Assessing your Aerobic and Anaerobic Thresholds is important for every mountain athlete because that is how you will correctly define your training intensities for different workouts. This article summarizes the current best-practice recommendations for aerobic self-assessment. Embedded throughout you will find links to older articles—for those who want more information about a specific method.In our books Training for the New Alpinism and Training for the Uphill Athlete, as well on this site, we have devoted copious amounts of ink to helping athletes assess their fitness. In our efforts to cover all the angles, we’ve created a sprawling menu of options.…

You’re two weeks out from the main event—the race, the climb, the big adventure. You’ve been training for months, stressing your body consistently and strategically to prepare yourself for the demands of your objective. Now what? For most athletes, it’s time to gradually reduce the overall volume—and in some cases intensity—of training. This is called tapering, and it will allow your body to recover from and adapt to all the work you have put in. When done correctly, it should leave you feeling fresh for the miles and elevation gain to come. The key is to invest your taper period…

Less than an hour into our Ptarmigan Traverse Fastest Known Time (FKT) attempt and I was wondering if we had picked the wrong day. It was wet, cold, low-visibility. Steven and I had just traded a well-worn trail for the start of what would be 25 miles of technical terrain.Oh boy, I thought. This is going to be a really long day.The weather in the North Cascades is fickle in late June and early July. Steven and I had been monitoring the conditions for a couple of weeks, waiting for a decent window. Three days out, we committed to going for…

In mountaineering there are no rules. Everybody can draw his or her line. My line, my style, is that I don’t use supplementary oxygen. I don’t enlist Sherpas to transport my equipment and supplies. I climb in as small a team as possible. It is in the harsh environment of high altitude—being exposed and vulnerable on a mountain—that I feel most alive.So far I have summited five 8,000-meter peaks without oxygen: Gasherbrum II, Broad Peak, Dhaulagiri, Lhotse, and Makalu. I came very close on K2 and Shishapangma. On Shishapangma, after a 13-hour single push from the base of the south…

In 2014, after watching a Discovery Channel docuseries about commercial climbing on Mount Everest, I texted a good friend of mine: What do you think about climbing Everest? His response was quick and to the point: Mike, there’s no way you’re going to climb Everest. Okay, I wasn’t going to do it the next day, and I’d have to lay down a lot of groundwork, but I believed it could be possible. I started putting together the pieces that would be required if I ever got the chance. Over a five-year span, I overhauled my life to facilitate being faster,…

“Go big or go home.” That’s what my youngest son said in January 2017 when we decided to do our first ultra-distance trail race. I was 62 years old, my son a spry 28.I started running in 2015. I’m a competitive guy and I like taking on new challenges. I quickly ticked off a handful of road half marathons and one road marathon, all on top of my first love—rock climbing. Then rotator cuff surgery put my climbing on hold in late 2016, and I found myself needing something to do so I could keep drinking beer. My son suggested…

This video shows you how to improve your skimo striding and bounding technique. Ski striding and bounding are great tools for training. Ski striding is a lot like walking uphill but with an extra hip thrust, creating a more fluid movement. Striding requires the heel placement and leg extension to be farther forward than just walking. Ski bounding is a faster, more powerful version of ski striding. Using the same basic technique, all you do is add power and more drive to get to bounding. The foot is still out in front while maintaining a solid hip swing. Bounding is…

Winter-sport athletes face a unique problem when it comes to training for their disciplines. Cross-country ski racers train seven to eight months of the year—NOT doing their sport—in preparation for a four-to-five-month racing season. These athletes have had to become very clever about sport mimicry to fool their muscular and nervous systems into believing that they are doing something very close to skiing. They call this dryland training. Off-season training can be just as beneficial for skimo racers, who would be wise to experiment with some of the methods and techniques their cross-country brethren rely on between winters. Skimo Off-Season…

I love running downhill. So much so that for the ultras I run I tend to subtract the downhill miles from the overall distance to make it more manageable to wrap my head around the undertaking. Years ago, while teaching technique clinics, I quickly realized that not everyone shares this love. While I wanted to work on uphill technique, more people were interested in how to go downhill without knee pain, ankle injuries, or blown-out quads. I’ve come up with three tips that can help with your downhill prowess: engage your core, look down the trail, and practice a quick…

I was a few months into an academic desk job in the Southeast when I got the call. Would I like to return to the West Coast and rejoin a US Special Operations Force (SOF)? A position had opened up and it was mine if I wanted it. Hell yes, I wanted it. I missed the West Coast culture and the Cascades. I despised the humid low ground where I was living and missed having mountains like Mount Rainier and Mount Shasta visible from the highway. I had moved away from my alpine objectives and lamented the lack of a…