Entries from Mountaineering Fitness & Training

In a busy world of managing work schedules, family, and training, sleep is often the first thing to suffer. As we pack more and more into our day, we try to get away with less and less sleep. While it’s difficult to manage schedules and sometimes a last minute crunch demands heading to bed late for a few nights, athletic gains from your training are a sum of your training load and your recovery from that load. This means that simply putting in the training hours and effort are not enough; you need to give your body the time and ability to recover from those efforts as well. Additionally, studies of sleep and performance have shown a significant cognitive effect from continual sleep “debt” or sleep restriction. This all leads to the conclusion that you need to hold your sleep time just as sacrosanct in your schedule as you do your training time. If you can stick to this, you will find yourself much more productive with your waking hours as well! To make sure that you are giving your body the recovery it needs from your training load, studies suggest you follow several principles:

Set a consistent sleep schedule: To get quality sleep and maximize your recovery, it’s important to stick to a consistent schedule. Try to head to bed at each night and wake up at the same time. Your body develops a rhythm to sleep, and when your schedule is altered it can make it more difficult to fall asleep, or the sleep you get to be more fitful. Similarly, try to match your sleep schedule to your circadian rhythm. If you are a night owl, embrace it. Heading to bed at 1 am, and trying to wake at 5 am for a pre-work workout is a recipe for sleep deprivation. Recognize your circadian tendencies and try to design your schedule around them to accommodate.

Create a constructive sleep environment: Light pollution and excess noise can prevent you from entering the deepest stages of sleep, in which the majority of recovery from your training load occurs. Consider using fans or white noise machines to drown out excess noise, and consider blackout curtains to create an environment for truly restorative sleep.

Disengage from your screens half an hour before bed: Try to put your screens down at least a half hour before you head to bed. That includes your phone, Ipads, kindles, and televisions. All of the electronics in our lives create stimulation that can make it difficult to fall asleep, keeping us up longer and upsetting our rhythm.

Get 8 hours of sleep: Studies show that while many of us may think that we can operate on less, 8 hours of sleep is the magic number to maximize recovery in athletes. This number creeps up a few hours for teenagers and younger children. While a single night of less sleep will probably not affect your training appreciably, consistently shorting yourself on sleep will reduce your recovery, and reduce the efficacy of your training.

Try a nap! In studies of elite athletes’ recovery, a half hour nap between 2 and 4 pm was shown to dramatically improve recovery. Furthermore, a cup of coffee consumed before that nap helped athletes to wake from it alert and ready to go. While it may not be practical for everyone’s schedule, see if you can sneak in a quick catnap; it may be the performance boost you’ve been looking for!

The Canadian Sport for Life organization has published a detailed explanation of sleep studies as they pertain to long-term athlete development. Find it here: http://canadiansportforlife.ca/sites/default/files/resources/Sleep_Recovery_Jan2013_EN_web.pdf

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• A great place to start improving your efficiency in the mountains begins with your equipment: what equipment are you using and does it work for you? Place a high priority on critical items such as boots and or packs, and worry less about items such as a fancy headlamp or spork. For me, a well-fit boot that is designed for the type of climbing I am doing is imperative. A good boot can mean the difference between a successful summit and a failed attempt; blisters and cold feet should never thwart a climber’s chance at the summit. In addition, find a climbing pack that carries weight well and fits you properly. Forget all the fancy features and pockets; a simple and minimalist pack that fits and carries weight well is what I look for. You might be able to get by with an old pack or a warm weather climbing boot, but why chance it? Having the right gear for the task makes for one less thing that could slow you down.
• Maintaining your gear makes a big difference too.  I regularly spend a few hours taking care of small issues that have cropped up with my equipment to make sure that everything is going to work well when I need it to and not fail when it really counts.  I trust my life to my equipment and so do others. For example, I frequently re-waterproof my gloves and Gore-Tex jackets. A headlamp is no good if your batteries run out, and a boot will not work as well if the laces snap. Not every piece of equipment needs to be new, but it does need to work properly. Climbing is too much fun to be hampered by equipment issues!
• With the right gear and everything dialed in, you need to pack it all up.  As guides, we seem to have a magical ability to pack 50 liters of gear into a 30 liter pack, but what may seem to be magic is really just some good common sense.  My favorite metaphor for packing is “brick and mortar.”  Some of your items are going to be bricks (eg: sleeping bag in stuff sack) and some are going to be mortar (eg: puffy jacket).  When packing, also consider multi-use items.  A 1/2 liter nalgene makes for a great coffee mug and can also carry an extra 1/2 liter of water when you need it.  You want to maximize space and value in your pack. Crampons don’t need a crampon case, since quite often wrapping them in your gaiters works just fine and saves space and weight.  Putting some time and thought into a well-packed kit can often fit in a smaller pack. Smaller packs equal lighter packs, giving you a little more money in the bank.
• With packing complete, there are still a few more things you can do before a climb that will get you ahead.  For me this starts with my nutrition and hydration.  On Mt. Rainier, I’ve found that from the time I leave home in the morning to the time my team is hiking out of Paradise (approx. 1.5 hours), I can easily sip down a liter of water.  Don’t chug water, but slowly sip a liter in the morning and on the bus ride to Paradise. This will help make sure that you are hydrated for the beginning of your climb.  Pre-hydration, which can start as early as the night before, allows me to bring less water during a climb (less weight), and helps prevent dehydration. I can recover more quickly, and can focus on other aspects of the climb instead of staving off dehydration.
• With regards to nutrition, my best suggestion is to learn your own body.  I know how much fuel my body needs at a high level of activity, which is less than some of my friends but definitely more than others. For two-day trips such as Mt. Rainer, I try to be as precise as I can with the amount of food I bring.  Start by factoring around 200 calories per break and then adjust from there to your specific needs.  In addition to that, bring foods you enjoy eating and can eat while exercising. I love pizza, but definitely wouldn’t want a slice in the middle of a climb. Remember; when we climb at altitude the effort is roughly similar to how our bodies feel during a slow jog.  Focus on foods that hold a lot of caloric value.  By bringing the right food and bring only the food you’ll need, you’ll save space and carry less weight.
• Lastly, be efficient with your time.  When taking a break, maximize your time resting and recovering. Get your self-care chores done early and quickly so that you get as much time off of your feet as possible. This applies to getting to camp also. Take care of business first so that you spend a maximum amount of time recovering later.  Use momentum to your advantage: we take short breaks so we do not lose our momentum, and when you roll into camp use that same momentum to set up and settle in before you are too tired to do the things you should have done.  This might be setting up camp or dealing with a pesky blister; the sooner you get it done the sooner you can rest.  Keep in mind that even if we feel great we still need to recover!

