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Training for Mountaineering: Climbing Specific Period
13.1k Plays1 year ago
In this episode of Training for Mountaineering, Steve and Alyssa discuss the last training period before tapering, the climbing specific period. This stage follows the crucial base period, and serves to sharpen the skills a climber needs for a specific goal. Steve and Alyssa tackle how to navigate and plan this period from build up climbing trips, to training at home. They break down how a climber should distribute intensity, volume, recovery and strength throughout the week. They also touch on the importance of mental preparation and the confidence this period brings to a climber before they take off for their goal climbs.
Thank you to Chase Clark for the intro/outro and Tim McClain for our sound engineering.
Visit us at uphillathlete.com or write to us at [email protected]
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Transcript
Introduction to Training Cycle
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the uphill athlete podcast. Our mission is to elevate and inspire all mountain athletes through education and celebration. My name is Steve House, and I'm here today with Alyssa Clark. Today we'll be discussing the specific period of the training cycle and how we should approach this time. It is a crucial period for athletes and it can make or break a trip, not only from the preparation standpoint, but also from the fine line of overdoing it.
00:00:30
Speaker
Let's get into it.
00:00:39
Speaker
Thanks, Steve. I'm super excited to get started with this topic as it's really, I think the time where the hours of base training and effort come into play and where we see the work come into focus on our goals. I think it's the part that we see, we kind of visualize, we think about as like in the dirt, going after it. And so I think that it's going to be really fun to talk about today.
Base and Sharpening Periods Explained
00:01:09
Speaker
So, as we're getting into it, let's start by defining what is the specific period and where does it fit into the trading cycle.
00:01:20
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's easiest to think of, for me, as the sharpening period. And so much of what we talk about at the last day is about building an aerobic base. And we have all kinds of analogies, the analogy of putting money in the bank with all the aerobic work, the analogy of building a big aerobic base, building a big engine. We've talked about these different
00:01:46
Speaker
analogies at various points in these series. And this is the period at which you take that and you convert it and make it more relatable or more specific to your event, to your sport that you're going to do. And really, I think it's what most people think of when they think of training. It's the going out and climbing hard. It's the running fast. It's doing your sport.
00:02:15
Speaker
how you dream of doing it. And it's not this sort of somewhat rudimentary and often repetitive basic training that the supporting training is. This is the fun stuff. This is the good times.
00:02:35
Speaker
Definitely. It's also the part I always think about in the cycle of my training. That's like, I am going to be just tired.
00:02:46
Speaker
And, and it's like, I think that you probably understand this too, where it's, it's the exciting part where you're like, okay, this is what fatigue means. And this is what it's going to feel like. And these are the moments I'm going to draw off of when I'm in the hard part of the race. Um, and we're going to talk about the balance of fatigue and rest within this, but it's the part, and I think it's well-written in the book where it's like, if you're not barely hanging on, it may not be hard enough.
00:03:13
Speaker
So I think that's kind of an exciting part of it as well. Yeah. I want to start by just sort of prefacing this all with saying that if one has not had a good solid base period of, you know, I don't know, these are those questions where every coach will say that it depends.
00:03:41
Speaker
You know, you need at least 12 weeks and probably 16 weeks of base period. And if you don't have that, and you know, 12 would really be the floor for me. If you don't have 12 weeks.
Balancing Life and Training
00:03:56
Speaker
of base period, then you're going to skip this part and you're just going to continue to build base as long as you can. So let's start with sort of laying that out. And, you know, how big is it? This is a question we answered before, but the base period can be bigger than 12 weeks or 16 weeks. It can be 24 weeks. So think about this. This the.
00:04:19
Speaker
the bigger your base, the sharper the point can become, the more work, the more specific work you can do during this period. Definitely. And I think that there's a couple of ways to break down when this time period or how long this time period should be. And it's also, I think, a difference we see between, and I don't love these terms, but for the sake of
00:04:45
Speaker
where we're at there's a difference between an elite athlete where the main focus is the event the climb etc and a more everyday athlete where you're juggling life you're juggling work kids etc and so
00:05:02
Speaker
for an elite the specific period could look a lot different than more of the everyday person and also that's where it may not be quite as important for someone who is not trying to be on the cutting edge. But to break down this period a little bit more it can range from two to eight weeks
00:05:22
Speaker
depending on the level of the athlete and the objective. We kind of prescribe a crossover period from the base training to the specific that's around two weeks, which allows for a shift in the volume and the sports specification. Also too, as Steve already touched on, if you are time constrained and you don't have
00:05:50
Speaker
more than 12 weeks of a base period, then it's probably going to be most beneficial for you to just skip this period. Also, if you're a newer athlete, you're probably going to benefit from staying in the base period longer rather than trying to specialize and increase the intensity.
00:06:10
Speaker
Yeah, and that conversion to specificity is a little bit of a process and needs to take some time. I also will add that even for those, for example, if you're training to climb Mount Rainier,
00:06:26
Speaker
or you're going to Mont Blanc or something like that. During this period, leading up to that is the time where you will want to do your training climbs. If you're going to climb Rainier, then this is the time to start booking in climbs for Mount Hood and Mount Adams.
