Panem
4mo ago
I am not at the point of muscular failure. The cramps happen nocturnally after the training, honestly in this case I think I sweated a bit too much and not enough electrolyte to counter balance. But this tight rope between injury and gain is a fine one to balance. I find that given the nature of the challenge 72,000m cumulative vertical, long days etc I need to push now, but not too much.
Panem
4mo ago
The guy on dialysis was me, so I am doing this of course out of self-interest but also because I think this is a fairly atypical disease that doesn't get the spotlight much.
Panem
4mo ago
To add reference, my life expectancy on dialysis would be like 15 years. So the expected life-years for me doing this now (were I 100% healthy) is still fair bit longer than were I to go back to dialysis. I'll take the odds.
Panem
4mo ago
Training for a charity event I am organising, basically the prime aim is to help change the culture around dialysis. I think there are a lot of misconceptions that have made us converge on solution that is by far sub-optimal.
I will do 41 Alpine peaks above 4000m through hard routes. So it requires a whole season of just climbing and not dying (o1 calculated about 20 millimorts!, will have to check but sounds reasonable given my near misses).
Ramping up the training
So for the past month I have been at 4-5hrs of cardio. I do 1hr long run and a 5k interval session, going hard, per week. Then, most of the time is spent going up a 20 floor building with 12kg pack and taking the elevator down followed by some cycling. This needs to build to around 7hrs a week by May. Yesterday I did around 700m vert in an hour, today I am aiming for at least 400m. Though during the night I had very bad cramps. Every time I get them, I am scared for the kidney. Because leading up to my kidney failure cramps were a painful constant.
I am also climbing more and more outdoors now. There I really want to be able to onsight (sport) a couple of 6bs before May 15th. I also want to comfortably trad 5a/5b on limestone. Limestone is a traitorous mistress, gear that you would be bomber on any other rock can and will pull. My friends partner took a ground fall when two of his cams popped. You need deep placements and ideally nuts work best. Overall, I think this would put me in a good place to start the Climb Against Time.
Finding time for everything is a huge issue. So during the days there is obviously the daily lab stuff. On the weekends and nights there is the promotional stuff, improvements to the website, as well as attracting participants for their own challenge. I have to do these otherwise you are just 'Another fucker climbing' as per a mountain guide I met last September. Then there is finding the partners for the climbs I will be doing, which given the volume, is a bit of an ordeal of its own. All of this does strain my relationship with my wife, the time we can spend together is reduced by quiet a bit. Feeling a bit drawn.
Speaking of promotion the social media business is weird. I have now had some experience with Instagram and YouTube. I hugely favor Youtube. You need to spend a lot more effort, your reach is smaller, but you can actually post long-form content, saying somewhat meaningful things or actually being able to tell a story. And I also feel like with investment in to quality you can really take off. There are a crap tonne of accounts on instagram and the competition is fierce because the effort is less. On Instagram 3 second retention is like 30%. You can't really tell a story there, its more like, hey look at this thing real quick! Then bam on to the next thing. If I look at my own viewing habbits this all makes quiet a lot of sense. I think taking this brief foray in to the content creation world has made me a tiny bit more conscious of how I engage with it also.
Panem
5mo ago
Videos and reports! I want to document everything. The thing I really want to do is keep an alpine diary but its always hard to write while you are on 'tour' because you are one of: tired, eating, sleeping, or climbing and nothing else :D
Panem
5mo ago
A lot of things happening. So if some of you remember I was on dialysis (kidney failure) for like 10 months, decided to change career from vehicle engineering to basically finding a solution. Now I am in University Medical Center Utrecht, started a day after the transplant, trying to do just that. Its hard of course, creating a bio-artificial/engineered kidney. Harder still when you are so resource constrained, money being sprayed around in consortia with all sorts of other different ambitions and capabilities. But I feel like we are at a position to give a good crack at it. I say bio-engineered because there will always be some degree of bio-engineering, currently that might be simple, but in the future, maybe more extensive.
The current aim for me is an implantable hemodialyser, so something that can be implanted that will dialyse the patient without the need for an external blood circuit and so without the need for needles. This is like an intermediate point, half way line. If we can get this, patient mobility will increase, treatment quality also. More patients will be able to dialyse at home for instance, which is good given how pressed the nursing situation is!
