-up succeed

Standing waist deep inside a frozen lake–in the heart of Finnish winter–I knew I was in for a challenge. I was competing in the Polar Bear Pitch, a start-up competition with one small catch: I needed to deliver my pitch while immersed in a hole cut through the frozen Baltic Sea.

I had trained for this moment for weeks, taking ice baths and cold showers to acclimatize my body to new temperatures. The intensity of the ice was a new sensation for me, especially as an Israeli more accustomed to extremes of heat than of cold.

But I was no stranger to self-discipline.

In Israel, people point to army service as key to the start up nation success. But for me, that training started much earlier. As a teenager, I trained every day as a long jump athlete, with dreams of making it to the Olympics. I was used to pushing my body to extremes, crowded an Israeli long jump championship at the age of just 16.

The way I saw it, succeeding in the Polar Bear Pitch would be no different from any other athletic challenge.

With the proper physical training (the ice baths) and mental preparation, I would keep my eyes on the prize, ignore the cold, and deliver a pitch as if I were standing in my own living room.

And, amazingly, it worked!

But, my foundation as an athlete helped with so much more than becoming the Polar bear Champion. It was a key preparation for start-up life.

Seize Opportunities

I began my first company during the dotcom boom in 2002, investing $3 to buy the domain easytobook.com. I saw the growth of the web as a huge opportunity to shift travel agency services online, and decided I wanted in on the action.

I was new to the travel space, but what I lacked in knowledge, I made up for in discipline and focus. That mindset allowed me to seize a new opportunity to start a company in a new space, not as an “expert” but as a “trainee” with the confidence that I would figure things out along the way.

Confronting new challenges was familiar to me: As an athlete, I was never fully satisfied with my progress, always pushing towards the next goal. When opportunities presented themselves, even if I was not fully ready, I learned to push myself beyond my comfort zone.

Practice self-discipline and focus  

In the same way I was able to stand in that frozen lake and not “feel” the cold–or at least not let it affect me–I’ve trained myself to “tune out the noise” and laser focus on my goals. It was the same when I trained as an athlete. Winning was as much about my mental focus and state of mind than my physical prowess.

Part of self-discipline is about ignoring the noise–Many people offering their opinions, whether solicited or not. The trick is to filter through all this noise, and take only the advice that instinctively feels right.  

Project Confidence

A friend of mine once told me you can always tell a woman plays sports simply by her posture. The simple act of “standing tall” can often help you project confidence. I think this is so important because as an entrepreneur, you experience many “no’s” and rejection on a daily basis.

“Ignoring the naysayers” sometimes means ignoring self-doubts and negative voices inside my own head. But confidence–even if it’s only an illusion–is key.  Why would someone invest in you if you don’t believe in yourself?

Self reliance

For the first few years of the company I worked alone and I believe the most important person you have to count on is yourself. When you fail, you are alone. Nobody comes to people who are failures. People forget about you. But if you are mentally strong, you don’t let this influence you, and you retain the strength to keep going.

Self reliance doesn’t mean you don’t consult with others or strive to build a team. In fact, I have have several mentors, whose guide us in our strategic decisions. They played a similar role to my coaches in my early athletic days.

And while I began the company on my own, slowly, slowly I built a team and grew it to a few more European cities. When the time was right we scaled to over 100.

In the decade since my $3 investment, I managed to conquer my doubts, ignore the noise, stand tall, scale the company, and shake up the travel field.

In 2011, we sold easytobook.com to BCD holdings, one of the largest travel companies in the world. At that time, we had 80 employees and a turnover of EUR 100 million.

Once at athlete, always an athlete

It is this same determination and dedication that I take with me to my current company VDroom, a content management system for hotels to showcase 3D versions of their properties. In a sense, I have been “training” for this opportunity my whole life, honing the goal setting abilities that have gotten my company featured in over 100 hotel chains globally, in the span of a year in a half.

But this is only the beginning.

Entrepreneurship, like extreme sports, is not for the faint of heart. And while all all entrepreneurs face hurdles in founding, leading and scaling their business, I draw unique strength from my sports training to get me through any challenge life throws in my way.

Michal Hubschmann is a former Israeli Long Jump Champion and CEO of VDroom, a leading 360° content management system for property owners. She is a veteran of the travel industry, and sold her first start-up, Easytobook.com to Dutch based Travix (BCD holdings), one of the largest travel companies in the world.

Get High In Bed: How To Acclimatize At Home

The oxygen at the summit of an 8,000-meter peak is so thin most humans can’t survive if plucked from sea level and dropped at the top.

A Hypoxico Deluxe Tent in action

That’s why most mountaineers spend a month or two on a mountain before summiting, making repeated trips to progressively higher spots. This allows the body to acclimatize for the final summit push.

