Most altitude camps are planned around flights, not physiology

Camp dates get set by airfares and team logistics long before anyone asks what the athlete's blood is doing.

Ask a distance coach why the camp runs from the eighth to the twenty-eighth and you will usually get an honest answer about a charter, a training partner's visa, or a facility booking that could not be moved. Nobody says that out loud in the press release. The press release says three weeks at two thousand three hundred metres.

I have no problem with logistics driving a calendar. Every sport runs on logistics. The problem is that the physiology then gets described as if it had chosen the dates, and athletes end up believing a schedule that was really an accounting decision.

The mechanism is simple enough to state. Living high raises the hormone signal that tells the body to make more red cells, and that process is slow. You need weeks, not days, and the useful part of the block sits at the back end. The first several days are mostly a tax. Sleep gets worse, breathing at night turns irregular, appetite drops, and the sessions you can actually complete are worse than the ones you were doing at home. A camp cut short to catch a cheaper return leg pays the tax and skips the refund.

Then there is the descent. Coming down changes your blood, your breathing mechanics and your perception of effort all at once, and they do not settle on the same timetable. Some athletes race very well within a couple of days of coming down, before the ventilatory drive has readjusted. Others feel flat for a week and sharp in the second. That variation is individual, and it is stable enough that a coach who has watched the same athlete descend four times knows roughly what to expect. A coach who has watched once knows nothing and is guessing with a stopwatch.

So the useful question is not how long the camp is. It is when the race sits relative to the descent, and whether the athlete has enough previous descents on record for anyone to hold an opinion worth having.

My view, and plenty of coaches will argue it: two shorter camps in a season, each followed by a race, teach you far more than one long camp followed by a championship. The block itself is not the asset. The record of how that particular body comes down is.