PRESQUE ISLE – With Gentile Hall now open, officials at the University of Maine at Presque Isle say they have in place about $85,000 in new equipment that is putting the northern Maine institution on the map.

Community members who toured the building during its grand opening Saturday were able to check out the human performance laboratory, a room dominated by a huge treadmill about the size of two standard treadmills placed side by side.

The lab – which also includes a new gas analysis system, heart rate monitors and other equipment – makes UMPI one of two institutions east of the Mississippi River with such facilities, according to officials. The other lab, located at the Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid, N.Y., offers testing only to Olympic athletes and does not offer treadmill tests to skiers.

The lab in Presque Isle will be used for elite athletes, college athletes and the average citizen. The large treadmill can accommodate roller skiing and pole skiing, according to Dr. Suzanne Beaudet, professor of physical education and kinesiology, who is serving as director of the new lab.

“This is going to attract more people who want to train to be cross-country skiers and biathletes,” Beaudet said on Sunday. “It’s going to attract students who really want to be serious about studying cross-country skiing and-or exercise science, and it really validates our physical education teaching major. We have all the bells and whistles now. We’re farther away than anyone else, but we do it right.”

Beaudet said that the updated lab is necessary in the university’s efforts to support biathlon activities and endurance sports in the area. University officials plan to use the performance lab for research, teaching and testing, as well as to benefit academic programs, such as cross-country ski coaching and athletic training, the university’s ski team, the Maine Winter Sports Center, and the U.S. Biathlon Association’s development team.

Beaudet said officials will conduct precise testing with the equipment by having an athlete wear a breathing mask and work out on the treadmill or another piece of fitness equipment. The air athletes expire will go through a tube connected to the mask and into the gas analysis system. Beaudet said the system will measure the maximum oxygen uptake as well as lactate thresholds – measurements that will help officials develop physiologic and biomechanical methods that, ultimately, may help to improve an athlete’s performance.

Beaudet recently spent a sabbatical at the Vuokatti Sport Institute in Finland, a site that specializes in the study of cross-country skiing and biathlon at a world-class level. While in Finland, Beaudet had the opportunity to participate in the physiologic testing of Finland’s most talented development skiers. Her recommendation based on the trip was instrumental in determining UMPI’s performance lab equipment.

Beaudet expects to begin implementing tests with the new equipment as soon as April or May.

“It’s kind of like a dream come true,” she said of the new lab. “I landed here in 1981 an avid cross-country skier. Now I get to test these [skiing] athletes in their element, the way the rest of the world tests their athletes. It’s pretty cool.”