Altiude

Huge topic here and more opinions than data! The goals of a training cycle and the goals of a climb are somewhat different so the tactics can at times seem to be opposite and not make sense. Your primary goal with training is to make sure you’re recovering from the training load so sleeping quite high can be problematic. That is one of a few reasons why athletes will train up high but sleep lower to get really good quality recovery. (Doing high intensity work is a common exception, many times athletes will actually drop down to be able to do super high quality intensity training) Once youre on the mountain and climbing, your goal isn’t training any more but to acclimated enough to go to the top safely. Theres a ton of factors here but slowly sleeping higher and higher to get used to the altitude is obviously one tactic. You need to get your body ready to sleep at the altitude of the high camp so you don’t get altitude sickness. On high peaks this is very much at odds with the ability to recover which is why you need a really big aerobic capacity and work capacity to be able to absorb the hardship. Double carrying where you carry some gear to the next camp and drop back down before moving the next day can be helpful with this method.

Jeremy,
Sadly there is a lot of variability with acclimatization but in my experience folks do tend to follow a bit of a pattern. If you have historically done well or poorly with a certain rate of ascent it is likely that you will be similar in the future. I wouldn’t draw super broad conclusions from this one data point but it may be that your wife doesn’t do as well with going from 0 to 14k’ in a very short time frame. Given a more leisurely rate of ascent she may do just fine comparatively. I tend not to think of it so much in terms of whether folks acclimate well or poorly but more in terms of how fast do they acclimate and trying to pace trips accordingly. Most climbers will acclimate well given the proper rate of ascent. Conversely athlete that historically do amazing at altitude need to always be on their toes a bit and be alert to signs of altitude sickness as there are never any guarantees. I really encourage everyone to expose themselves to different altitudes and get to know how their body reacts, how quickly it adjusts, whether diamox can be helpful etc.