00:06:45
Speaker
you know Glacier Peak and Baker and whatever else you can get your hands on during this and during whatever time period you have. So that's also one of the reasons that this is fun and I think that to your point Alyssa if you're even when you're not
00:07:04
Speaker
living in the mountains or an elite athlete and able to just travel here, there, wherever you want, whenever the weather is good, you still want to do your best to make your training during this period look as much like the event as possible. And if that means kind of improvising, then if you're
00:07:30
Speaker
having to drive somewhere to Sandy Hill and carry rocks up a sand dune somewhere because that's what you have and you're actually trying to get to Everest. Well, that's great. That should be applauded in room
00:07:49
Speaker
And that should be viewed as ingenious, not as a concession or doing something wrong. So it definitely needs to
Training Adventures and Improvisation
00:07:59
Speaker
be. Let's get a little bit more into the specifics, though. I'll start with just sort of talking about what this looked like for me in my climbing, professional climbing years. And I essentially would break this down like most of my climbing
00:08:18
Speaker
was centered around climbing in the Karakoram Range. And so the climbing season there was the summertime. And so if I was going, and I typically would try to plan my expeditions so that I was climbing in August, and preferably in late August when the monsoon is usually past its peak power and peak strength, and the atmosphere is drying out a little bit,
00:08:47
Speaker
And so that would mean I would be leaving somewhere in the first couple of weeks, somewhere between July 1st and July 15th, depending on the track and so on. And that would mean that I would back up a month. That would mean my specific period would be, you know,
00:09:05
Speaker
at least May and June, and sometimes April, May, and June. And so the way I would do that is I would go in April, I would go to the Canadian Rockies, and I would catch the end of the ice season and the beginning of the alpine season. For me, at my experience level, I could always climb there even when the weather wasn't perfect. And I could make sure I got in some really big days out in the mountains.
00:09:34
Speaker
then I would have a week or two of recovery and travel coming back. Then I would go somewhere else where the weather was really good. Typically, that for me was often Peru. It was one of the best places. You go to Peru in May or in June and start to get a little altitude. The weather is typically
00:09:55
Speaker
Again, stable enough that you can almost always climb. I'm not going to, I'm not choosing Peru over Alaska because in Alaska you can so easily attempt not be able to climb, but in a place like Peru, you can always move even when the weather is
00:10:11
Speaker
poor, you could at least be going out and doing big hikes or something. And then the end, the last period would probably usually end up, invariably end up
00:10:27
Speaker
mandating some weeks at home kind of because of the logistics of preparing for going away for a couple of months and wanting to be around friends and family and so on. And so I would do my best to just have a couple of key workouts. And so when I lived in the Pacific Northwest or in Colorado, as I lived in both those places during those periods, I would just have
00:10:52
Speaker
some little critical local mountains that I could go and come up with some sort of circuit and I would come up with some sort of convoluted thing that I could go and do a big day. I'll let you all in on a little secret I've not probably told anybody about before. Nanga Parbat, I actually went to Maui.
00:11:16
Speaker
My laughed climb, quote unquote, that I did, my laugh training event that I did was Haleakala from sea to summit and on foot running up the trail. I don't remember the name of the trail, the Sandy Trail all the way to the top and got completely laughed up there.
00:11:38
Speaker
It got kind of an epic, actually. But it ended up being, I think, a 16-hour day or something because of all of that. And running in this sand was heinous, but actually pretty good training for walking and exerting in snow and had lots of elevation gain. So there's a lot of
00:12:02
Speaker
Being in Maui two weeks before going to an 8,000-meter peak might not be the most intuitive thing. And for sure, it was a concession. I was there with my girlfriend at the time. But it was also like, hey, there's a lot of vertical here. And I can figure out a way to make a really big day out of this. And I only need about one of those a week. And it's not like we were there for a month either. We were there for a week. So it was fine.
00:12:25
Speaker
That's a pretty funny because I have also done holly ochola from sea to summit and also got lost and also bushwhacked a lot. Yeah, I think I mean, it's it's a 10k day and you're ending up over 10,000 feet.
00:12:41
Speaker
You're running on volcanic, like the ash and everything. It's hard footing. It's hard route finding. We also got lost and ended up being like a, I don't know, eight plus hour day. So yeah, it's a good mountain. That's funny. It was all cloudy when I was up there. I couldn't see. I totally wiped out. It was pretty funny. It's also pretty cold up there. Yeah, that's the other thing. I had like no clothes with me. It was freezing.
Building Confidence and Mental Resilience
00:13:10
Speaker
But anyway, but so that's a great segue, right? Listen to, you know, a way of, you know, finding not everybody's got a 10,000 feet foot gain climb near nearby. But you can figure out something to do. Another one that I think is really good is to take one of our muscular endurance workouts like a weighted pack carry.
