Many athletes we work with throughout the year target long-duration events: high-altitude climbs, ultramarathons, and big ski tours. As avid readers of Uphill Athlete literature know, the biggest bang for these athletes’ buck will be aerobic-capacity-building training. This comes in the form of low-intensity, long-duration work—multi-hour climbs, weighted pack carries, long aerobic runs. But for others there are competitions on the horizon. The 50K ultrarunner, the skimo racer with an eye on Patrouille des Glaciers, and the road runner–turned–vertical kilometer aficionado all need to pay attention to their speed potential. To perform well, they need to be able to prolong…

Sit down for story-time with Scott Johnston and Sam Naney. These two have a long history together, and in this hangout they will recount the development and evolution of Sam as an athlete, and Scott as a coach. Their dynamic story is full of lessons and applications for any athlete, or coach.https://youtu.be/bNpG1mBE6d4 Sam, #3, competing at US Nationals. Image by Matt Hagen Sam competing in the Alpental skimo race, January 2020. Sam skiing the Silverhorn Couloir near Mazama, Washington. 1:1 Coaching Personalized and direct accountability for your training Find Your Coach

For endurance athletes, staying healthy while training represents more money in the fitness bank. Imagine that for every day you were sick, you had to dig into your savings and pay your employer two and a half days of income:Five days off would cost you 13 days’ income;Seven days off would cost you 18 days’ income;Two weeks off would cost you 35 days’ income.If sick days cost you money, would that change how you interact with people? How much more cautious would you be about getting sick? “Also known as germophobia, mysophobia is a pathological fear of contamination and germs.” …

Every time I see El Cap my stomach sinks, my hands start sweating, my heart pumps faster. Even today, even after climbing the Nose, El Cap still strikes me as being impossibly big. When you’re up there the granite sweeps above and below you like a strange vertical sea. It looks and feels like it will never end. I have to convince myself I was really there. That I did in fact climb a route I had always dreamed of doing but had assumed I would never do.I’m a father of three with a full-time job, a decent climber but…

In the last two years of managing my leg injury, the best physical therapist I found lived over 5,000 kilometers away. Funny, but that’s true. I reached out to Uphill Athlete’s Pete Dickinson after my surgery, and he has been instrumental to getting me back on my feet doing the sports I love.This included specific advice, such as when I could start exercising or what movements to do. He gave me a list of exercises that would help me build strength without aggravating my problem areas. Every four to six weeks I check in with him, and he adjusts the…

After you deliver a baby, it often takes time and effort to bring muscle tone and neuromuscular pathways back online for the pelvic floor. As with any well-structured and progressive training, don’t compare what you can do with what you see others doing. It’s much more important to start from where you are, and progress from there. The goal of the following beginning postpartum core exercises is to get your diaphragm, TA, and pelvic floor muscles working together again. Because of that, you can do this workout multiple times per week. It shouldn’t make you feel sore so much as…

It’s a familiar scenario, especially among the athletes I coach: You’re far from a gym, yet you want to squeeze in a strength workout that will—at a minimum—help you maintain the strength you’ve been building over the previous weeks and months. Whether you’re in Yosemite or at a base camp in the Himalaya, the following no gear strength workout will fill that void. It is designed to be a general strength, full-body workout for a typical uphill athlete, such as a climber, who counts on her strength training as being a catalyst to enhance the effects of her endurance training.…

Core training after pregnancy demands patience and a back-to-the-fundamentals approach. This is because growing a baby changes your structure in major, long-lasting ways. Given these shifts to your alignment and anatomy, one of the best things you can do to support your return to athletic activity postpartum is to strengthen your core globally. Core training after pregnancy, and in general, isn’t about doing a million crunches to cultivate a six-pack. The goal is a functional core: a core that supports you as you eventually layer on more strenuous strength work and learn to move again with good postural and pelvic…

It blends together a wee bit, the three days. I remember damp, dark forests, a sense of always being closed in. After I put my wet weather gear on the first evening, I took it off only once or twice between then and Monday morning. It rained all three nights, and when it wasn’t raining, I was engulfed in low clouds and mist. Even the few moments it dried out, I kept my jacket on to shield myself from the mosquitoes—mosquitoes trying to bite me through my raincoat, mosquitoes the size of a normal fly.I hadn’t anticipated these conditions, but…

It was morning, full sun. I was on the second-to-last descent, just 20 kilometers from Courmayeur. There were 430 jagged kilometers behind me.Up to this point, I had successfully managed each transitory wave of pain, tiredness, and hunger. I’d handled frigid temperatures and tricky, middle-of-the-night navigation. I controlled what I could and accepted what I could not. Moving forward was what I did.After six days of rolling with it all, my body picked this moment to rebel—on a well-maintained trail in broad daylight super close to the finish. Suddenly the only stride I could muster was an inefficient jig-hop. I…