Not to sound like a medical journal here, but the symptoms of desynchronosis include fatigue, insomnia, anxiety, confusion, dehydration, headache, irritability, nausea, sweating, indigestion, diminished coordination, diminished memory, heartbeat irregularities, susceptibility to illness plus at least three conditions a tad too indelicate to mention here as you might be amid breakfast.
This dreaded "jet lag" can make zombies out of almost anyone, not just visiting parents.
It can disrupt circadian rhythms and impair the hypothalamus, and as we all say from time to time, Look, do not mess with my hypothalamus.
So if anyone tries to brand Formula One drivers as sub-athletes, just brand them twisted in the hypothalamus, and tell them that is the little part of the brain that keeps time.
Within an eight-day frame last week and this, these beings will have driven 300kph around a track with heartless curves in Sao Paulo, Brazil, flown 12,124 kilometres from Sao Paulo to Abu Dhabi, and then driven 300kph around a track with heartless curves on Yas Island.
They will make serially urgent decisions at dangerously high speeds for an uncomfortably long time with potentially impaired hypothalamuses, a condition that leaves many regular humans useless and pulse-less by the pool side.
Yet they are so unfazed by this that they almost never mention it, none ever speaking of "circadian rhythms".
These people have mighty, mighty innards.
"We are all on the edge pushing ourselves to the limit," said Sebastian Vettel, who won the 2009 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix and figures among four drivers grappling for the championship with compromised pineal glands at Yas Marina Circuit. (Note: That is the gland that produces melatonin.)
Well, they keep a permanent address on the edge. Every now and again they even share their rarefied knowledge.
Earlier this season, Lewis Hamilton reported unusual freshness upon his arrival in Australia and attributed it to a stopover in Los Angeles to visit his singer-songwriter-dancer-sometime-actress girlfriend. "The secret is meeting up with your girlfriend halfway," he allowed, and an airborne world nodded in understanding.
That trip, however, paled against Sao Paulo to Abu Dhabi. Lightweight, it was.
The Australian Grand Prix trailed the Bahrain Grand Prix by two calendar weeks, an epoch for these Herculean sorts. Among the 19 races, only four came seven days after a predecessor, the second longest of those four treks being the 6,375km from Melbourne to Kuala Lumpur.
Hockenheim to Budapest can be trying, Melbourne to Kuala Lumpur harder still, but this one is Melbourne-to-Kuala Lumpur on airline growth hormone.
In an interview with Malaysia's New Straits Times earlier this year, the Williams-Cosworth team exercise physiologist Nick Harris cited some desynchronosis-de-programming tricks. Blue lights. (Do those fit in the overhead compartment?) A long bath. (Would Mark Webber's bathwater be colder than Vettel's?) Light music. (Can these people with their irreversibly damaged eardrums actually hear light music?) Water. (Boring.)
Upon arrival, meals must start out light, he said. A mere smoothie begins a day. For the Singapore night race, which began simultaneous to the European afternoon, teams pretended as if in Europe, breakfasting in the mid-afternoon. From the Sao Paulo start of 2pm across six time zones to the Abu Dhabi start of 5pm - does anybody want to figure out that? After the initial smoothie, there follows a systematic snowballing of food towards eventual readiness for a two-hour race that, Harris said, will rob the drivers of two to three kilogrammes of body weight and 1,500 calories while presenting heart rates of 190 and forces five times that of gravity.
And some call these non-athletes.
They practically navigate some grand global, physiological experiment impossible a short 108 years ago and unthinkable 60 years ago when F1 tooled around Europe. The once-exotic has become routine, unspoken, unlamented.
In fact, of all sports, the jet-lag topic seems to come up the most in golf, where you might hear Lee Westwood say: "I started to feel a bit of jet lag out there," or Ernie Els with: "I've been up since 3 o'clock in the morning, I've got a bit of jet lag." Corey Pavin, after his United States Ryder Cup team arrived in Wales, said: "We have a little bit of jet lag today, that's for sure," and Nick Faldo, after his Europe Ryder Cup team arrived in Kentucky, said: "They had a long day yesterday with the jet lag and that sort of thing."
Golf requires laudable precision, but what is the worst that could happen with jet lag? An errant shot strikes a spectator and distorts his-or-her plastic surgery?
F1 demands ruthless precision amid perilous possibilities from people who fly 12,000km and then go driving at 300kph. You might wonder if they are bloodless.
cculpepper@thenational.ae