00:13:42
Speaker
you know, a heavy-ish weight, maybe not the heaviest weight you've been carried, but add more volume and really like, you know, by a significant, you know, do it to 30% more volume than you have with something that's close to the heaviest pack you've had. After, of course, a little bit of a mini taper going into that and so on, so that you're really prepared for that. You're rested, you've fueled, you know, you've fueled during the thing. You're not trying to kill yourself, but you're trying to kind of create this,
00:14:02
Speaker
and you know, do that with like,
00:14:11
Speaker
event that where you're sort of overreaching into that. The other thing I do is back to back days, you know, try to simulate the and when you're mountaineering, you're almost always have back to back days. And depending on your objective, even something like Rainier, it's going to be three days, right, or minimum of two for most people, you know, you're going to go up and camp, say a mirror on the
00:14:39
Speaker
On the Yemen side, you're going to go up to the high camp, and then you're going to the next day go to the summit and then come all the way out. So those are very typical. So you need to be kind of, it makes a lot of sense to train for those back-to-back days. And the way I typically do that is I typically do something that's slightly harder on the first day. Let's say 60% of the effort goes into the first day, and 40% of the effort goes into the second day.
00:15:07
Speaker
And again, just being creative with my duration, my weight. I'll often use mountaineering boots for my training if I can to have a little weight on my feet. I'll use the actual backpack that I'm going to carry on my climb. And I'll
00:15:28
Speaker
I'll try to leave some of it out there. There's always this saying, don't run your best races in your training. That's the saying. But you do want to definitely have at least one week where you're overreaching and driving yourself pretty far into fatigue and then feeling yourself bounce back from that.
00:15:57
Speaker
Yeah, I totally agree. And I think not only from the physical standpoint of that overreaching, but I think it's crucial for the mental standpoint where you understand what it feels like to be in those moments. And I'm a big fan of back to back days. They're huge in ultra running. It's the way you can't go run a hundred miles to train for a hundred mile race. And so we often use.
00:16:20
Speaker
doing those back to back runs and i think such a huge component of it is can you get yourself out the door on the second day and go run and you know what is almost always never worse than you think it's going to be you're going to find your group you're going to get there
00:16:39
Speaker
And also, the feeling afterwards, you're like, I just did that. That's what's going to allow you to be successful. When you're in the race, things are hurting, things aren't going well, or you're out in the mountain. And so I think that that mental component is so crucial to building up the resilience and the durability when you're actually in in the thing.
00:17:01
Speaker
Yeah. And those periods that I described like going to Canada and then going to Peru and then going to the Himalaya or the Karakoram, I mean, that was a big part of it. And I would feel so strong during those trips in Canada and Peru and could see how strong I was compared to my partners. And that gave me a ton of confidence.
00:17:31
Speaker
a ton of confidence. I think that that's really important to confidence. You're going to know if you're faking your own confidence. You can fake that to other people, but you can't fake that to yourself. And if you've had that experience and had that
00:17:48
Speaker
with yourself that you just described really so that yeah, I was able to do that. And I did, yeah, I was hard to get out the door, but I, and it was hard to eat, but I did it. I got my shoes on, I got my boots on. I did that other day. I, you know, it's, it's so, so valuable.
00:18:08
Speaker
And I think that I can pinpoint, and it's hard because it almost comes across as cockiness, that sureness that you're talking about. When you go into an event and you're like, no, no, I got this. I know where I'm at. I know how well I've been training.
00:18:26
Speaker
Just unless there's a fluke which always happens whether you know weird injuries, etc It's like, you know when you've put your best foot forward and I've seen it in my athletes to where I'm like, oh no matter what happens they are going to succeed because they know they put in the work and they have full confidence in themselves and that's a really beautiful thing to see of other people I've started seeing it in myself more than I used to and I can
00:18:55
Speaker
I, I feel like I freaked my parents out a little bit. And I'm like, Oh, no, I got this. Like, this is what's gonna happen. And they're always like, I don't know, be like, just watch yourself. And I'm like, No, no, no, this is what's gonna happen. And that's not because I just rock up to a start line being like, Oh, I can do this. It's like all of those days of effort. And especially when you put in that big specialized period, you just you can feel it, you know it.
00:19:26
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's a great point. I've said this before in other places, but before Vincent and I climbed Angaparba,
00:19:38
Speaker
I remember he and I had this conversation. He was getting a little anxious because we were waiting for the weather and waiting for the weather and waiting for the weather. And he was like, our colonization is eroding and we're losing fitness and the longer we wait. And I was like, well, we have this much longer. And if we get the weather, we're going to do it. There was no question in my mind. There was what you said. There was no doubt. Really, it sounds arrogant.
00:20:08
Speaker
But I knew. I was just like, yeah, that's not going to be the problem. The weak link isn't going to be us. The weak link is going to be the conditions or the bad weather or the unforeseen thing. But we have done our work. And I think that this is one of the things.
