I’ve decided to climb less after another pully injury so I’m going to be focused on mountain biking, and also thinking about ultralight backpacking and peak-bagging.

I’ve realized that one of the biggest factors in how I train is convenience. e.g. I was able to build strength consistently lifting weights over past 9 months since I shower at a gym regardless.

I need to build a base, and I know the mountain biking I’m doing might make that challenging since it pushes my into zone 3 and 4 even when I keep the pace within zone 2 when terrain allows. My intention was to supplement this with road riding to balance it out, but wondering how bad it would be to do majority of focused z1/2 work on an indoor treadmill walking with an incline?

Putting on a kit, planning a route, considering weather all make me less likely to ride consistently, but I could walk on a treadmill consistently while sometime going on road rides. I can read a book while on treadmill.

How effective would this be to build biking capacity? It seems that an incline treadmill could be more time efficient as well. I know that the other way around probably doesn’t work as well so if I do have foot based objectives in mind, does this approach give me a large boost with this with minimal loss on biking?

Some objectives I have in mind: fast thru hike of Hayduke Route (800 miles, desert); henry coe hardcoere (mtb, 100 mi 20k ft, I did 100 km version a few years ago and less fit now); sierra challenge 10 peaks in 10 days averaging 5500 ft gain, 16 mi (I’ve never completed all official challenge peaks).

Also, I’ll try to preserve upper body mass since I still want to be able to sport climb from time to time, but I’ll do it more for fun than with a training focus.