How to survive an avalanche
14. March 2008 by Tridad.
from Wired.com
Your odds of outrunning the snow? Not so good. An avalanche can accelerate to 80 mph in seconds. But if you follow these tips, you might just limp away from it or get carried on a stretcher to the ER.
Ski one at a time. Ski between islands of safety. Make sure somebody is watching your entire descent. Shout to warn others. Ditch your poles. Keep your pack on. Insert AvaLung mouthpiece. Pull the ABS ripcord.
1. Grab a tree. The more snow that slides past you, the less likely you’ll be buried alive. Hang on for dear life until the force knocks you off.
2. Do Not Swim. Research has shown that swimming does not increase odds of survival and it’s better to protect yourself and conserve energy.
3. Create space. Once the snow stops, it’ll set like concrete. As it slows, exhale to clear the snow that is packed in your mouth.
4. Raise a hand. Before the flow ceases, get a limb to the surface to help rescuers find you. Between 15 minutes and 45 minutes under the snow, your odds of survival fall from 90 percent to 30.
5. Breathe slowly. To delay an impermeable ice mask forming around your face, stay calm and don’t bother yelling until rescuers are on top of you. Your fate is now in their hands. Pray that your beacon is working. Pray that their beacon is working. Pray that they have practiced using their beacon. Pray that they have a shovel that won’t break. Pray that they have practiced the latest shoveling techniques. Pray that there is no major trauma. Be thankful you had the insight to outfit yourself with coverage from iMULTISPORT
Losing a leg hasn’t stopped her triathlon training
14. March 2008 by Tridad.
By JOE MILLER McClatchy-Tribune
RALEIGH, N.C. — Like a lot of triathletes, Deanna Babcock is starting to train for the 2008 season. She’s swimming a
couple of days a week at the YMCA, and she’s gradually upping the miles on the bike. Soon, she plans to start running. Her goal is to be ready, by June 1, for the Kerr Lake Triathlon, a 1,500-meter swim, 40-kilometer bike ride and 10k run. By November, she plans to do the Beach 2 Battleship Half-Ironman in Wilmington, N.C., which will involve swimming 1.2 miles, biking 56 miles and running 13.1 miles.
First, though, she needs to break in a new piece of equipment.
Her left leg.
“There’s a lot to learn,” says Babcock, a 23-year-old grad student at N.C. State whose plan to do Ironman Florida this past November got derailed the afternoon of July 20 when a routine workout cost her her left leg and nearly her life. “That’s OK. There’s a lot of people out there willing to help you. It’s not like Sarah Reinertsen is out to keep her trade secrets.”
Sarah Reinertsen, for those of you outside the triathlon community, is the reason you shouldn’t scoff at Babcock’s plan to do a half Ironman. In 2005, Reinertsen became the first female with an above-the-knee amputation to finish the Hawaii Ironman, generally regarded as the toughest Ironman going.
Run an Ironman on just one leg? In Babcock’s opinion, it’s just a matter of figuring out the new hardware. The rest — the open water swims at Jordan Lake, the hours of pedaling the back roads of North Carolina’s Wake and Chatham counties, the long training runs through town — that’s a matter of doing what every other triathlete has to do: getting yourself physically and mentally prepped for the challenge ahead.
“It’s pretty sweet to put your body to the limits of what it can do,” Babcock says. “I kinda inadvertently did that this summer.”
When everything changed
By “this summer,” Babcock means July 20.
Her recollection of the day is fuzzy. She remembers rising early and heading to her 10-foot by 30-foot research plot along Davis Drive. For her graduate thesis in soil sciences, she’s testing various materials that may help minimize erosion. She spent the day working in the sun — the temperature peaked that day at 88 degrees — before knocking off about 3 to get in a swim at N.C. State.
The swim was important. Nine months earlier, Babcock, who had run cross-country as an undergrad at Albion College in Michigan, was watching the Ironman world championships in Kona, Hawaii. That looks like fun, she thought. She’d done a couple of sprint triathlons over the summer and performed well, winning her age category in both; an Ironman would just be more — a lot more — of the same. She joined the N.C. State Triathlon Club, picked an Ironman a year out — Ironman Florida, on Nov. 4, 2007 — and started training. That training had included the Myrtle Beach Marathon in February (time: 4 hours, 1 minute), the collegiate nationals triathlon in mid-April and the White Lake Triathlon, an Olympic distance race (just under a mile in the water, 24.8 miles on the bike, a 6.2-mile run) in May. Her next big test was the Duke Half Marathon in September. She needed to swim.
Babcock has to rely on the recollections of others for an account of what happened after she rode her bike to the pool. At some point in her swim her heart stopped. N.C. State lifeguards pulled her from the water and began CPR. Wake County EMS arrived and had to use a defibrillator three times to revive her. No one can say for sure how long her heart was stopped. One estimate puts it as long as seven minutes. “It certainly was at least a few minutes,” says Dr. Marc Silver, her cardiologist.
Certainly, he adds, long enough to do some serious damage.
Bad to worse quickly
When she arrived at WakeMed, it was feared that Babcock had an enlarged heart, a thickening of the heart muscle. Silver says the condition is more common than generally thought; it only becomes apparent when the heart undergoes an intense workout. When that happens, the heart practically explodes and the situation is almost always fatal. About 125 athletes younger than 35 die each year from an enlarged heart; among the more prominent recently was 28-year-old marathoner Ryan Shay, who died five miles into an Olympics qualifying event last fall in New York.