00:20:27
Speaker
that has so many implications in mountain sports because we as participants, and this is why I believe so much in the whole concept of the process of engaging in mountain sports over the outcome because it's the process that
00:20:48
Speaker
changes you and what changes you is this experience of yourself in these new ways, this confidence of these capacities that you develop
00:20:59
Speaker
you know, through practice and through time and through hard work and through consistency. And you literally become a different person. And then, you know, somebody may ask you like, Oh, are you worried about climbing the root ball face? And then you look at them and be like, No, I'm not worried. Like, I'm going to do this. And they think you're crazy, but they don't
00:21:20
Speaker
know what you know, and they don't feel what you feel, and they don't know you in the way you know yourself. And it's also like within mountaineering. I remember five years later, people would come up to me and being like, oh, that's so cool. You're coming along, I'm like, yeah, but that was five years ago. I couldn't do that now. You should have congratulated me five years ago because I'm not that person anymore.
00:21:44
Speaker
And that's also true, right? In climbing, it's a little different in running, but in climbing, all of the sort of
00:21:55
Speaker
let's say, acknowledgement comes well after the fact, which is fine, but it's actually also part of a good lesson, I think, because it's that lesson of delayed gratification, which I think is so important and so rare, it seems like, in modern society and so valuable, I think.
00:22:18
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that that's something that athletes who have been in the game where you're an overnight sensation to so many people where you're like, I'm an overnight sensation of 10 years of hard work. And that, like, you know, we're talking about such a specific period, but you and I combined have probably been through like, you know, 50 of these specific periods throughout our lives. Um,
00:22:45
Speaker
You know, it's, it's, it's not just those two to eight weeks of hard work. It's like years and years and years going through the cycle. And then every time you learn a bit more about yourself, you increase your fitness, you increase your mental elasticity. Uh, and so, you know, it's just, it's a, it's a lot of parts and it's a lot of time. It's just years of doing this and that can be.
00:23:13
Speaker
hard to grasp when you're starting out and you're brand new and you're like, so it's going to take me years to get here. And it's like, but if it's worth it, then you'll like, that fire will be lit and it will stay lit until that time has passed. But I think that something that's worth doing, it's worth doing for years on end.
00:23:39
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's for me what uphill athlete is all
Training Without Mountains?
00:23:42
Speaker
about, right? Like it's the process of becoming, not the process of achieving. And so I think our audience is probably wondering when we're going to start talking about the specific period again. But I think it would, and we can come back to this as a fascinating conversation, but let's return to what this,
00:24:06
Speaker
because I think this applies to most people. So I want to make sure we make time to address this thoroughly, the whole idea of trying to execute a specific period before a big climb or an expedition when you do not live in the mountains or are not a professional climber. For example, I'm coaching a guy right now who's going to go to K2 this summer, but he lives in Australia, which is
00:24:33
Speaker
pretty flat. So you've got to take this into consideration. How are we going to do that, for example, with him? And so do you want to talk about that for a moment?
00:24:45
Speaker
Yeah, of course. Just quickly, though, I kind of want to summarize going backwards quite a bit to when you were, say, doing a climbing trip. And some people are able to get away with these climbing trips or able to take some time. And really, the main objectives that you want to focus on are making it similar to your goal climb as much as you can.
00:25:08
Speaker
Increasing the difficulty with each progression of climb, so say you're able to do a couple of mountains, making sure that it progresses in an increasing level of difficulty. If you are dealing with higher altitude, each peak should be higher in elevation as you are moving through them.
00:25:30
Speaker
I think one of the most important things is making sure that you're recovering and recovering mentally, recovering physically, and really taking care of yourself throughout this period. That's great, Alyssa, and thanks for pausing on that because I kind of breezed over it, and I would only add to consider that travel is not recovery. So do.
00:25:55
Speaker
But these are great points and things I sort of failed to mention in my description, but it's really important to realize that these things come from these central tenets of training that we always talk about, which is continuity, gradualness, and modulation.
00:26:14
Speaker
And the gradualness is what you were talking about, like making sure that things are a little bit harder each time. And the modulation is the recovery piece. And this is also tied to confidence as we were talking about a moment ago. And, you know, we should
00:26:34
Speaker
and rightly are skeptical of large jumps in things that we're trying to do and things we have confidence in ourselves in doing. And so what will happen if you pull something off, you make a big step and your mind will doubt, you will suffer from self-doubt because you'll be thinking later, oh, that was just a fluke.
00:27:01
Speaker
And the only way to head that off is to approach things in a way that builds your confidence gradually over time so your mind can't try to trick you into thinking that that was a fluke or a one-off or that wasn't really you or something like that because we tell ourselves these stories and these stories become our reality. So we need to try to
00:27:28
Speaker
stay ahead of these things. And that's how we do it. So thanks for bringing those up. I think that's great. That's a really good point about the mind tricking. I've definitely been there.