At least that’s the tradition. But when Adrian Ballinger and Emily Harrington climbed 8,188-meter Cho Oyu in a single “lightning” push last month, they cut that step entirely.

This is how.

Pre-Acclimatizing

“The key to moving fast was to have logistics dialed and be in great shape,” said Ballinger, 40, the founder of Olympic Valley, California-based guiding service Alpenglow Expeditions. “But we combined that with pre-acclimatization with Hypoxico altitude tents.”

Hypoxico’s units are sealed spaces – as small as a mask, or as large as a whole room. They thin the concentration of oxygen in that space by replacing it with nitrogen. This simulates higher altitudes within the confined area.

Ballinger and Harrington usually opted for a tent or head tent during training.

The idea being, when placed under duress with less oxygen, the body produces more red blood cells, capillaries, and mitochondria, all of which help deliver more oxygen. The body adapts to low oxygen levels, and thus performs more efficiently.

It boosts fitness and prepares the body for high-altitude climbing, without all the time spent on the side of a mountain.

Endurance Training

“This caught the attention of endurance athletes,” said Brian Oestrike, 37, the CEO of Hypoxico, which designed and patented the first altitude tents in the ’90s. “From about 1995 to 2005, you saw a lot of triathletes, cyclists, and other extreme endurance athletes using these systems.”

It had long been theorized that athletes from high-altitude climes – like Colorado or Kenya – had a physiological advantage from training in thinner air. But a 2001 study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology confirmed a significant performance boost for athletes who “live high-train low.” That means they sleep or rest in an altitude tent or chamber (or live in high mountains) and do their actual training at lower elevation, where they can still perform at maximum strength.

An athlete ‘training high’ with a Hypoxico mask

Oestrike said Hypoxico arranged for training systems as small as a mask and as large as an entire room at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs.

“We have NFL teams that are starting to use them,” Oestrike said. “Most English Premier League [soccer] teams have their athletes using them.”

Mountain Training

“I first heard about altitude tents in 2010 or 2011 from athletes who were using them to train for extreme endurance events like [The Leadville 100],” said Ballinger. “And I thought, I’m spending seven to eight months a year in tents on expeditions, and if I can find a way to shorten that, I will.”

It followed, Ballinger reasoned, that if tents could cause adaptations for endurance athletes similar to living at altitude, they should be able to simulate the acclimatization process in mountaineering, possibly cutting steps out of the summiting process and cutting the risk of various altitude-related ailments like acute mountain sickness or high-altitude pulmonary edema.

Ballinger acclimates at home

He tested his hypothesis on an Alpenglow expedition to 8,485-meter Malaku, the fifth-highest peak in the world. The trek to the mountain was so gnarly that would-be climbers often failed before reaching base camp. Ballinger wanted to skip it, flying the group right to 17,000 feet.

“So we had them pre-acclimatizing using the tents, and we had a 100 percent success rate,” he said.

Ballinger began integrating it into his own training – Olympic Valley sits at 6,000 feet – and said by January 2017, all of Alpenglow’s mountaineering trips will have clients pre-acclimatizing using Hypoxico systems in order to shorten the ascent time.

“We can cut 30 to 50 percent off the length of a trip with the rapid ascent program,” he said.

High Altitude ‘Training’

Ballinger said he and Harrington used Hypoxico systems for about eight weeks before Cho, but that a 6,000- or 7,000-meter peak might only require four to six weeks or pre-acclimatization.

“We spent eight hours a day in the tent, mostly sleeping, but sometimes watching a movie or doing e-mails,” he said. “We bumped up the altitude slowly with the goal of sleeping well at night. If you’re too aggressive, you can hurt your recovery and not see the full benefits of training.”

To keep from overdoing it, Ballinger employed a sleep tracker and pulse oximeter to measure oxygen saturation in his blood.

“The goal was to have good sleep and keep saturation above 80 percent,” he said. (For reference, normal oxygen saturation is between 95 and 100 percent.) “If it hit the high 80s or low 90s, we would bump it up.”

Ballinger “training high” with a mask before Cho Oyu

He and Harrington also “trained high.” They rode stationary bikes using Hypoxico masks – a smaller version of the same oxygen-replacing system as the tents, not the air-blocking masks that became popular a few years ago.

“We would go as high as 21,000 feet for that,” Ballinger said. “Saturation would get down to the high 60s or low 70s.”

“It’s just like what we do in the mountains,” he continued. “We get to a point where we’re comfortable, push it up until we’re suffering, then drop back down to a comfortable level to recover.”

Drawbacks

Ballinger said sleeping in the tents doesn’t always make for the most romantic arrangement. (He and Harrington live together.)