An echocardiogram ruled out an enlarged heart in Babcock’s case. A diagnosis would have to wait until other life-threatening problems could be addressed.
When the heart stops pumping and cells stop getting blood, bad things happen quickly. The immediate concern is brain damage. Brain cells start dying after three to four minutes without oxygen. After the brain, the heart and kidneys start to go. With Babcock’s heart down for perhaps as long as seven minutes, there was plenty of cause for concern.
That concern immediately focused on her kidneys. The blood-deprived muscle tissue in her legs began leaking an enzyme damaging to the kidneys. Both failed. She went on dialysis.
Then there were her legs. The muscles in her left leg were especially bad, the lack of coursing blood causing the veins to collapse. Doctors cut the muscle fascia — the thin layer of tissue encasing all muscle — to re-stimulate circulation. Her right leg stabilized; her left worsened. The next day it was amputated about mid-thigh.
She developed pneumonia and was in an induced coma — to keep her still for healing purposes — for four weeks.
During that time, though, surprisingly positive signs began to emerge. Her kidneys regained full function, there was no evidence of brain damage, and her right leg began to improve.
“She is incredibly lucky to be alive,” Silver says. “She’s a miracle child.”
An aggressive treatment
Babcock is quick to second that “incredibly lucky to be alive” observation. Asked Monday how long it had been since the incident, she replied, “My six-month anniversary of not dying was two days ago. We went out and celebrated with refined sugar.”
She’s quick to second the “miracle” thing as well. The miracle is the technology that saved her life and promises to get it close to where it was before July 20.
Miracle One: The reason Babcock survived as long as she did without a heartbeat is a procedure called induced hypothermia, being used with increased aggressiveness by WakeMed. Induced hypothermia involves dropping body temperature through ice packs and an injection of an icy saline solution via a catheter into balloons placed under the skin.
“The target temperature is 91.4 degrees,” says Eric Reyer, a nurse with WakeMed who’s involved in the hospital’s induced hypothermia program. Cells in a chilled body require significantly less oxygen to survive and thus prevent damage from spreading. The procedure has been in use for several years, but gained widespread attention last fall when Buffalo Bills tight end Kevin Everett suffered a severe blow to his spinal column, the type of injury that often results in paralysis. Doctors credit induced hypothermia with the fact that three months later he exhibits few signs of his injury.
Miracle Two: Silver still isn’t sure what caused Babcock’s heart to stop, but the current thinking is that it was caused by an enlarged right ventricle, something a person is born with. If the ventricle has improved on her next checkup, then Silver will scratch that diagnosis — a genetic condition can’t “improve” — and look elsewhere. Regardless, Babcock will keep the implantable cardiac defibrillator inserted under her left collarbone. It’s a tiny, battery-operated device that, should Babcock’s heart stop again, will deliver an electric jolt to jump-start it.
Miracles One and Two were lifesaving. Miracle Three has more to do with saving Babcock’s spirit.
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Deanna Babcock’s goal is to be ready, by June 1, for the Kerr Lake Triathlon, a 1,500-meter swim, 40-kilometer bike ride and 10k run. By November, she plans to do the Beach 2 Battleship Half-Ironman in Wilmington, N.C. — we’ll be cheering her on.
if you’d like to help her in her cause, then check out Dollars for Deanna
hear Deanna’s interview with Beginner Triathlete
900 Feet Up With Nowhere to Go but Down
14. March 2008 by Tridad.
He had learned this extreme form of tightrope walking from a homeless man who wrote books on quantum physics. But that was years ago, while goofing around on a flexible piece of nylon webbing tied close to the ground between a tree and the bumper of a Chevy van.
This was something else entirely for Dean Potter, one of the world’s best climbers, barefoot in the dying sun last Friday, walking between ledges of a U-shaped rim above Hell Roaring Canyon, a 400-foot sheer sandstone wall on his right, a 900-foot drop to a dry riverbed on his left. No leash tethered him to the rope. Nothing attached him to earth but the grip of his size-14 feet and the confident belief that, if needed, his parachute would open quickly and cleanly and not slam him into the canyon wall.
At 6 feet 5 inches and 180 pounds, wirily strong, Potter dressed in jeans and blue T-shirt emblazoned with a hawk. He wore a wide headband over unruly hair, gaining the appearance of a less gaunt and reckless Keith Richards as Alpine daredevil. As Potter stepped onto the 180-foot rope — a strand of iridescent blue against desiccated canyon shades of brick and tan and coppery green — he was believed to be the first person to combine the adventure sports of highlining and BASE-jumping.
He was also taking another stride toward his longing for avian flight, not as a birdman in a nylon wing suit or squirrel suit, which he had tried, but as a soloist who could jump off a cliff in a way that he did not yet understand, with a strength and concentration that he did not yet possess, and simply fly. Trance music pulsed from speakers on the canyon ledge with knowing lyrics: “Sometimes I think my dreams are wild.”
Highlining was a high-wire version of slacklining, an extreme cousin of tightrope walking in which no pole was used for balance and the rope was elastic, allowing for various tricks involving walking, sitting, lying down, flipping, even spinning hula hoops. BASE-jumping was an acronym used to describe parachuting from objects like buildings, towers, bridges and cliffs.
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