I want to develop a minimal prototype by May 1st. So a lot of hours in the lab, I feel like with the printers and resins we have, we are in a good place to do this. But it requires a shit tonne of optimization and bashing ones skull in to the printer casing I feel. Just the other day I moved the printers in to another room, and physics stopped working. I had prints come out good at first, then wonky later. Turns out that I was not in the grips of delirium, but the lights in this room were emitting too much UV and poisoning the resin. Took quiet a while to figure that one out, now I am mainly in the dark :D
This is all happening in the background of a fundraiser/awareness campaign I am planning for the summer (May 15- October 15). Where I will be doing 41, 4000m peaks through hard routes. I have also invited other people to do their own challenge, hike, climb, walk, cycle, whatever it may be. The idea is inspired by my own experiences in the mountains and the National Donor Monument, which is called 'The Climb' the website is www.climbagainsttime.org. In any case, naked advertising aside, it took quiet some time to knock this together, not on the code side (gpt helped a tonne), but the communication side. Its very hard to communicate things via the web form I find. Presentations I can do, but web, its hard to give enough information but not too much. In any case, now comes to hard part of getting people involved, networking, social media presence etc. So quiet a lot of stuff, because in the end, I at least want to make some noise, money is nice, but not essential.
And also, if I am putting my neck on the line (or spine in this case), I want it to have some pay off, high-risk low gain isn't too desirable. But I do remind myself of the Scottish song 'Will ye no come back again' from Alastair McDonald, he says 'although the cause was ill fated and hopeless, the sentiment is noble and chivalrous and self-sacrificing ' referencing the Jacobite uprising. So I take some solice in that!
I will try to keep updating here on the progress and other details. I said I would keep a dialysis diary here but only managed like 3 weeks, so lets see how far this one goes
Panem
8mo ago
Perhaps, depending on how the space capabilities are used. But space technology so far has given me very little to be suspicious. Spy satellites etc are of course a thing, but compared to the thing in your pocket, they almost seem like old technology. I fear more the cars of the glorified military contractor than I do his rockets right now.
Panem
8mo ago
nobody is calling for a return of Constantinople to the Christians
I honestly wouldn't say nobody. There are plenty of people larping as crusaders. Just mostly they aren't taken too seriously.
Panem
8mo ago
I am thinking about the aesthetics of technology. Certain technologies seem deeply aesthetic to me and really appeal to my soul. So for instance, SpaceX capturing the booster, that really speaks to me, to be honest pretty much anything space related does. I would class this as 'real' engineering, as would I class building a bridge for instance, but that doesn't have the same frontier pushing edge. Whereas anything related to sensors and artificial intelligence, though can be cool, doesn't evoke the same feelings. I am trying to pin down why this is. I think maybe because I see the electrical technologies as more homogenizing, or more liable to the centralization of power and control? Mobile phones during COVID come to mind for instance. Does anyone else get where I am coming from?
Panem
9mo ago
It depends whether it is a suicide pact or not. If you are climbing a long unprotectable hard snow at high angle for hundreds of meters, than perhaps its good to put away the rope. But most of the time it is not like this. You are moving through a very large amount of terrain of varying complexity. You do not have the time to mess around with the rope. You should move together when possible, using terrain belays when possible and soloing if you cannot. This is the only way to really move in the Alpine. Otherwise you get benighted. Just last week I was listening to some French mountain rescue guys talk about a pair of British climbers who were stranded enroute on the Peuterey Integral having made it just past the technical difficulties. Its an astounding route, very serious but most parties complete it 2-3 days. These guys were on it for 5 days. Likely because the terrain requires a lot of efficient moving together. The subsequent rescue was quiet legendary and put a hell lot of people at risk with a storm nipping at their heels (helicopter could not be used due to visibility).
As for the milli and micromort strategy I think its a function of ability. Ueli Steck could jog up the Matterhorn and down before you got to the Hornli. It would also mean that during an Alpine season your chances of dying should decrease. But I find the approach interesting and I will use it for my next year fundraiser which will be 41 Alpine Peaks above 4000m through technical routes. I am curious what my chances of dying is.