“We usually opt for the head tents,” he said, referring to the Hypoxico product pictured above, which covers only above the shoulders.

Some have questioned the ethics of altitude-simulating tents or chambers by endurance athletes, likening them to performance-enhancing drugs.

(Ballinger and Harrington, of course, don’t compete in Olympic events, and this issue does not pertain to mountaineering. However, it has been raised in the endurance sports world.)

Oestrike is quick to point out the World Anti-Doping Agency conducted a review of hypoxic technology and concluded it did not constitute an unfair advantage.

“They basically came to the conclusion that if other people can live in Chamonix or Aspen, and train there, then others should be able to simulate altitude training at sea level and level the playing field,” he said.

By Alex Kurt Alex Kurt is a Minnesota native, an avid runner, a novice climber, a begrudging cyclist, and an enthusiastic skier. A graduate of St. John's University and the University of Minnesota, he is most proud of his 6:48 PR in the beer mile.

Juan Antonio Pizzi’s Saudi Arabia need to acclimatize quickly against tougher opponents in Ukraine, Belgium friendlies

MARBELLA: Be it cities, squads or footballing styles, comparing characteristics on paper is rarely an accurate way to predict outcomes.Case in point: Marbella and Moscow. The two cities could hardly be more contrasting. The 140,000 residents of the former generally enjoy a year-round sun-kissed Spanish city hugging the Mediterranean coastline. The 12 million or so Muscovites living in the latter reside in a landlocked, history-rich metropolis and regularly experience sub-zero conditions.Yet, while the two cities are as different as chalk and cheddar, Saudi Arabia’s new coach Juan Antonio Pizzi — who had brought his team to the south of Spain for a 10-day warm-weather training camp — may be learning a thing or two about how his team react to the cold. Despite Marbella boasting its usual clear blue firmament, it has also this week been engulfed in unseasonably chilly and windy climes.On Wednesday, the city’s famous beaches, usually thronged with holidaymakers, were eerily quiet as tourists walked the promenade in hats and jackets. Several outdoor signs advertising restaurants and shops lay face down having been blown over by strong winds.This was not part of the plan.Pizzi, a veteran Argentine coach who led Chile to Copa America glory in 2016, selected Marbella for his 28-man squad’s third of five preparatory camps ahead of the FIFA World Cup. With two friendly matches against Ukraine and Belgium, much will be gleaned from performances between now and the end of the month, and there is clearly much work to be done.With Saudi’s only matches under Pizzi so far having been a stress-free 3-0 win over lowly Moldova in Jeddah and an experimental side’s disappointing 4-1 defeat to Iraq in Basra, this week’s camp arguably marks the first real insight into the new coach’s preparations. His predecessor, Edgardo Bauza, was given just three official matches before the country’s football federation decided improvement was not quick enough. With less than 12 weeks until the tournament curtain-raiser against hosts Russia, both Pizzi and the Saudi FA will be well aware time is of the essence.It is no coincidence also that tonight’s opponents Ukraine are similar in stature and style to Russia. Pizzi waited until after December’s World Cup draw before confirming any of his plans and decided to forego glitzy ties against Brazil and Argentina in favor of practical encounters. The evening’s match at Estadio Municipal, given the opposition and weather conditions, could thus provide an early indication of what can be expected on June 14 when his side face another tough, physical team comfortable in brisk, breezy conditions.While the Green Falcons are likely to be defensively-minded in Russia, Pizzi famously produced a high-octane style of play with Chile that involved pressing deep into the opposition half, and, after winning possession, flooding forward in numbers. It is a style that requires inexhaustible fitness, something he does not have at his disposal with Saudi Arabia. How he adapts his tactics will perhaps prove the hot-topic of this week’s camp. It will, hopefully for Pizzi and Co, not prove to be the only thing hot in Marbella.

THREE STARS LACKING MATCH-TIMEMost worryingly for Juan Antonio Pizzi will be that three of his Saudi Arabia team’s most crucial cogs — Salem Al-Dawsari, Fahad Al-Muwallad and Yahya Al-Shehri — have not played competitive football since January, having been sent to Spain’s La Liga in a bid to gain international experience ahead of the World Cup.Sami Al Jaber, the former national team player who played at four World Cups between 1994 and 2006, backed the strategy of sending his compatriots to Spain, although was quick to add a caveat.“The Saudi League does not have enough intensity to prepare players for a tournament like the World Cup,” Al-Jaber, who played in England with Wolverhampton Wanderers in 2000, told the Associated Press earlier this week. “That is why players need to go overseas. The idea is a good one, but it just needs time to see whether it works for the World Cup. It is better if they are playing and so it is up to the coach to see how they perform in the friendly games.