Training for Mountaineering: Climbing Specific Period

00:05.35
Steve
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 am here today with Alyssa Clark. Today we’ll be discussing the specific period, the training cycle and how we should approach this time. It is a crucial period for athletes and it can make or a break a trip. Not only from the preparation standpoint but also from the fine line of overdoing it. Let’s get into it.

00:37.80
Alyssa
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 kind of visualize when we think about as like in the dirt going after it. So I think that it’s going to be really fun to talk about today. 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?

01:18.50
Steve
Yeah I think it’s easiest to think of for me as the sharpening period and so much of what we talk about at Uphill Athlete is about building an aerobic base and we have all kinds of analogies. You know 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 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 going out and climbing hard. It’s running fast. It’s doing your sport 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.

02:35.65
Alyssa
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 and I think that you probably understand this too where 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. 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. So I think that’s kind of an exciting part of it as well.

03:16.26
Steve
Yeah I want to start by just sort of prefacing this all we’re saying that if one has not had a good solid base period. I don’t know these are those questions where every coach will say that it depends but you need at least twelve weeks and probably sixteen weeks of base period and if you don’t have that and 12 would really be the floor for me. If you don’t have twelve weeks of base period. Then you’re going to skip this part and you’re just going to continue to build a base as long as you can. So let’s start with sort of laying that out and you know how big this question we answered before but the base period can be. Bigger than twelve weeks or sixteen weeks it could be twenty four weeks so think about this the bigger your base the sharper the point can become. The more work the more specific work you can do during this period.

04:29.40
Alyssa
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 where we’re at. There is a difference between an elite athlete where the main focus is the event, the climb etc. and in a more everyday athlete where you’re juggling life. You’re juggling work, kids etc and so 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 2 to 8 weeks 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 as Steve already touched on, if you are time constrained and you don’t have more than twelve weeks of a base period then it’s probably going to be most beneficial for you to just skip this period.

05:58.95
Alyssa
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.

06:07.90
Steve
Yeah, yeah, and that conversion to the 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 or you’re going to Mt Blanc or something like that during this period that leading up to that is the time where you will want to do your training climbs. You will if you’re going to climb right near then this is the time to start booking in climbs for Mount Hood and Mount Adams and   Glacier peak and Baker and whatever else you can get your hands on during this 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 living in the mountains or an elite athlete and able to just travel when here or 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 having to drive somewhere to a 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. You know that’s great. That should be applauded and that should be viewed as ingenious, not as a concession or someone doing something wrong. So it definitely needs to 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 professional climbing years and I essentially would break this down like most of my climbing was centered around climbing in the karakoram range and so the climbing season there was the summertime. So if I was going, 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 you know past its peak power and peak strength and the atmosphere is drying out a little bit and so that would mean I would be leaving somewhere in the first couple of weeks of somewhere between July first and July fifteenth 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 at least May and June and sometimes April, May and June.

09:10.22
Steve
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 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 then I would have a week or 2 of kind of recovery and sort of travel coming back. And then I would go somewhere else where the weather was really good and typically that for me was often Peru 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 again stable enough that you can almost always climb. I’m choosing Peru over Alaska because in Alaska you can so easily sit in a tent and not be able to climb but in a place like Peru you can always move even when the weather is poor. You could at least be you know going out and doing big hikes or something.  The end, the last you know period would probably usually end up invariably end up 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. So when I lived in the pacific northwest or in Colorado as I did live in both those places during those periods I would just have 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.

11:09.11
Steve
I’ll let you all in on a little secret that I’ve not probably told anybody about before Naga Parbat. I actually went to Maui and my climb quote unquote that I did my training event that I did was Haleakala from sea to summit.

1:27.36
Steve
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 I got completely lost up there kind of an epic day actually but it ended up being like 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 you know, walking and exerting in snow and I had lots of elevation gains. So there’s a lot, being in Maui you know two weeks before going to an eight thousand meter peak might not be the most intuitive thing and for sure it was a concession I was there with my girlfriend of 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 its not like we were there for a month either. We were there for a week. So it’s fine.

