And the words are meaningless- apahasia in Florence+The Machine’s “all this and heaven too”

Abstract

Background: Sportomics is non-hypothesis-driven holistic top-down research on individual metabolic changes during sports and exercise. Ultramarathon is a prolonged exercise and an important challenge for the Central Nervous System (CNS), making it an interesting protocol to study central and peripheral fatigue. Objective: Here we evaluated the immune response and amino acids metabolism during an ultramarathon in an elite world-class male athlete. Methods: The athlete ran for 8 hours (86 km). Venous blood samples were collected (fasting, before race, hourly, recovery-60 min and 720 min) and~75 cellular and biochemical parameters were measured. Major nitrogen compounds were corrected by creatinine concentration and evaluated using Pearson correlation. Results: Leucocytes presence increase in blood was mostly due a neutrophil response to exercise (250%). We also observed a lymphocytes reduction. The exercise raise of both leukocytes and neutrophils were cooperative and fitted in sigmoid function with high correlation (r = 0.97). On the other hand their presence in blood declined during recovery following an exponential decay. We were not able to find an equation to fit the lymphocytes presence behavior. Ammonia increased more than 300%, almost due amino acid deamination (mainly Leu; Ile; Phe and Trp). A raise of both urea (200%) and urate (30%) was also measured.