This is question we deal with a fair amount. It depends on a few factors, primarily, How hard is the activity aerobically, how far from your goal climb are you and what is your recovery capacity? Things like hard tennis playing, ski touring, and skate skiing for most folks have a pretty high aerobic demand and should be counted as “training” and incorporated into the program for the most part. I wear a HR monitor while doing them and log them into TP. Things like technical climbing (gym or outdoors) I do not log as aerobic training but I do think about if they conflict with strength training workouts. Usually its not a big issue. One of the main principles to think about with regards to a lot of these activities is how sport specific are they. You want the training to evolve to be more sport specific as the goal nears. Spending a bunch of time and energy lift skiing 8 months out from a goal is probably not an issue, if you’re 8 weeks out then you’ll likely want to spend some of that time hiking uphill with a pack on.

One of my loves is weight lifting – just coming off a strength block now. Always have to reduce it as I ramp up for a mountain. DOMS and long runs aren’t good buddies for me.

I’m sure this will be covered on another call, but I have a similar question.

My Denali climb is June 2022. I’m coming off a successful 10/2/21 50k trail race with ~6k of vert that I’m now fully recovered from. My current CTL is 76. I have 2 50k trail races between now and the end of this training block that I have been training for. One with about 3500 ft of vert, the other with around 5k ft of vert.

I will aim to be around 85-90 CTL for the second race 10 weeks from now (Jan 22). The first race I am treating as a training run to do the whole thing at or below AeT, ie, lots of hiking. The second race is harder so I may have to push a bit but my goal is to simply finish feeling good.

I feel like the training for these (LSD running, power hiking on hills, core/strength sessions and yoga) will dovetail nicely with the principles of the UA plan but I will need to add volume to keep my fitness up for the races.

If I keep the ramp rate low, is it a problem to add volume? 10-15 CTL over 10 weeks is not demanding.

Fantastic. Thanks for the quick response.

Don, If you have a history with TP I always recommend to keep the same methodologies going forward to allow and apples to apples comparison to past seasons, I think this is the most important thing. That said its important to understand if your comparing your CTL score to others (always dangerous ?) or to some theoretical gold standard (I.e. CTL of 100 for Denali) that if you log lift service skiing, yoga, hangboarding, dog walking and leaf raking that your CTL will be a bigger number than another athlete who only logs more sport specific training. My personal method is to only log aerobic work that gets me into a minimum of Z1 and also my Strength work. I add notes of additional training related things that I want to keep track of (so everything is housed in one place) but don’t give them a TSS. Hope that helps.

Good morning–where can I find the training regimen for both the basic and advanced plans?

Thanks,

jeff

Hey what’s about commuting by bike almost every workday. That means for me about 2*10k biking in the city so not really fast.

Anna- Good questions. I’m glad that swimming has been a good work around with your ischemic colitis. We don’t have anything against swimming (I went swimming yesterday :)) its just one of many activities that don’t look much like mountaineering and all things being equal arent as good for preparing. In the real world all things are not equal and we need to make compromises. As you mentioned I would explore how much footbourne training you can interject without causing issues. I would also explore hilly hiking over running and see if that helps. (If your footbourne volume if limited hilly hiking with a bit of pack weight is the most sport specific) Bike and rowing might be of use as well. Not sure what your current strength training program looks like but the addition of things like weighted box steps may also help you. As for the swimming TSS its a bit hard since swimming is so non impact they don’t generate a high TSS number since they don’t have a high training stress (recovery demand) thus I think those numbers are fairly accurate. With my 1 on 1 coached athletes I convert all aerobic training to the hrTSS as I find this allows more apples to apples comparisons but I don’t have any athletes that are doing more than say 20% of their volume swimming. You might try the hrTSS as well and see if you like the results. (Assuming youre monitoring your HR in the pool) We also commonly have folks do a larger volume of training (by time) if its non impact so you’ll want to consider longer sessions which will helps the TSS score. As with all athletes we like to move from general to specific with training so within your limitations I would make an extra effort to do some sport specific work in the last months/weeks before your goal.