The Wake-Up Call
In June 2001, I found myself standing atop 17,400-foot Mount Foraker in the Alaska Range, looking toward Denali. The Argentine alpinist Rolando Garibotti and I had just climbed the Infinite Spur in 25 hours, turning what was once a multiday testpiece of Alaskan mountaineering into a day climb. Staring at Denali—where I had established three new routes and climbed the Slovak Direct in a 60-hour push—it dawned on me that there was nothing bigger to climb as far as the eye could see.
That season in Base Camp, I met the world-renowned Slovenian alpinist Marko Prezelj. We hit it off immediately. Within weeks of returning home, we were scheming to visit the Himalaya. The objective: a new route on the then-unclimbed south face of Nepal’s Nuptse East, 25,600 feet. It would be the biggest mountain I had ever tried in alpine style.
I trained for Nuptse the same way I trained for everything at that point. I was ski guiding, climbing one to two days a week, spending a lot of time ski touring. A couple of months before the trip, I ramped up hard—long climbing days, Nordic skiing, just generally pushing myself as much as I could. By March, I felt ready.
Near the end of that spring season, Marko, Barry Blanchard, and I were making good progress on a new route up Nuptse’s south face. We were climbing well together. On the third day, we reached what we expected to be our last bivy, within striking distance of the unclimbed summit. Barry had worn himself out and took on a support role while Marko and I made the final push.
When we left the tent that morning, I hit a wall. Everything felt difficult, even relatively simple terrain. Marko, on the other hand, was ready and raring to go. He was just so much stronger than I was. Two Marko Prezeljs could have summited that day. One Marko and one Steve could not, and the reason was my lack of fitness. We turned around and went down.
This was the biggest wake-up call of my life as a professional climber. Without trying to sound arrogant, just to be matter of fact: I think Marko was the first partner I had teamed up with who was head and shoulders better than I was, especially in terms of fitness. I was not only frustrated to have narrowly missed such an incredible opportunity. I was embarrassed at having failed my partner. I made up my mind to start training in earnest as soon as I got home. Fortunately, Marko did not hold it against me too much. On the way out, we were already making plans to attempt an incredible line on Masherbrum in the Pakistani Karakoram the following year.
Overtrained
Back home in Mazama, Washington, I knew I needed professional guidance. I happened to be living among a small but vibrant group of talented Nordic skiers and Nordic ski trainers, so I solicited a woman who was a former assistant coach for the Canadian women’s Olympic cross-country skiing team.
She and I talked briefly about my goals, and she wrote out a few months of workouts. What neither of us took into account was my life outside the training. All winter long, I worked as a helicopter ski guide out of Mazama. I had to be at work at 7:00 a.m., so each day I got up long before sunrise and did my workout at 4 or 5 in the morning. Then I went to work and guided 10,000 feet of powder descents each day—the minimum guarantee of the company; some days we skied 30,000 feet—all while wearing a 30-pound guide’s pack. On my days off, I went on long ski tours, continued the training program, tackled alpine climbs. Anything but rest.
Sometime in the middle of February, I became sick in a way I had never experienced before. I was basically in bed for a month, completely laid up. I could not move. The doctors had me on an IV, taking antiviral and antibiotic drugs. They never figured out exactly what I had. They called it an unknown viral infection and left it at that.
Of course, I understand now what happened. I was seriously overtrained. Between work, training, harsh weather, lack of sleep, and going nonstop for months, I forced my body into shutdown mode. Two months later, when I should have been in the best shape of my life, I went for a ski tour to test the waters. A tour that normally took me an hour of ascent took four hours. I was completely distraught.
I still headed to Pakistan with Marko and another Slovenian alpinist, Matic Jost, despite not being fully recovered. I had lost any conditioning I had gained. It ended up being somewhat moot—we never got enough good weather for a serious bid. But when I came home, I knew I wanted to train again. There was no question about that. The question was how.
Teaching Myself the Science
When I returned to Mazama, I started casting about for help and ideas. I talked to coaches and trainers across several sports. I read everything I could find about endurance training methodology. I consulted with exercise physiologists, Nordic ski coaches, running coaches—anyone who had thought seriously about how the aerobic system works and how to build it without destroying yourself in the process.
What quickly became clear was that the principles of endurance training were well established and had been for decades. The science of how to build an aerobic base, how to incorporate structured rest, how to periodize intensity, how to develop strength that transfers to performance—all of this was understood in sports like cross-country skiing, distance running, and cycling. The problem was that almost none of it had been translated for mountain athletes. Climbers, ski mountaineers, and alpinists were training hard—often impressively hard—but without a framework that connected proven endurance principles to the specific demands of their sport.