12:25.51
Alyssa
That’s pretty funny because I have also done Haleakala from sea to summit and also got lost and also bushwhacked a lot. I mean it’s a 10k  day and you’re ending up over ten thousand feet you’re running on volcanic like the ash and everything and it’s hard footing. It’s hard route finding. We also got lost and ended up being like I don’t know an 8 plus hour day so yeah it’s a good mountain. That’s funny. 

12:57.36
Steve
It was all cloudy when I was up there I couldn’t see it was totally white out. It’s pretty funny. Yeah, that’s the other thing I had like no clothes and was freezing. But anyway, so that’s great.

13:02.59
Alyssa
It’s also pretty cold up there.

13:13.90
Steve
Segway right? Certainly you know a way to find not everybody’s got Haleakala or ten thousand vertical foot gain climb nearby but you can figure out something to do. One thing that I think is really good is to take one of our muscular endurance workouts like a weighted pack carry and you know do that with a heavyish weight. Maybe not the heaviest weight you’ve been carrying but add more volume and really like you know by a significant amount. 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’re fueled. You know you fuel during the thing you’re not trying to kill yourself. But you’re trying to kind of create this event where you’re sort of overreaching into that. The other thing I do is back-to-back days. You know, try to simulate that and when you’re mountaineering, you almost always have back-to-back days. And depending on your objective even something like Rainier. It’s going to be three days or minimum  of 2 for most people, you know you’re going to go up and camp at Muir and then you’re going to go up to highcamp and then the next day go to the summit and then come all the way out.

14:45.78
Steve
So those are very typical so it makes a lot of sense to train for those back-to-back days and the way I typically do that is to 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 and again just being creative with my duration. I’ll often use mountaineering boots for my training if I can. Ah, to have a little weight on my feet.  I’ll use the actual backpack that I’m going to carry on my climb.   I’ll kind of try to leave some of it out there. I mean there’s always this sort of saying don’t run your best races in your training right? That’s sort of the saying but you do want to definitely have at least 1 week where you’re kind of overreaching and driving yourself pretty far into fatigue and then feeling yourself bounce back from that.

15:54.66
Alyssa
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 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? It’s almost never worse than you think it’s going to be. You’re going to find your groove. You’re going to get there 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 mountains and so I think that mental component is so crucial to building up the resilience and the durability when you’re actually in the thing. 

16:59.25
Steve
So periods that I described like going to Canada and then going to Peru and then going to the Himalaya or the Karakorum I mean that was a big part of it and I would feel so strong on those and 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. I think that’s really important for confidence you know. You’re going to know if you’re faking your own confidence right? 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 with yourself that you just described so that yeah I was able to do that and I did. Yeah it was hard to get out the door. And it was hard to eat but I did it. I got my shoes on. I got my boots on. I did that the other day. You know it’s so valuable.

18:05.77
Alyssa
And I think that I mean 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. You’re like no I got this I know where I’m at. I know how? I’ve been training 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 too 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 in myself more than I used to and I feel like I freak my parents out a little bit and I’m like oh no I got this like this is what’s going to happen. And they’re always like I don’t know, like just watch yourself and I’m like no no, no, this is what’s going to 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.

19:23.16
Steve
Yeah I think that’s a great point I think and you know I remember I’ve said this before in other places but you know before Vince and I climbed Naga Parbat, 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 we’re eroding and we’re losing fitness and the longer we wait and it was like well you know we have this much longer and if we get the weather we’re going to do it like there was no question in my mind there was like what you said there was no doubt really it sounds arrogant. But I knew like I was just like yeah that’s not going to be the problem like the weak link isn’t going to be us. The weak link is going to be 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 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 changes you and what changes you is this experience of yourself in these new ways.

20:54.45
Steve
This confidence of these capacities that you develop you know through practice and through time and through hard work and through consistency and you literally become a different person. Somebody may ask you like oh are you worried about climbing the Rupaul 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 know what you know and they don’t feel what you feel and they don’t know you in the way you know yourself. It’s also within mountaineering I remember five years later people coming up to me and being like oh it’s so cool you climbed Nanga Parbat but I’m like yeah but that was five years ago like I couldn’t do that now you should have congratulated me five years ago because I’m not that person anymore and that’s also true, right? Like in all the climbing. It’s a little different in running but in climbing you know all the sort of 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.