Yea I am always kind of at two places with 'safe' outdoor route climbing. I generally think there should be a variety. Because usually things that are too safe or too gym like also become like a gym where you lose a lot of the outdoor element and there is a lot of traffic. Some sort of gating based on ability and risk tolerance is I think nice, also gives an additional sense of progression and accomplishment. I generally don't think having bolts but coloring them etc makes sense, not having the bolt there, and experiencing the real sketch is what makes the route the route. So overall I think a variety of climbs of differing boldness is good.
Panem
9mo ago
I am working on a membrane testing system for blood contact. Basically when blood makes contact starts to foul the surface and may start to coagulate. This is something I don't want. So we need a fast way of optimising surface coatings/membranes that prevent this from happening. All current systems are kinda shit and not meant for this purpose. We have animal experiments but these are costly and time consuming and not well controlled.
So I have currently a small fluidic loop that contains all the blood needed for the experiment, a peristaltic pump and a syringe pump. The peristaltic pump moves the blood around at the right rate so it doesn't aggregate or get damaged by excessive shear forces. The syringe pump keeps the system pressurised at a certain level. This is the neat part because then you don't need small diameter resistive tubing to do the pressure, which means blood gets less damaged.
I built the 3 syringe pumps from an old ender 3 printer. You should be able to control the pumps through the electronics of the ender but its super clunky. Especially if you want to interface with a pressure sensor and keep the pressure at a set point, via PID control. So I now bought an Uno and a CNC shield so I can do it low level via this. The syringe pump also means I can measure exactly how much flow is going through my membrane which is neat. But lets see if the interface works out, especially on the talking with the pressure sensor. Because the sensor is connected to a different arduino, so I think the simplest way is to send signals from my computer to the Uno based on this. But the nicest would probably be to integrate the control and the sensing together. But I think that would take a bit too long.
Panem
11mo ago
Isn't the problem here mass marketing? The same regulations basically seem to apply across the board, irrespective of the amount of data, nature of the data , or the usage of the data (non-commercial, research). The nature of the data in our case is very clear. Data obtained during human experiment, under informed consent, with a very real physical signature of said consent document.
Panem
11mo ago
I agree that cowboy in this regard can be both good and bad. There is a book called 'How to make a killing' which looks in to the flip side of the coin. Where basically doctors were the first ones to commercialize dialysis, and attempt to maximize profits from it. Of course, different cowboys at Seattle were the first to have a dialysis ward for chronic dialysis patients that would otherwise die, using the shunt invented by them, without the intent of profit maximization but maintenance instead.
Its obviously a mixed bag but I feel like we are sliding more and more towards things being harder to develop. I think this is a shame and potentially, in the long term, dangerous. There must be a way of reducing the regulatory burden and safetyism without producing these negative effects. Or the system is basically unstable and you will slide to one extreme or the other.
I am unsure about the animal research part. I think things that could be done without it, should be. This is what I am trying to do to some degree with in-vitro blood testing setup for the blood filtration membranes (its hard, blood is weird and weirder outside the body :D). I think in-vitro is always going to be cheaper and likely better controlled, if you are clever about it.
But I do wonder if the authors thought the work was unnecessary prior to their results. If so, why did the work happen in the first place. Goodness knows there are a lot of bullshit proposals out there. I generally think a lot of science is muddling around in the dark and sometimes something works. Thats for the majority of the mortals. Therefore most of the time the tools we use for this (animals perhaps) were 'wasted' if we hit a wall, atleast on the individual level. But on a macro-level it seems like a part of the process.
Panem
11mo ago
If you know how to fight standing then I think it goes without saying strength matters a lot. But I also did a few weeks of MMA (Friday was like sparring from standing with strikes allowed) I remember going against a person who was vastly superior striker (with my 2x MMA striking, you can imagine my state). But I shot quiet fast and took him down and there it was quiet easy. I imagine, given that she was so good at judo (coming from that background), etc, unless I got lucky or for some reason she just couldn't deal with striking being a part of the game, she would similarly take me down and go to town. As I replied to faceh, similar weight + huge skill imbalance is where you would get a woman absolutely dominate. If she was 20kg lighter (as is usual) I think it would be a very different story.