I became, essentially, self-coached. I read the science, consulted widely, experimented on myself, and built my own training programs based on what I was learning. I was not following anyone’s system wholesale. I was synthesizing principles from endurance sport, testing them against the demands of high-altitude alpinism, and keeping what worked.
The big key was shifting my focus away from technical climbing and toward building my capacity for sustained physical work. By that point, my technical climbing skills were good enough for the situations I was going to encounter on big mountain routes. My capacity for the kinds of physical beatings that your body is subjected to on huge alpine climbing days, however, was lacking. That was where I had the most room for improvement, and that is where I focused. It was a total sea change for me. I had been of the old school that “the best way to train for climbing is to go climbing.” As it turned out, that could not have been farther from the truth for my situation.
The Transformation
The results were immediate and dramatic.
The year I committed fully to structured endurance training was one of the best climbing years of my life. Marko and I climbed the North Face of North Twin in the Canadian Rockies. I returned to the Karakoram and soloed a new route on K7 and attempted Nanga Parbat by a new route on the Rupal Face. For those several months I was in amazing shape, and I felt utterly unstoppable.
After that first season I was a total believer. The next year, in 2005, Vince Anderson and I climbed a new route on the Central Pillar of the Rupal Face on Nanga Parbat in alpine style in six days and won the prestigious Piolet d’Or. In 2006, we came within a couple hundred feet of the 7,821-meter summit of Kunyang Chish East, eventually shut down by dangerous snow conditions on the summit ridge. In 2007, I climbed a new route on K7 West and a number of smaller new routes in the Karakoram. In 2008, I attempted Makalu and did a very hard new route on Mount Alberta in the Canadian Rockies—the two parties who have repeated our line both resorted to aid climbing where I had free climbed.
During those years, I was in the best shape of any climbing partner I roped up with. I am not saying that to brag. I am saying it to make one simple point: the training worked. It had completely transformed me and my climbing abilities. What I came to realize is that every alpine climb comes down to at least one moment where you are just not sure if you can continue. In those moments, it is absolutely crucial that you have enough energy, fitness, focus, and gas in the tank to say, “Yes, I can keep going.”
Sharing What I Had Learned
I was at the height of my climbing career when, in 2010, I had a very bad accident on Mount Temple. The illness back in 2002 had invalided me for a few months. This fall—from which I barely escaped with my life—would set me back for years.
During my convalescence, I decided to write down everything I had learned about training for alpinism. The gap I had identified years earlier—that the science of endurance training existed but had never been translated for mountain athletes—was still wide open. The principles that had transformed my own climbing could help others, and I wanted to share them.
The result was Training for the New Alpinism, published in 2014 with co-author Scott Johnston, followed by Training for the Uphill Athlete in 2017. The books laid out the endurance training methodology I had developed and tested through years of climbing at the highest level: aerobic base first, structured periodization, intensity only when the base supports it, strength that serves the demands of the mountain.
Since those books were published, we have received thousands of messages from people who used the principles to achieve their mountain goals. From climbing Everest without supplemental oxygen, to establishing new technical routes in remote ranges, to training for trekking in the Khumbu, to competing in ultra-distance races—all kinds of people with all kinds of backgrounds have successfully applied these ideas to their own objectives.
Why Uphill Athlete Exists
The books were the beginning. But a book is a static object, and training is a living process. I founded Uphill Athlete to build something the books alone could not provide: a coaching organization that applies proven endurance training methodology to the full spectrum of mountain and endurance athletes, with the individualized guidance that makes the difference between a plan and a transformation.
Today, Uphill Athlete serves mountaineers, alpinists, trail runners, ski mountaineers, ice climbers, rock climbers, trekkers, and tactical athletes. Our coaching team trains athletes at every level, from first-time trekkers preparing for their first high-altitude objective to professional alpinists pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the mountains. Our Training Groups provide structured plans, community, and coach access at scale. And the AI-powered tools we are building will bring training intelligence to athletes who have never had access to this kind of support.
Every piece of it traces back to the same place: a tent high on Nuptse in 2001, watching Marko Prezelj move with a power and efficiency I could not match, and deciding that I was going to figure out how to close that gap.
The methodology I built to transform my own climbing is the methodology Uphill Athlete teaches today. The science was not new. What was new was applying it to the mountains. That is still what we do, and we do it better than anyone.
There is no magic key to endurance training. There are no six simple steps, no guru who can take you there, and no shortcut that replaces the work. But there are a hundred years of science and a well-understood framework behind the principles that apply to every endurance sport. Our mission is to translate that framework for mountain athletes—to train, teach, and connect the people who go uphill.
I hope you learn something here. But above all, I hope you go outside and apply what you learn to the goals and dreams that brought you here in the first place.