If you regularly read this blog, you may know that the research questions that physiologists ask relate to wide range of topics—cells, tissues and organs, insects and animals, and how the environment influences all of these things. Nowhere is this more apparent than at the annual Experimental Biology meeting. This year, thousands of physiology-based research abstracts were presented over five days. Read on to learn about two research studies on extreme sports that caught our eye.

Credit: Ram Barkai

Ice swimming is growing in popularity, with hundreds of athletes worldwide giving this chilly sport a try. Human performance in water this cold—swims must take place in water that’s 5 degrees Celsius or colder—has not been well-studied. In a study presented at the EB meeting, researchers looked at how age, gender and environmental factors such as wind chill affected athletes during one-mile ice swims. Among other results, they found that age doesn’t have a large effect on swim times, suggesting that athletes can be competitive in the sport well into their 30s and 40s. This is significantly older than the average age of the athletes on the most recent U.S. Winter Olympic team (26 years old), giving hope to older athletes as the sport is being considered as a new Winter Olympics event.

Credit: IStock

Fifty kilometer (~31 mile) mountain ultramarathons test athletes aerobic and anaerobic fitness through changes in elevation, terrain and weather. Aerobic fitness refers to how the body uses energy when there is enough oxygen, such as the energy burn that occurs when running at a comfortable pace. Anaerobic fitness refers to the body’s ability to exercise when there’s not enough oxygen, such as during a sprint to the finish line at the end of a race. While it may seem that aerobic fitness would be a better predictor of how fast a person would finish an ultramarathon, researchers found that competitors with the best anaerobic fitness finished faster. That’s why exercises that build anaerobic endurance, such as uphill sprints, would be a worthwhile addition to the training regimen of anyone preparing for this type of race.

These studies were just the tip of the iceberg. Read more physiology research highlights from the EB meeting:

How exercise to protect the blood vessels from stress

Why a high-salt and high-sugar diet is a fast track to high blood pressure

The benefits of gastric bypass surgery that occur before the weight comes off

Elephant seals that protect themselves with CO₂

What tobacco hornworms can tell us about fat metabolism

How an inhaler could protect against life-threatening accumulation of fluid in the lungs

Stacy Brooks is the former director of marketing and communications for the American Physiological Society (APS). One of her favorite things about working at APS was learning about the interesting and important research that physiologists do and finding ways to communicate their science to a wide variety of audiences who benefit from these research advances.