Before Uphill Athlete, I’d been engaged in structured training—mostly self-coached—for mountain and endurance sports for many years. I was a runner and cyclist through high school and college, then got into skiing and climbing toward the end of school and did those almost exclusively. About seven years ago, my daughter, who was a competitive Nordic skier, took up cycling as part of her dryland training, and I got back into road biking with her and started racing again. My main winter thing was still skiing, so my training revolved around biking and skiing.A couple years ago I wanted to get…
Author: Uphill Athlete
I first heard the term “death by threshold” during a session with famed track coach Alberto Salazar at a seminar a few years ago. It’s a trap people fall into when they do a lot of Zone 3 training—middle-to-higher-intensity training (around Anaerobic or Lactate Threshold)—without the sufficient aerobic base to support it.At first it seems like the regimen is working: you see a rapid improvement in performance, because the adaptations that take place in your glycolytic metabolism are quick to occur. Then after about a month, these steady gains level off. When you hit that plateau, the immediate reaction is…
Uphill Athlete is delighted to introduce Coach Carolyn Parker. A lifelong endurance athlete and accomplished climber, Carolyn owns and runs Ripple Effect Training Center in Carbondale, Colorado, where she shares her expertise in strength training and muscular conditioning with hundreds of mountain athletes. Her goal is to be a catalyst for positive change—from the individual outward.-by Uphill Athlete Coach Carolyn Parker“Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi. Pair Gandhi’s insight with “The mind is primary,” a phrase my friend Mark Twight coined years ago at Gym Jones, and you get the…
Aerobic Deficiency is all too common among the people who approach Uphill Athlete for coaching and training. Don’t worry: Aerobic Deficiency Syndrome is not a fatal disorder. It’s a reversible condition we often see in those athletes that have spent too much time training in Zone 3 and above. These athletes often have finely-tuned anaerobic capacities from years of working out at higher intensities. They feel fit, fast, and strong, but their aerobic bases, and therefore their endurance, are woefully underdeveloped—sometimes virtually nonexistent. Aerobic Deficiency is pretty much a given among the un-fit. The Importance of the Aerobic Base Sub-aerobic…
I’ve gone on over 20 expeditions in my climbing life—to Pakistan, Nepal, Tibet, India, Antarctica, and all over South America. In the early days, when I was new to packing for these big trips, I would just lay out my stuff and fixate on what I was forgetting. I’m not a naturally organized person, so it didn’t occur to me to make a list and check it. Then before one of my first India expeditions, someone in my party started a shared Google document, and we filled it with everything we thought we might need for every possible type of…
Max VO2 is the Holy Grail of endurance qualities, right? Looking at its importance in the fitness landscape, you’d sure think so. Many training methodologies embrace it as the metric that rules all others, and the popular media fuels this misunderstanding with articles about how to boost your max VO2 in order to be the best athletic you. But of the three main components that pertain to endurance—economy, speed at Lactate Threshold (aka Anaerobic Threshold), and max VO2—max VO2 correlates the least with performance. It’s time to debunk the max VO2 myth. My Growing Skepticism During my ski racing career,…
Back in the day, coaches and endurance athletes noticed that during prolonged training, an athlete’s heart rate would slowly climb while the athlete maintained a steady pace. Bear in mind that this was long before modern GPS watches, so much of this “noticing” was very subjective. Nonetheless, to these early observers the anecdotal evidence suggested that the faster the pace, the more the athlete’s heart rate would drift upward during the second half of the workout—a phenomenon that became known as heart rate drift. TrainingPeaks refers to this as decoupling. From Linear to Nonlinear What these athletes and coaches were…
Maximize your fitness with this 12-week mountaineering training plan, especially for athletes with limited time availability.
Kevin Daniels was a climber to the core. For over three decades, the Bishop-based owner and operator of Fixe Hardware USA divided his time between outdoor-industry work and vertical play: alpine, ice, trad, sport, bouldering—he did it all. Then an ACL re-injury sidelined him in 2013, and his doctor suggested he tool around the mountains on a trail bike while recovering. The next day he bought a motorcycle, and the following year he raced over 40 hours through the Mexican desert to his first Baja 1000 Ironman finish. He was hooked. Determined to win the 2017 running of the event—the…
BUY NOW FOR $49 The Uphill Athlete 8 week Mount Blanc Plan is designed for climbers bound for either the Gouter or the more demanding Cosmique route over Mt Blanc du Tacul and Mt Maudit. This plan assumes that you have no strength training background and is ideal for mountaineers and trekkers who have never engaged in an organized training program or who have not done so for a long time.This training plan is based on scientifically sound training principles and a combined thirty years of professional endurance coaching experience and sixty years of world-wide climbing and mountaineering experience. In…