We're camped with our Spartan toy hauler, Oz Report World
Headquarters, at the Hidden Valley RV Park, just east of highway 14, the
Turquoise Trail, on the eastern side of Cedar Crest and Sandia Peak (site of the
1990's Sandia Classic hang gliding competitions). We drove up the eastern side
this morning to the ski area hoping that the chair lift would be open so that we
could ride up and come back down on the single track.

Doesn't open until July 2nd, so the only thing to do was head uphill on the King
of the Mountain trail (Golden Eagle is the downhill trail). Belinda was hiking
and I went biking up with another mountain biker who was familiar with the area.
The trail was mostly clear if little used so far this season as it is so early.
Very narrow with luxurious grass and Iris surrounding the trail, which was about
the width of a mountain bike tire.

Starting out at 8,500' the trail is a switch back that makes for fairly easy
climbing but given the altitude after living in Florida for six month I was
breathing heavily. My legs felt good and the actual climbing was without any
issue but I went slow to keep up with my breathing.

About half way into my climb I started coughing. My lungs were getting irritated
and after a while about every thirty seconds I would have to cough. Then I had
phlegm in my nose and I also coughed up spit.

I kept going as I wasn't in any pain but after a while I noticed that this cough
was happening very regularly and this was not usual for me.  I do often
have issues with my nose when bicycling, but never coughing. I finally decided
that something was not right and I needed to stop, site down and assess the
situation. I was breathing heavily.

I decided to turn around and upon descending the need to cough greatly
decreased. I met Belinda on the trail and told her that I would ride all the way
down back to the RV park, about 25 km away.

She later reported that she also experienced a cough as she hiked higher up to
where I turned around.

She felt that our coughs were a reaction to pollen and that breathing heavily
just brought the irritants deeper, quicker, and in greater amounts into our
lungs. I looked to see if there was an altitude/cough relationship and came up
with this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17196414

We hypothesize that there are two forms of altitude-related cough:
a cough which may occur at relatively low altitudes and which is related to
exercise and persists despite descent and a cough which does not occur at
altitudes below 5000-6000 m and which improves rapidly with descent to lower
altitude.

https://www.strava.com/activities/599783880