• 3 sets of 50 crunches
• 3 sets of 20 pushups
• and 3 sets of 20 dips

• 100 crunches (feet on the ground, curling my torso towards my knees, but not a full sit-up)
• 50 sit-ups to the side (alternating sides)
• 25 leg raises (some straight on, some to either side)
• and 100 more crunches to finish

As your next climb approaches, it’s a great idea to revisit your training plan with a critical eye and make a plan for how you are going to tune-up for the big event. Within four to six weeks of your climb, assess what is going well in your training and what could use a boost. This might mean entering a race or checking back in on a set of benchmarks that you’ve been using. It’s difficult to make an effective difference in your endurance base at this point—there simply isn’t time. Cramming in all of the hours that you wish you had done earlier is more likely to lead to injury or showing up to the climb already fatigued. Have confidence that you’ve done the job of setting yourself up with a good base and look to these other areas of your fitness for the final tune-up:

Core strength: Your core is comprised of all of the muscles that surround your spine, the side muscles, pelvic muscles, the glutes, as well as (but not just!) the abs. These muscles provide the link in the kinetic chain between your upper and lower body, and thus, nearly any movement you make ripples through the core. In climbing, a strong core helps to link the movements that we make rest stepping uphill with the stabilization of the upper body, including a heavy pack. Add an extra workout or two per week of core strength—focusing on the whole core not just the abs—in the weeks leading up to your climb. The extra strength that you build will help you to climb more efficiently, for longer!

Anaerobic threshold: Your final weeks of training should include some tune-up interval workouts. Try to find a mix of slightly longer level 4 interval workouts to increase your anaerobic threshold, and shorter, speed oriented workouts to tune-up your fast-twitch muscles. Emphasizing some harder intervals and speeds during your final weeks can give you a greater ability to recover from hard efforts during your climb and give you a few more gears should you need them.

Flexibility: A focus on strength training often comes at the expense of flexibility. As the muscles are broken down by training and recover again to build strength, they tend to tighten. If you haven’t dedicated much time to stretching and flexibility, use this opportunity to build it. Building flexibility will help your muscles work more efficiently during the climb and can help to prevent injuries or discomfort that may arise from the effort.

In your final tune-up don’t leave out your long workouts completely, but you can reduce your training volume or hours, and in doing so free up some workout time to focus on these areas. Though mountaineering is an endurance sport, strength, flexibility, and your capacity for high output activity are all important and the effect of your training can be greater in these areas over this last period of preparation. Pick out the elements that could use a tune-up, and take this opportunity to maximize your gains and head into your climb feeling ready and prepared.

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Aerobic Base Training Aerobic Base Training is the foundation that the subsequent layers of your training will be built on. The first of the three standard phases of training, the goals of aerobic training are to increase muscle efficiency and endurance. During this building phase, your body develops its capillary network, delivering more blood (and oxygen) to your muscle fibers, minimizing lactate production, maximizing lactate disposal, and increasing mitochondrial density (which produces ATP to fuel your muscles).

Aerobic base training was initially pioneered by New Zealand running coach Arthur Lydiard1. In the 1960 and 1964 Olympic games, three of the athletes he coached combined for 6 medals, dominating the distance events. The world took notice, and soon some form of his theory of aerobic base training had become commonplace in nearly all endurance events. There were many misconceptions to his theory though that endured: namely that aerobic training involves lots of long slow miles, and nothing else. In reality, Lydiard typically included three workouts into his athletes base periods: long runs, shorter steady state runs at an increased effort, and fartlek type interval workouts.