00:27:39
Speaker
But let's yeah, let's shift to what does this look like when you have to stay closer to home when you're trying to hold down a full time job or deal with kids. And I'm gonna break down more of kind of the terms of it and then give a specific anecdote of for me, it was it was a running event, very mountainous running event, but the the same
00:28:08
Speaker
applications can be made. So essentially, you're trying to simulate the event that you are doing. The interesting thing about this time period is that if you look at the breakdown, your volume should, for the most part, decrease because your intensity is increasing. And for those who get perhaps frustrated with how much zone two, this is your chance to go harder.
00:28:35
Speaker
So you should be looking at two zone three workouts uphill with an Alpine weight pack. So the pack that you are going to bring on your climb, you should have one big day out with a lot of vertical gain and loss. And if you have an objective that does have some technical climbing in this, that should be part of this big day. You should have easy days before and after
00:29:04
Speaker
These bigger days to make sure that you're recovering properly You should be doing maintenance strength one to two days a week again, if technical climbing is part of that objective making sure that you are incorporating that in and
00:29:19
Speaker
This is not though the time or really any time to just drop the aerobic base. So you should be maintaining your aerobic base through recovery. And as we've mentioned a few times, this is hard work. So a high percentage of your week should be recovery. Um, that allows you to have the hard days, hard.
00:29:43
Speaker
Um, and the easy days, easy and the hard days should be as hard or harder than the big days of your climb. Um, as Steve has mentioned so far, so I want to jump in here and, um, talk about some of the specific things. So just in, in summary, you know, we talked about the weighted hill climbs. That's one.
00:30:07
Speaker
I think the easy days, as you said, easy days are easy and hard days are hard. That's really key. I think that the strength, we talk about this in the book and we talk about doing
00:30:22
Speaker
a mini max strength session that takes like 30, 40 minutes at the most with all the warm up and cool down and everything that leaves you energized and feeling better than when you started. This is a time for practicing skills if you have technical climbing, maybe a little bit of cragging or something like that.
00:30:43
Speaker
You probably don't need to be going into the bouldering gym, but for me, that was usually some sort of ice climbing or mix climbing or dry tooling in the case of me, but I think that the...
00:30:58
Speaker
overarching idea is that when you do these couple of hard days, they are really hard. And when you do these easy days, they're really easy. And the hard days should also be some sort of reasonable facsimile of your event, whatever you can make up, whether you've got Haleakala or a sand dune or actual mountains or a treadmill. You've got to try to figure out a way to make that look as much like your event is
00:31:28
Speaker
possible. One place I would caution people is not to try to carry as much weight as they're going to have to carry on the climb. So if you're going to Denali, you're going to say you're going to have to carry an 80-pound pack. Don't try to carry an 80-pound pack like it's not worth getting injured. Right, or tweaking your something, putting the pack on and off right before you go. Keep things reasonable so you don't, you know, health is always the top priority.
00:31:57
Speaker
Definitely. Again, as you've written in the book, this is really a moment where you can make a break and you can really bury yourself if you are not super careful in this time period. Yeah.
Alyssa's Creative Training Methods
00:32:15
Speaker
Why don't you tell us about TDS? First, tell us what TDS is.
00:32:19
Speaker
Yeah, so TDS is one of the UTMB races in the race series. It's considered kind of the technical sibling of UTMB. It is about 85 miles or so with pretty much comparable elevation gain to UTMB, so shorter but steeper and more technical.
00:32:44
Speaker
I'm going to say all of this with the fact that I have still not gotten to raise TDS, because unfortunately, I got COVID rate as I landed in Chamonix, as did a bunch of other people. So that was a huge bummer. But it led to later success in Moab in Hertz. So
00:33:00
Speaker
You take all the punches with what you can get and you make the best of it. But I think that TDS represented, at least for me, a time. So at the time, I was working a job for a school as well as going to graduate school.
00:33:19
Speaker
and again so my training looks a bit different than the mountaineering training just because my objectives were different but essentially i was trying to fit in four to six hour days every day while training or while going to school while working
00:33:36
Speaker
And it would be like, Hey, get up at five in the morning, go run two hours, go run at lunch for an hour, go run another two hours in the evening. And so I was able with asking for some grace from my partner to get in this training and.
00:33:56
Speaker
where I had to get it done didn't exactly look like TDS, but I would be able to get three to 4000 feet of climbing just going up and down, up and down, up and down. And that helped me to feel like my mountain legs are ready. My mind was ready. And was it perfect? It wasn't. But I was able to get upwards of like 25,000 feet of climbing over 100 miles while balancing all of these things. And so
00:34:27
Speaker
at the end of the day, if you like I hate to kind of go this way, but like if you really want to make time for something, you can make time for something. Was I tired? Yes, I was super tired. You can't like for me, I felt kind of kind of on the edge of like, is this too much? Or is this
00:34:49
Speaker
just right. And that's where it's really important to have a coach have an outside perspective that's watching you as well. And my coach was like, Nope.