22:15.89
Alyssa
Yeah, and I think 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.

22:28.80
Steve
Exactly.

22:33.60
Alyssa
We’re talking about such a specific period but you and I combined have probably been through like, 50 of these specific periods throughout our lives. It’s not just those two to eight weeks of hard work. It’s like years and years and years. Going through this cycle and then every time you learn a bit more about yourself. You increase your fitness, you increase your mental elasticity. It’s a lot of parts and it’s a lot of time. It’s just years of doing this. And that can be 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 that fire will be lit and it will stay lit until that time has passed. But I think if it’s something that’s worth doing. It’s worth doing for years on end.

23:37.00
Steve
Yeah I mean that’s for me what Uphill Athlete is all about right? 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 this specific period again.

23:56.90
Steve
But I think it would and we can come back to this as a fascinating conversation but let’s ah, let’s return to what this is 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 pretty flat so you’ve got to take this into consideration like how we’re going to do that for example with him and so do you want to talk about that for a moment.

24:45.90
Alyssa
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, and 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 increasing levels of difficulty. If you are dealing with higher altitude. Each peak should be higher in elevation as you are moving through them and 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. 

25:43.21
Steve
No, that’s great. 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 and these are great points and things I’ve 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. And the gradualness is what you’re 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. We should rightly be skeptical of large jumps in things that we’re trying to do and things we have confidence in ourselves and so what will happen if you, you know, pull something off, you make a big step. And yes your mind will doubt you and so you will suffer from self-doubt because you’ll be thinking later hh that was just a fluke 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 it was a fluke or a one-off or that it 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 stay ahead of these things and that’s how we do it. So thanks for bringing those up.

27:35.50
Alyssa
I think that’s great. That’s a really good point about the mind tricking I’ve definitely been there 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 going to break down more of the terms and then give a specific anecdote. For me, it was a very mountainous running event. But the same 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 2 this is your chance to go harder. So you should be looking at two zone 3 workouts, an uphill with an alpine weight pack. So the pack that you are going to bring on your climb.

28:50.51
Alyssa
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 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 this is not though the time or at 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. That allows you to have the hard days hard and the easy days easy and the hard days should be as hard or harder than the big days of your climb as Steve has mentioned so far. So should I jump into my own story of trying to fit this in or do you want to add anything Steve.

30:26.54
Steve
I want to jump in here and talk about some of the specific things so just in summary, we talked about the weighted hill climbs. That’s one chunk 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 in the book and we talk about like doing a mini max strength session that takes like thirty, forty 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. But you probably don’t need to be going into the bouldering gym but you know for me that was usually some sort of ice climbing or mixed climbing or dry tooling in my case. But I think that the 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 as 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 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 something by putting the pack on and off right before you go.  Keeping things reasonable as health is always the top priority.

32:29.91
Alyssa
Definitely yeah because again, as you’ve written in the book. This is really a moment where you can make or break and you can really bury yourself if you are not super careful in this time period. 

32:44.45
Steve
Yeah, why would you tell us about TDS first tell us what TDS is.

32:47.11
Alyssa
TDS is one of the utmb races in the race series. It’s considered kind of the technical sibling of UTMB. It is about eighty five miles or so with pretty much comparable elevation gain to UTMB so shorter but steeper and more technical. I’m going to say all of this with the fact that I have still not gotten to race TDS because unfortunately I got covid right as I landed in Chamonix as did a bunch of people so that was a huge bummer but it led to later success in Moab and in Hurt. So 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 when I was working a job for a school as well as going to graduate school and 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 4 to 6 hour days every day while training or while going to school while working and it would be like hey get up at 5 in the morning, go run 2 hours go run at lunch for an hour go run another 2 hours in the evening and so I was able with asking for some grace from my partner to get in this training and where I had to get it done didn’t exactly look like TDS but I would be able to get three to four thousand feet of climbing just going up and down up and down up and down and that helped me to feel like my mountain legs were ready my mind was ready and was it perfect it wasn’t but I was able to get upwards of like twenty five thousand feet of climbing over a hundred miles while balancing all of these things and so at the end of the day if you I like I hate to to kind of put it 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. I felt kind of on the edge of like, is this too much? Or is this 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 is like nope 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. I even did some on the treadmill for hurt this year. I was in negative 35 degress and I would spend 5 hours on the treadmill just going up and down up and down and that paid off and you just have to do the best you can with what you have and learn that all of those mental pieces are going to help whether it’s 5 hours on the treadmill or going up and down the same street because it’s a hilly street you can find and I think that all of those contribute to the success that you will find later on.

