Following on from the success of last year, we opened our lab doors again to runners preparing for the Marathon de Sables - this year was a little different though!
This year, as part of her PhD thesis, Jodie Moss devised and ran a heat acclimation research study. The participants undertook two 5-day blocks of heat acclimation with heat stress tests performed before, mid-way, and after. Some of the MdS runners wanted to do their own thing in the chamber (e.g. they had their own training plan/ideas and/or couldn't commit to the number of sessions required to take part in the research project) and so chose to take the paid heat acclimation consultancy route. Running the study and consultancy simultaneously meant that Jodie and members of the research team* were in the laboratory from ~ 5 am to 10 pm every day for about three weeks! As a supervisor it was a joy to see how everybody chipped in to help - the model was one that I had seen working very effectively at Prof. Stephen Cheung's lab in Canada many years ago and it was great to finally see a similar set-up up and running at Roehampton. * While Jodie was the driving force behind the heat acclimation, the study would not have been possible without the help from many other members of the lab (who, I believe, were paid in coffee and snacks!). Specifically:
Part of being a good supervisor is, in my opinion, to know when to push and when to hold back. Jodie has been extremely busy over the last month collecting the data and as a result has hardly slept! Once data collection was complete I told Jodie that:
We will get back to the PhD once she has had a break!
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February 2020
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