00:34:58
Speaker
If you want to go do as well as you can, this is what you need to do. And so it doesn't have to look perfect. Um, I even did like some on the treadmill for hurt this year. I was in negative 35 degrees and I would spend five hours on the treadmill, just going up and down, up and down. And that, um, paid off and you just have to do the best you can with what you have.
00:35:23
Speaker
and learn that all of those mental pieces are going to help, whether it's five hours on the treadmill or going up and down the same street because it's the hilliest street you can find. And I think that all of those contribute to the success that you will find later on. Yeah. Yeah. How does that quote go? He who has a why can suffer anyhow the, um,
00:35:51
Speaker
I like that. Victor Frankl quote, but you know, it's you.
00:35:58
Speaker
I think that in a lot of ways that these people like your story or I've coached athletes that trained for Everest without supplemental oxygen and they used the stairs and buildings. That's to me harder than going out in the mountains and running frankly. So if you have the will to stick it out on the treadmill or in the stairwell or
00:36:27
Speaker
up and down the same street in your neighborhood, then wow, I'm impressed. That's some real will and stick-to-itiveness, so that's good.
00:36:38
Speaker
I think that the other part of it too is that there's so much gratitude when you actually get to what you're doing, because you're in, you're doing what you love in the place that you love, oftentimes with people that you really care about. And I think that you build that gratitude. And then when you get there, it's an expression of that joy and that love and that effort you've put in. And so that's where I think it's so important to
00:37:08
Speaker
know that this effort will pay off and that it might not look pretty. It might not look very, um, as similar as you want it to, but all of that will, will come around full circle. But let's get to now that now that wax and wind a little bit, um, let's look at actually like,
Structuring a Training Plan
00:37:30
Speaker
generalized ideas of how to structure a training plan for an athlete. And Steve, you've touched on this a bit, but we're going to break it down a little bit by numbers. But really, the two biggest considerations are keeping the volume at a reasonable amount while increasing the intensity.
00:37:49
Speaker
So the workouts should be, as we've kind of said, it should be hard. Um, they should really challenge you. But Steve, if you could break down kind of what like maybe a first week or two of a special period looks like, um, what would, what would that be? Yeah. So, you know, you're going to have one big day that's going to probably account for 40 or 50% of your total training volume in that one
00:38:19
Speaker
workout and probably most if not all of your vertical for that week. And then probably something around the weight of about half of what you're going to be carrying on your, you know, ultimate goal climb is sort of a baseline. That's going to be one of the workouts, the hard workouts. And the other hard workout is going to be, you know, that's a long,
00:38:47
Speaker
I should say that's mostly an aerobic effort. Of course you can go hard and you can go into anaerobic, right? It's a continuum. This is not a binary you're in aerobic or you're in anaerobic. It's a bit of a continuum. So you can be in zone three, the dreaded zone three. This is a good time to be in the zone three in the middle. And you can go fun hard.
00:39:08
Speaker
And then you can do something that's really focused zone three intervals. If you're doing it on a treadmill or on a hill, we can put these in the show notes, some of these types of protocols. There's also some of this is laid out in the book and on the website. We can link to that. And then the rest of it is essentially what I would call maintenance. It's going to be really easy, easy zone one.
00:39:37
Speaker
you know, and ideally multiple zone one workouts in a day, like, you know, morning and evening really easy, but you know, 30, 40 minutes, but really easy just moving and keeping things going, eating, staying healthy. I think that this is also something worth saying at this point in your training, there is probably not a whole lot as you get towards the end here.
00:40:05
Speaker
There probably isn't going to be so much more that you can do, but there's going to be a lot that you could mess up. So a big part of your job here is to not make any mistakes and do something like get sick or eat poorly or whatever.
00:40:20
Speaker
not get enough sleep. And then that minimax strength, kind of maintenance slash recovery, and then just the rest of your volume is going to be just time and recovery zone. And it can be in whatever modality you like. The modality actually isn't that important.
00:40:39
Speaker
I know a favorite of a lot of the coaches is swimming because it gets the body horizontal, which means that the heart doesn't have to pump as hard to get the blood throughout the extremities. Some people say the pressure of the water helps Venus return and so on.
00:41:01
Speaker
So the swimming can be good. I like to do cycling personally because I can keep cycling. You can kind of always spin it and keep it really light and easy and minimal chance for injury. If it's winter, skiing, ski touring are great things. But again, keeping those two really hard days and the rest of it's pretty much easy. I think that's it in a nutshell.
00:41:32
Speaker
Awesome. Yeah, I think this is also just a very important period. I always think of this as the asking for forgiveness of your family period where you're like, I have to be a hypochondriac, I have to train really hard, and please feed me a lot of food and let me sleep. So just maybe ask for forgiveness before you enter this period of your family. Yeah, yeah.
00:41:56
Speaker
But yeah, I think I think that this is truly, especially as you get closer to the taper period, where you should really be, I mean, treating yourself very gently and being really conscientious. Like honestly, I started wearing a mask in a grocery store. I'm very careful about what I touch. I'm very careful not to get sick, to eat the same foods.