36:13.76
Steve
Yeah, how does that quote go? He who has a why can suffer any how. It’s a Victor Frankl quote. 

36:21.67
Alyssa
I like that.

36:30.46
Steve
I think that in a lot of ways these people like you know your story or you know I’ve coached athletes that train for Everest without supplemental oxygen and they used the stairs and buildings and 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 up and down the same street in your neighborhood then wow like I’m impressed. That’s some real will and sticktoitiveness. So that’s good.

37:13.71
Alyssa
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 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 know that this effort will pay off and that it might not look pretty. It might not look as similar as you want it to but all of that will come full circle but let’s get to now that we wax and waned a little bit. Let’s look at actually like 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. So the workouts should be as we’ve kind of said they should be hard. They should really challenge you. But Steve, if you could break down what maybe a first week or two of a special period looks like, what would that be.

38:44.38
Steve
Yeah, so you know you can have one big day that’s going to probably account for 40 or 50% of your total training volume in that one workout and probably most if not all of your vertical for that week and then probably something around the the weight of about half of what you’re going to be carrying on your ultimate goal climb is sort of of a baseline that’s going to be one of the workouts the hard workouts and the other hard workout is going to be. I should say that’s mostly an aerobic effort. Of course you can go hard and go into anaerobic right? You can know it’s a continuum, this is not a binary, you’re in aerobic or you’re in anaerobic. It’s a good bit of a continuum. You can be in zone 3 the dreaded zone 3. This is a good time to be in zone 3 in the middle and you can go fun hard and then you know you can do something that’s really focused zone 3 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 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. You know it’s going to be really easy. Easy zone one and ideally multiple zone 1 workouts in a day like you know morning and evening are really easy. But thirty to forty minutes is really easy just moving and keeping things going, eating and 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. 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, not get enough sleep. So and then that mini Max Strength kind of maintenance 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. It isn’t actually that important. I know a favorite of a lot of the coaches is swimming because it gets the body horizontal and which means that the heart doesn’t have to pump as hard to get the blood throughout the extremities. There’s some people who say the pressure of the water helps venous return and so on so the swimming can be good. I liked to do cycling personally because I could cycle and can kind of always spin it and keep it really light and easy. And minimal chance for injury. If it’s winter, skiing and ski touring are great things but again like keeping those couple like two really hard days and the rest of it pretty much easy. I think that’s it in a nutshell.

42:07.98
Alyssa
Awesome! Yeah I think this is also just a very important period. I always think of this as 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.

42:25.85
Steve
Yeah, yeah.

42:26.40
Alyssa
So maybe ask for forgiveness before you enter this period of your family. But yeah I think that this is true 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 start 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. 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 start of the climb healthy and safe like all is good rather than taking a risk and getting sick or just not really paying attention to it. So I highly recommend just really being on top of that. Most of what we’re talking about also refers to specific breakdowns and recommendations for this period are in Training for the New Alpinism specifically chapter 9, but we’ve talked about this probably more than we meant to throughout, but Steve for you for a climbing objective how does the mental aspect of this and do you visualize like how do you push yourself in these moments and how does that pay off when you’re actually in the climb.

44:16.20
Steve
Yeah, it’s a great question and you know we have talked about it in spots and other places of the series on training for mountaineering.

44:29.17
Steve
But 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 this specific period I was feeling into my body I was really noticing how the effort felt. And that you know if things are going well is usually an experience of like wow this seems to be hard and now it feels kind of easy. That’s cool, like I wonder what else I can do like I wonder if I can hold on to this a little longer. Can I start to explore a little bit what my 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. 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. They have to have this experience in their own bodies with themselves.

