January 23th will be not easy to forget in the Faculty of Sciences for Physical Activity and Sport (INEF). Francisco Manuel San Cristóbal, a final year student at this Faculty from the Technical University of Madrid (UPM) faced the challenge of reaching the 8.848m from Mount Everest by going up and down 312 times the seven floors of the main building from the faculty.

Everest Challenge Team. Francisco San Cristobal wears a blue t-shirt.

This challenge makes part of his Bachelor´s degree final project. Francisco started at 7:00 am and was assessed using infrared thermography before and every hour during the whole challenge. In addition to that, nutrition, hydration, blood glucose, heart rate, and weight were measured every hour. At 1:04 am of the next day (after more than 18 hours) he finally reached the last step to the summit.

Manuel Sillero, Nieves Fernández, Francisco Manuel and Guadalupe Garrido during the challenge.

Thermography assessments were performed on the lower limbs, both front and back. Besides the thermal images taken during the challenge day, pre-test thermograms were collected in December during their training period and also 36 and 72 hours after the challenge.

Francisco Manuel during a training session

Thermography evaluation during the challenge.

It is very interesting to observe a baseline condition with almost no thermal asymmetries, and how throughout the challenge the repetitive effort was creating a clear asymmetrical pattern.

Thermal asymmetry tracking report from the lower limbs during the challenge (ThermoHuman software report)

In addition to that, it is extremely interesting to analyze the coefficient of variation, showing hypothermic values during the first 4 hours and how this tendency was getting to the opposite on the following hours.

Coefficient of variation tracking report from the lower limbs during the challenge (ThermoHuman software report)

A more detailed description will be performed in a scientific report.