00:42:21
Speaker
You know, just making sure that this is a moment where all of that hard work can very easily get derailed. And if it takes just a little bit more effort, like just do it because you're going to be so happy if you get to the, to the start of the climb, healthy, safe, like all is good rather than taking a risk and, um,
00:42:47
Speaker
you know, getting sick or just not really paying attention to it. So highly recommend just really being on top of that.
Mental Training and Problem-solving
00:42:55
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
00:42:58
Speaker
I will say that most all of what we're talking about, also to specific breakdowns and recommendations for this period are in training for the new alpinism, specifically kind of chapter nine. But we've talked about this probably more than we meant to throughout. But Steve, for you for a climbing objective.
00:43:23
Speaker
How does the mental aspect of this and do you visualize like, how do you, uh, push yourself in these moments and how does that pay off when you're actually in the climb? Yeah, it's a great question. And, you know, we, we have talked about it in spots and other places, uh, of the series on training for mountaineering, but.
00:43:50
Speaker
I want to pick up on something that you said and connect it to the mental training piece, which I think is so important. And the way I would think about it is that as I was climbing during a specific period, I was feeling into my body. I was really noticing how the effort felt and that
00:44:13
Speaker
If things are going well, it is usually an experience of like, oh wow, this used to be hard and now it feels kind of easy.
00:44:24
Speaker
that's cool. Like I wonder what else I can do. Like I wonder, can I hold onto this a little longer? Can I like, you know, and you start to explore a little bit what your body can do because literally you will be in a place where you've never been before. You'll be able to do things physically with your body that you just didn't know you're capable of because you haven't ever been capable of it because these capacities are built, not given. So,
00:44:53
Speaker
As you go through that experience, this is really important too. I want to delineate the experience of an athlete versus as a coach because as a coach, when I'm coaching someone, I can't have this experience for them.
00:45:08
Speaker
they have to have this experience in their own bodies with themselves. And so this is kind of what I'm telling them, I'm asking questions, I'm trying to draw this out. And as an athlete, I'm exploring my newfound capabilities and strength and
00:45:28
Speaker
through this process and that's what's going to give me the confidence. And we touched on that a moment ago, but I think that that's so important. And then mentally I'm connecting it to my goal plan. So I'm connecting it to one of the things like with how I structured things.
00:45:47
Speaker
the climbs would become less technical and more aerobic focused because my big goal climbs were at extreme altitude. So the aerobic component was more and more important, but they were still technical.
00:46:04
Speaker
But the concept is that I want it technical to be so easy that it doesn't even really cause a blip for me when I'm doing it at an extreme altitude. So as I'm doing something technical at low altitude, I'm having that experience. I'm like, oh wow, this isn't that hard. Cool. Okay. And this is about this kind of grade and I'm feeling pretty good on this. I feel very secure on this.
00:46:32
Speaker
can make it safe because I'm not getting pumped and I can hang out here all day and putting gear and all of those things. And then later on, I'm also connecting that to being like, okay, so when I'm at 6,000 meters and I'm doing something that's easier than this, that's not going to be an issue. That's really not going to be an issue. I do not have to fear that.
00:46:52
Speaker
I did not have to fear the inability to get here and because I'm going to be, I'm not going to be pumped because it's not only going to be easier than this. Um, it's, I've already got more than enough capacity to do this here. So that kind of feeds into like, I guess a form of visualization and connecting my experience of that moment to my projection of what the, I will experience in the future. And what is,
00:47:19
Speaker
really interesting about that experience. I can say this as an athlete is that that's what happened. It literally plays out almost exactly as I visualize it. That's how I experience it. And that's the power of visualization. It doesn't make logical sense because this just goes to show and goes to demonstrate how much our
00:47:45
Speaker
perceptions, color, our reality, our experience of reality. And if you've projected and visualized a certain experience, which is one of being calm and in control and having enough strength and endurance and capacity to do the task, then that's the way you're most likely going to experience it. And that certainly was exactly how it came about for me.
00:48:16
Speaker
That's lovely. And I think the important point to draw on what you're saying is that it's not that you visualize everything going perfectly. It's that you visualize how you're going to feel as you were experiencing things. And that's, that's exactly, yeah, that's exactly what I think too many people focus on. How am I going to feel when I cross the finish line? How am I going to feel when I stand on top of that mountain? And that's actually not the moment necessarily to visualize. It's the moment of
00:48:47
Speaker
Okay, I'm, for me, 10 hours in, 60 miles of the night is rolling in. How am I going to mentally be in a great position if I start getting nauseous? Like, oh, oh, cool. Like nausea, it happens. I'm okay. Everything else is fine. And I have
00:49:08
Speaker
plan X, Y, and Z to deal with feeling nauseous and I can handle this. I think too often we visualize everything going perfectly or right of exterior pieces that we can't control and really it's visualizing how you will react to what is before you.