45:51.82
Steve
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 new found capabilities and strength. Through this process, 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 climb. So I’m connecting it to one of the things like with how I structured things. 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. But the concept is that I want it technically to be so easy that it doesn’t even really cause a blip for me when I’m doing it at an extreme high 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 about this. I feel very secure about this and can make it safely because I’m not getting pumped and I can hang out here all day and put in gear and all of those things and then later on I’m also thinking I’m connecting that to bailing like okay so when I’m at six thousand meters and I’m doing something that’s easier than this that’s not going to be an issue. And it’s really not going to be an issue. I do not have to fear the inability to get gear in because I’m not going to be pumped because it’s not only going to be easier than this. 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 I will experience in the future. What is really interesting about that experience I can say as an athlete is that’s what happened like 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 perceptions color our reality or 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 it came about for me.

48:55.91
Alyssa
Ah, it’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 are experiencing things and 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 okay I’m 10 hours in, or sixty miles and the night is rolling in. How am I going to mentally be in a great position if I start getting nauseous like oh cool, nausea, it happens I’m okay, everything else is fine and I have planned x, y and z to deal with feeling nauseous and I can handle this. And so 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.

50:04.85
Steve
Exactly yeah I mean on day three of Nanga Parbat we had a really big day and we climbed literally 24 hours that day. It was one of the biggest climbing days literally of my life and it was really hard at the end. Three quarters of the way through it. Vince’s experience of it, and he’s told the story, was very different from mine. Like 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. 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 I just just navigated us to the end and nailed the route finding and got us to a really good campsite. All of these 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 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 Vince is bonking. Okay, let’s feed him rather than say oh no, well you have to go down. That’s a different reaction like no, there’s a problem. Have a solution here’s a bar like eat that damn it and put me on belay. 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 like I’m kind of strung out and I’m kind of stressed and all these things are happening at once. But, I mean 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 solve problems one at a time. And take your time and take some deep pressure 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. There’s so many things in life that I think that we can know. That I for myself experienced first in the mountains and have brought back to my life as this in the second half of my life here that I am now.

53:18.40
Alyssa
Yeah, I always joke with my friends that I can relate everything to ultra running or mountain sports if you allow me to do so. But yeah I guess we kind of need to wrap it up. But, the last thing I would touch on is that this is such a great time period for you because we’ve been talking a little bit about nutrition. You mentioned using the pack that you are going to use on the climb for you to know your gear and know your nutrition. Because you should be practicing what you’re going to be doing out in the mountains, like don’t go eating some random thing that you’re never going to bring on the mountain like this is when you’re practicing because this is when you realize I can’t eat Applesauce, I want to throw it up. You know or just whatever that is. And so this is a crucial period or like 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 at this point because this is simulating what you’re going to be doing out there.

54:14.00
Steve
Yeah.

54:26.64
Steve
So true like for example, you know one of the problems that I was solving for Nanga Parbat was the sleeping system I wanted and I sewed my own sleeping bag and I was trying to find different things and I was sewing up these bags and the guys at patagonia were helping me and providing me with materials and consult and you know on those climbs that spring like each trip was a different sort of prototype and then the one we had worked great, I still have it. And I got used to tons of all the other routes and climbs actually because it was like a two pound synthetic sleeping bag for 2 guys and it was brilliant and that was because we did all the testing. During this specific period to tie it back to the same thing with the food. How I packaged the food, how much to bring, how much to eat, what snacks we could tolerate all of those things. Yeah, you gotta get all that stuff dialed and that again connects back into your experience of your preparation and your experience of your confidence because you can’t fake that and you’re going to know that you went through that process and figured those things out and 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 stove top stuffing at eight thousand meters because I’ve eaten stove top stuffing at eight Thousand meters before and it tasted darn good and that’s going to be fine. That’s it.

56:02.30
Alyssa
Yeah, no I’ve done that so many times. I use spring energy for 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 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 one hundred and eighty 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 super super important to understand yourself and understand that you have contingency plans that are going to work.

56:41.50
Steve
Yeah, absolutely great discussion Alyssa. Thanks so much for that.

56:54.19
Alyssa
I’m excited. We have just about a little bit more left in the mountaineering series, 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 to help you get to more mountain adventures.

57:20.70
Steve
We’re not just one but a community together. We’re Uphill Athlete. Thanks for listening.