Hi George,

A couple of thoughts on your questions. In one of the Sunday evening calls, I was asking Mark if the 10-20% BW hikes counted as ME and my take away was those simply count as a normal Z2 workout. The ME workouts involve a heavier pack where HR may or may not exceed AeT but the local muscular fatigue and load on the legs would be quite high, or it could be a 10-20% BW carry where the HR is pushed into Z3. I too am on the intermediate plan and I have not been treating the weekend weighted carry’s as ME.

This is my first time doing the group training, but based on previous experience it is normal to be carrying a fair amount of fatigue into the end of the third week of a block, which is why the fourth week is an easier recovery week. This gives your body the necessary stress to trigger adaptation and the ‘easy’ week permits recovery to lock in the gains.

Pay attention to your body and see how you feel/recover during next week. As with everything, it’s all personal so you may need to tweak the plan for an extra recovery day, or incorporate a low stress swim or the like to aid in your recovery. I find the yoga can also help.

As for your second question, HR is always a function of speed, so if you feel like your terrain is sufficiently steep you may need to up the speed to get the HR into Z2. Or you may need steeper terrain. Just be smart about things – you shouldn’t need to run with a 30# pack (my knees ache just thinking about that) and you don’t want to go faster than difficult terrain would allow. Have you considered hiking the fall line vs the maintained trail? Are there super steep sections of trail you could repeat? I’m a fan of being outside, but for an academic exercise could you try a stairmill or indoor stairs to see how your HR responds?

Report back on what you end up doing and how your HR responds. Im sure you are not the e only one with this.

George, This is fairly common and a bit counterintuitive for a lot of folks. As you add weight it “feels” harder but yet you can’t drive your HR up into higher zones nearly as easily. This effect becomes more pronounced as the weight increases. In a perfect world I like athletes to train a mix here, unweighted trail runs (with some power hiking on the ups), more lightly weighted hikes and then some heavier pack weight hikes assuming their goals require this. That way you get your body ready for the reality of a heavy pack during the event and you get in a good bit of training that hits your HR targets to build aerobic capacity. Exactly what you prioritize the most comes back to what your goal climb requires and what your current skill set entails (or lacks). Even within a single expedition style climb you could be dragging a sled part of the time, carrying a very heavy pack part of the time, and dealing with thin air on summit day with a relatively light pack. Ideally you will want to have trained all of these in some way during your preparation.
All of that said you will want the vast majority of your training time to be spent in some combination Zone 1 and 2, if that means lightening up the pack and picking up the pace a bit on the weekends so you can hit the targets HR on the climbs then so be it. You will likely find that as you get stronger you can add a bit to the pack weight and still hit the targets if that’s appropriate for your goals.