Panem
11mo ago
We always started standing. I mean she was a judoka so, it wasn't that hard for her to get me to the ground. If you are so heavily out skilled and you have the same weight, the strength makes very little difference. She isn't going to let you body slam her and might do the same herself. Most women are very much NOT the same weight as me, indeed majority in the sparing sessions were about 20kg lighter. Which means it would probably go down as you are proposing, weight + large strength difference. But this was the only big Dutch woman there hence the result.
Panem
11mo ago
A biological male who goes through male puberty has an insurmountable advantage over any person whatsoever who hasn't gone through male puberty. Unironically, If I were forced to bet on a no-holds barred brawl between a barely-trained 70 year old male and a heavily trained mid-twenties female in the same weight class, I am picking gramps for the win. Cardio will 100% be a factor here, but also, old man strength is REAL. (Oh I'm prepared to lose my money, but absent actual medical problems a 70 year old is not as fragile as you think.) I wonder why such a matchup hasn't been done before. Hmmmm.
I honestly don't agree with this. I went to BJJ for a couple of months just prior to starting dialysis. I was strong, not super strong but pulling 1 rep-max of 50kg over my 75kg body weight on a pullup kind of strong. I had no technique just strength and the technique was developing, but only enough to resist tapping to white belts for the 5 minute hard sparing periods. And for some of the novice white belts I was pretty comfortably in top position against (just had no idea how to submit anyone). I went up against a judo girl about the same size and weight as me. Absolute utter domination. She had been doing this since she was very young. I think I got tapped out like 3 times in the span of 3 minutes. This was in the first week of my short bjj bout, but still.
In a previous Wellness Wednesday I talked about my summer challange to climb 41 4000ers, and promised there some trip reports. So here I go!
Prelude
The Climb Against Time, my summer challenge to climb 41 4000ers in one season and raise funds to develop an Implantable Artificial Kidney, started with disappointment. Here, after a good warmup stage of preparing both my body and mind in May, I was hit by terrible snow conditions.
In early June I attempted Allalinhorn through the Hohlaubgrat, mainly a snow route with a little bit of rock scrambling at the summit block. This attempt proved futile as we were bogged down by slushy snow straight from the hut all the way to 3600m where we turned around. This futility was followed by heavy bouts of diarrhea and vomiting, having contracted some stomach bug from the water or the fellow inhabitants of the dingy winter room at the Britannia hutte. Between trying to keep my immunosuppressants down and running to the toilet, days passed, and the snow that had plagued us on the approach had long since vanished in the raging rays of the early summer heat wave.
The week after, I was again in the Alps, this time to try Les Droites or the Aiguille Verte. Neither was in condition; the mixed routes were too soft and prone to rockfall, and the rock routes were too wet and filled with rotten snow. Instead, we did Aiguille du Moine as a workup climb. I was getting incredibly frustrated. I had 41 4000ers to go and here I was, grounded, without any so far. I needed a win, and I needed it fast.
Under these conditions, I accepted Freddy’s offer to try our luck at Dent du Geant. I met him in a cafe just next to the telepherique going up to the Midi. He seemed somewhat out of it, tired and hazy. He had just been up the normal route to Mont Blanc and had come down that night, slightly dazed from the exhaustion. In all likelihood, I had a similar daze, having just come down from my ‘emergency bivvy’ that I had set for myself by the Courvecle refuge at ~2700m to get a bit more acclimatization in and catch the train from Montenvers at 1800m, saving my legs almost 2000m of vertical. Two men, at two different sides of the massif, yet the same cold, sleepless night.
We went over the plan and agreed to meet in two days. We drove across to Italy over the Mont-Blanc tunnel in Freddy’s van. Here we promptly got the lift to Pointe Helbronner at 3462m to make our bivouac. The Italian side of Mont Blanc is steeper and wilder. Layers and layers of rock buttresses rise abruptly from the earth to meet the gently sweeping glaciers coming from the French side at the high summits. It amazed me that there was a path straight down almost from Helbronner to Courmayeur, a sickening amount of vertical on mostly loose rock. Dent du Geant The Bivvy
We got off the lift and could immediately see our objective, Dent du Geant or, Dente del Gigante as Italians would call it. The Giant's Tooth did indeed look like a tooth. I was used to the view of it from the French side; from there, with its sweeping North Face and its cloud perpetually lingering under it, it looked impressive. Now, with us so high up, it looked small and, importantly, attainable.