Each workout in the period accomplishes a specific purpose, with the overall goal being to maximize the aerobic energy system before moving on to anaerobic training. While long workouts accomplish the goals that we usually think of such as increasing blood flow and muscular efficiency, the steady state workout is designed to increase the aerobic threshold (the level of effort the body can exert while maintaining aerobic metabolism and not producing lactic acid), and the fartlek workout is designed to mix up the pace, letting the legs turn over more quickly to stimulate the muscle fibers in a different way and develop the neuromuscular system as well.

As mountaineers, these same principles and goals apply. During our base phase, our goal is to maximize the aerobic energy system, and so long workouts, shorter steady state workouts, and fartlek intervals will all help to build that strong foundation that the rest of our training will come to rest on. Into that mix, we can also add endurance strength (light weights, but lots of reps) and core strength workouts to start to build the well rounded fitness that is so essential for our sport! During the base building phase, higher intensity workouts should still be done at a moderate pace however, perhaps around 80-85% of your max heart rate, rather than a 100% all our effort. This pace will continue to develop your slow twitch muscle fibers while beginning to develop your fast twitch fibers as well. This has the added benefit of reducing the chance that you get injured as you move into more intense workouts during later phases of training.

Mt. Rainier may not be the Olympics, but we can certainly train like an Olympian, and that foundation laid now, will provide the support for a great climb on your next big objective!

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(1: http://runnersconnect.net/coach-corner/base-training-running/)

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The advice “show up in the best shape of your life” can mean very different things for different people. People from all sorts of different backgrounds come to Mt. Rainier for an adventure and they can all have great success, but it helps to know what you are training for. For an Ironman triathlete, perhaps it isn’t so much about showing up in the best shape of their life, but in the right shape: the physical demands of mountaineering can be very different than those of a triathlon. For someone venturing into the mountains for the first time, building overall aerobic fitness and core strength may be the focus.

Numbers that help to understand the climb:

17,982’ (5480m) of total elevation gain and loss

21 hours on our feet

45-55 lbs of weight potentially in your pack (pack weights do decrease for summit day)

30,000+ steps up and down (no one has ever actually counted them all for us)

2/3 roughly the amount of oxygen available to us at the summit versus sea level.

36 hours in which to do all this (*four day summit climb)

First off, aerobic fitness: For most, summit day on Mt. Rainier will be far and away the longest period of sustained exertion that they have ever done. A typical summit day involves 15 to 16 hours on our feet; as a general guideline that includes an hour of packing and prep, 10 hours of climbing to the summit and back to Camp Muir, an hour of packing and recovery at Muir, and 3 more hours down the Muir Snowfield. Even though the overall pace of our movement is slow, the sheer amount of time on our feet and moving adds up to be exhausting. Now consider that the previous day, the team spent 5 or 6 hours climbing to Camp Muir, and then got maybe 6 hours of somewhat fitful sleep prior to waking for the summit push. Having a deep aerobic base is the only way to be able to push through all these hours, and consequently, the bulk of your training should focus on this realm.

Recovery from anaerobic spurts: While 99.5% of the climb is accomplished in that zone of aerobic endurance, there are small sections of increased effort. It may be just a handful of tricky steps through a boulder jumble on Disappointment Cleaver, or a more sustained section of ice climbing through a tricky, steep section on the Kautz Ice Chute. At altitude, since we are breathing in less oxygen, these increases in effort can quickly become anaerobic, and the ability to recover mid-effort from these bursts is essential. Interval training helps to increase your body’s anaerobic threshold (the level of exertion at which you begin to create large amounts of lactic acid) and also builds your body’s ability to metabolize that lactic acid, effectively recovering. This way, though a few tricky steps may leave you feeling breathless or winded, you are able to recover in a matter of moments with a few deep breathes and fall right back into your rhythm.

Strength: While many focus on overall leg strength — consider that we will essentially be doing shallow squats all the way to the summit — and it is important, core strength and balance are perhaps even more important and more often overlooked. Throughout the climb you will be carrying a pack of varying weight. Your core muscles are responsible for helping to manage a load that is trying to pull you over backwards, keeping it stable and your posture in a position for efficient movement, and a base of core strength allows you to accomplish the more athletic moves that steeper climbing requires. While your core is doing the work to deal with your pack and much of your balance, the small muscles of your ankles and lower legs have to deal with ever-changing terrain: no step is the same, and your ankles and knees have adapt to the changes in slope and pitch to allow the rest of your body to remain in balance. Overall strength is still important, but strength exercises that incorporate an element of balance and coordination or involve your core will pay huge dividends once you find yourself on uneven terrain.

As you build your training plan, take these elements into account, and assess where you already stand. If you come from a strong endurance background, continue with that, but place more of your focus on recovery and core strength. If endurance sports are new to you, start here, focusing on building your base (as that really is the foundation of the rest). Most of all, have confidence that if you follow your plan, your will show up ready for the adventure of a lifetime!

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