Hi, I am am so excited to finally find my people! I heard about the new alpinism book and ordered it right away. I am a 43 yo. female with zero endurance background. I have been casually exercising for years but have never formally trained. I fell into the HIIT exercises and I most definitely know that I am aerobic deficient. 8 years ago I started to hike the 46 Adirondack high peaks with my 11 yo. son at the time. I know that for most people on here these are small peaks but I know several people who have stated that the distance, the unmaintained trails and the ruggedness of these mountains they are as hard or harder than some of the 14000 footers, aside from the oxygen acclimation. I have had several hikes that turned out badly due to what I now know is that my endurance is terrible! We are at 37 of the 46 and I need to get my endurance up so I can finish the rest strong. I am not looking to climb Mt. Everest some 14000 footers… maybe? So I attempted the HR drift test on my stationary bike, the bike is not my preferred choice of cardio equipment but it is what we have in the house. I can see why it is not the reccomended choice, it was very hard to keep the same pace. This is going to sound sad brace yourself I started at 118 and it drifted to 129 sometimes it also went down to 117. I am assuming most of it was due to the the fact that it was hard to keep pace. My average was 121 for the hour, it went up and down alot even in the last 5 minutes it went down to 117. I will get the gym and try it on a treadmill next week but would it safe to say I could go with 121 for the time being? Even though I didn’t get an accurate reading at least I got in good 1.5 hour session. Thank you to anyone who takes the time to read this. Miriam