Mountain biking at high altitudes

A lot of you bikers who live at sea level or lower altitude have this concern "will I survive high altitudes biking?" It is natural to have this doubt when you have some knowledge that high altitude causes trouble if you are not prepared. But you may not have all the knowledge required to pursue your dream of biking big mountains. Let me share my experiences of riding high altitudes.

I ride mountain bike Cross-Country (XC) style most of the time. Lately though, I have to admit that I am veering towards Enduro (There are many reasons for this and I will tell you at some point). I live in two different cities. My home town is Kathmandu (1300 meters above sea level) and I live & work in Singapore (sea level). In May 2016, I flew to Kathmandu from Singapore together with a Singaporean friend who wanted to team up with me to go up to Khangsar (4300 meters) to recce a high mountain trails for conducting world's highest Enduro race called YakRu.

The very next day we set off on a jeep to go to Manang but made our pit stop at Taal (1900 meters) for the first night. The next day we drove to Manang village (3700 meters). So technically, we reached the height of 3700 meters in 3 days from where we started at sea level. This should not have been done. We should have had one more day of acclimatization between Taal (1900meters) and Manang (3700).

The basic rule of thumb and mountain wisdom says that one should not ascend more than 500 meters in altitudes higher than 4000 meters but we were in such a time pressure that we had no choice but to reach Manang asap to start our recce of high altitude network of trails abundantly available in Manang regions. To say the least, we both suffered from massive headache all night long in Manang. But we knew we had to hydrate well so drank massive amount of water, chew on garlic cloves and gulped several glasses of Sea Buckthorne Juice (high altitudes berries on thorny shrubs) which all helped to lower our AMS (Acute Mountain Sickness) suffering.

What Happened the next three days were EPIC. We had cold windy nights and snow blizzard for two days during our ride to various villages of Manang. But we loved it as the AMS symptoms had subsided the next few days as we were well rested and had good food intake. The activities of the day sufficiently tired us to sleep like a log at night and recover well. Making Manang as our base, we made several runs up to 4300 meters to assess trail race worthiness of the high altitudes trails. As we gained more altitudes in the day and came back down to 3700 meters to sleep, our body rapidly adopted to the base height of 3700 meters well.

Lesson learnt!
Next time, I would go up a day slower to allow our body to acclimatize well before reaching Manang. This is firmly reflected in my planned race itinerary.
So the advise I have for biker friends at sea level who plan to ride big mountains are as follows:

-Don't be afraid of the altitudes but embrace it
-Plan in advance so that we have leisurely itinerary
-Ascend slowly giving your body ample time to adjust to lesser amount of Oxygen concentration available at higher altitude air
-Hydrate, hydrate and hydrate
-When you feel uneasy with massive headache and nausea, descend to lower altitudes immediately
-Rest at lower altitude, recover and gain height sunsequently
-Eat well and rest well
-You will be fine!