I finally got serious about mitigating my radon
problem this month. Not a ton of progress on this front yet. The main reason for this is that the people doing the mitigating don't trust the devices that alerted me to the problem in the first place. The first thing they had me do was setup (and pay for) 4 of their old school tests. I then had to put them in 4 different locations on the bottom floor of my house and keep 'still air' conditions for ~3 days. This meant, not opening doors, running heat or AC, or
running any hot water. It wasn't a surprise when the results came back and radon was 'high'. Next step is to get the mitigators back out and find out what the 'actual' next step is.
Since the last issue, I also embarked on training for my first overnight
backpacking trip at high altitude. This really consisted of two things that were different from normal training for a trip of this distance. The first was supplementing with a form of Rhodiola. Rhodiola is an adaptogen that has historically been used to combat altitude sickness. Unfortunately, I didn't really have a control to see how
effective this was other than me returning home without any major issues on the trip. The second thing that I did was my normal treadmill routine using a hypoxic training mask. This was meant to mimic hiking with weight up a 15% grade in a low oxygen environment. If nothing else, this did have a noticeable positive impact on my estimated V02Max. While on the trip, when I did feel winded, breathwork aimed at 'blowing off' CO2 seemed to be effective at getting me to feel
normal again.