We moved slowly up the glacier towards our mountain and settled on its shoulder, off the glacier at 3600m. It was an impressive bivvy location. Only 400m below our summit, with the entirety of the Mont Blanc massif to let our eyes gorge upon. Here I started with the ritual of collecting, melting, and boiling snow.
It always amazes me how long it takes to melt and boil snow. For the subsequent bivvies with easy lift access, I decided I would bring water up from the valley and save the time and hassle. Yet the time spent over the Jet Boil was not in boredom, for there was tomorrow's route behind us, and the routes for later, in front of us, to admire.
I had met my partner Freddy on a belay at Pointe Lachenal just a month prior. I didn’t know him well, aside from the coffee shop chat, and we had never climbed together either. Yet from the get-go, I was at ease; things were just meshing well without trouble. So we lay feet to head, as two wide-shouldered men could only lie in this tent, and slept soundly.
Until we were woken up around 2 am by the sound of metal and the flash of headlamps. I opened the zip of my tent and looked up; lo and behold, a train of lights heading up the approach gully. "What the hell? It's 2 am, are these people mad?" I asked rhetorically. This was not a long climb, and I certainly did not expect people to start at the hut at 1 am, yet here they were, clambering up the mountain in our backyard. I suppose it makes some sense to be the first on route for such a popular climb, yet the thought of leaving the tent at such an early hour and doing most of the climbing in darkness did not appeal to me at all.
Let them, we thought. We will get going at dawn. No need to rush; let the rock warm up. As I got back inside the tent, I looked up at the Kuffner, the mythical route of my desire. It cut so steeply up the side of Mont Maudit, intimidating at this time of day, with the deathly skirts of the Cursed mountain dropping steeply to either side. It, too, had a train of lights moving up it. I hoped and dreaded for it in the coming weeks.
In our tent, we brewed up, ate, and slowly but steadily got ready. At 5:40, just on the tick of dawn, we joined the light train going up the approach gully. The Climb
The first part of the climb was about 250m of steepish snow mixed with some rocks and rock passages. It was not too difficult, and we had a good clear night and so a refreeze. We moved past these sections to the start of the technical climbing slowly and easily in about 1hr 30 minutes.
We looked up to see that even the first pitch had fixed ropes aiding the way. We decided to simul climb this (climb while moving together). I remember this being the hardest pitch of the whole climb. Perhaps because I was still cold and not in the climbing mindset, but tugging on the fixed line in boots, it all felt very powerful. In either case, we made it up the first pitch to the second. I led the second pitch fairly easily placing a few pieces here and there, mostly just to place something, rather than a strict absolute need to place something.
The last move of this pitch was interesting, a mantle move using huge shipping ropes to help on to a massive terrace, at the beginning of the Burgener slabs. Freddy soon joined me on the belay.
The Burgener slabs, though on every photo I have seen look intense and hard, were far from it. Massive cracks go up the rock with good places for both foot and hand. The climb is only marred by the massive shipping rope yarding up the face, detracting from the seriousness of such an objective and its beauty. Yet the ropes were there and so Tug, started to tug, all the way up the slabs to the steepening just before the summit ridge.
Here it got a bit powerful as I entered the chimney, without the ropes I would definitely need my rock shoes but in this case there was no need. The climb was also as well protected as a multi-pitch sport route. So it all felt quiet breezy. I quickly led the remaining pitch on the summit ridge to the Maddona and gave her a kiss on the forehead.
We had made it, my 1st of the 41 4000ers. There was a huge welling of relief. Finally, at-least one was done.
Soon after this I took my immune suppressants. There is always one set at 10am and one set at 10pm, summit or valley, sleep or climb, this was the 10am set.
After summiting there was only the 7 or so rappels down the south face to do. These rappels were quiet fun (when expertly done as Freddy did so) with large overhanging sections which suspended you mid air.
All in all it was a glorious start a very long adventure, where good partnership met good conditions to give a beautiful outing.
[I am a few weeks delayed with all the write ups by the way but they are coming!]
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