00:49:30
Speaker
On day three of Nanga Paravat, we had a really big day and we climbed literally 24 hours that day. And it was probably the biggest climbing day, literally, of my life. And it was really hard at the end. And three-quarters of the way through it,
00:49:55
Speaker
Vince's experience of it, and he's told the story, was very different than mine. He was having this experience like, I've never gone this far, I can't go this far. And I was having this experience like, I've never gone this far, but I'm calm and I'm going to be able to find a way to figure it out.
00:50:19
Speaker
And I just kept finding it. I just kept finding the capacity. And that last part of that day, I took over, I started shoving food into Vince's mouth and just navigated us to the end and nailed the route finding and got us to a really good campsite. And
00:50:39
Speaker
all of the things came together and it was exactly because I had this experience where I had mentally been there so many times already and planned for that in my mind that I was going to go that far out and just, but yet have an experience of being in control and being in the moment and being in a problem solving mindset. Like you were saying like, oh,
00:51:05
Speaker
Vince is bonking. Okay, let's feed him rather than like, oh, no, well, you have to go down. That's a different reaction. No, there's a problem. I have a solution. Here's Barr. Eat that, damn it, and put me on belay. I think that this also is what I
00:51:34
Speaker
I think it's so important as I've been going through so much as a small business entrepreneur and it's a similar experience really in the mental ways where you just are having
00:51:53
Speaker
like, oh, I'm kind of strung out and I'm kind of stressed and all these things are happening at once. But the worst thing you can do is panic and throw your hands up in the air. And the best thing you can do is just sort of
00:52:08
Speaker
solve problems one at a time and take your time and take some deep breaths and go for a walk when you need to and take care of yourself when you need to and feed yourself when you need to and you'll get through it. And there's so many things in life that I think that we can, you know, that are, that I for myself experienced first in the mountains and have brought back to, you know, my life is in the second half of my life here that I am now.
Gear, Nutrition, and Conclusion
00:52:38
Speaker
Yeah, same. I always joke with my friends that I can relate everything to ultra running or mountain sports if you allow me to do so. Um, but we kind of, I guess need to wrap it up, but the last thing I would touch on is that this is such a great time period for you. Cause we've been talking a little bit about nutrition. You mentioned using the pack that you were going to use on the climb for you to be
00:53:06
Speaker
Know your gear and know your nutrition because you should be practicing what you're going to be doing out in the mountain. Don't go eating some random thing that you're never going to bring on the mountain. This is when you're practicing because this is when you realize, I can't eat.
00:53:22
Speaker
uh, applesauce, I want to throw it up, you know, or just whatever that is. And so this is a crucial period or like, huh, that piece of gear broke or like, that doesn't work the way that I wanted it to. So really be testing your gear, testing your nutrition, um, at this point, because this is simulating what you're going to be doing out there.
00:53:44
Speaker
so true. For example, one of the problems that I was solving for Nanga Parvat was the sleeping system. I sewed my own sleeping bag and I was trying to find different
00:54:00
Speaker
things and I was sewing up these bags and the guys at Patagonia were kind of helping me and providing me with materials and consult. And on those climbs that spring, each trip was a different sort of prototype and then the one we had on Nanga worked great.
00:54:17
Speaker
I still have it. And I got used on tons of other routes and climbs actually because it was like a two-pound synthetic sleeping bag for two guys. And it was brilliant.
00:54:32
Speaker
That was because we did all the testing during this specific period to tie it back to. Same thing with how I packaged the food, how much to bring, how much to eat, what snacks we could tolerate, all of those things. You got to get all that stuff dialed. That again connects back into your experience of your preparation and your experience of your confidence because you can't
00:54:58
Speaker
You can't fake that. And you're going to know that you went through that process and figured those things out. And you're going to, that's going to give you the confidence to be like, yeah, I know I'm not going to eat that apple sauce because whatever it is, like, I know that I'm going to be able to tolerate stovetop stuffing at 8,000 meters because I've eaten stovetop stuffing at 8,000 meters before and it tasted darn good. And that's going to be fine. That's it. Yeah. No, I've done that so many times. There's a spring energy for
00:55:28
Speaker
a lot of my racing and there's one flavor that I know no matter how nauseous I am, I can get that down. And so it's like the end of a race, the last 20 miles. If the only thing I can get down is awesome sauce, spring energy, that's 180 calories every 30 minutes. And that's going to get me to the end. And that is preparation because I know I will throw up anything with peanut butter or, you know, it's just, so.
00:55:52
Speaker
super important to understand yourself and understand that you have contingency plans that are going to work. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, great discussion, Lisa. Thanks so much for that.
00:56:06
Speaker
Yeah, thank you so much. I'm excited. We have just, I think about a little bit more left in the mountaineering series. Um, and we will be wrapping this up and producing something exciting for you coming up. Thank you for listening to the uphill athlete podcast. If you could rate review and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform, that really helps us, um, to get to more mountain adventurers.
00:56:36
Speaker
We're not just one, but a community. Together, we're uphill athletes. Thanks for listening.