LAB GUIDELINES FOR AEROBIC THRESHOLD TESTING By Uphill Athlete co-founders Steve House and Scott Johnston You’ve decided to get tested! Great. This can provide useful, actionable information about your metabolism and helps set a baseline which if you choose to re-test in the future will demonstrate the effectiveness of the training work you’ll do. We ask that you send this letter the clinician conducting the test prior to your arriving for your test. This text explains what we want to learn from these tests and why. Aerobic Threshold. We are primarily interested in determining your aerobic threshold first (AeT), and…
Author: Uphill Athlete
In January 2017, Jessica Flint, a 35-year-old New York–based magazine editor, climbed Africa’s Mount Kilimanjaro, in Tanzania. It was her first attempt at summiting anything, not to mention her first time camping. To prepare for the trek, she mostly participated in twice-weekly 45-minute, high-intensity treadmill classes at Manhattan’s Mile High Running Club, and ran three other times per week. Her training appeared to pay off: While the rest of her seven-person team had to dig deep to reach 19,341 feet, Jessica later told her guide from Summits Africa, Ake Lindstrom, that she felt like the effort she put in on…
The journey—it’s made of successes and failures and reflections and strengths and weaknesses. The journey, as opposed to the objective, is always a big source of discussion for climbers: What do you get when you’ve completed the objective? I’m not going to be the one to answer that difficult question, but I ask it and I feel it.I started climbing seriously in 2013, when I joined the Italian Alpine Club. I live in Turin in the western Alps, and my aspiration is to be the best all-around technical alpinist I can be—proficient on as many terrains as possible, with a…
Mike Foote cranked up his final lap—his 60th—with 15 friends in tow. It was nearing 9 a.m. on March 18, 2018, almost a full day after he first started skinning up and skiing down the 1,020-foot Ed’s Run at Whitefish Mountain Resort in Montana. During the previous lap, he’d eclipsed the world record for vertical ascended and descended in 24 hours on ski-mountaineering gear. This last push was a celebration. “It was really emotional and really special, and I was surrounded by people that I love,” he says. “It was an amazing thing.” It was also his second-fastest lap of…
TrainingPeaks.com is an incredibly powerful tool for planning and monitoring your training. We’ve been using it since 2012 and the longer we use it, the more impressed we have become. At this point we simply can’t imagine training without this tool. It is simply light-years better than using a spreadsheet-as-training-plan. TrainingPeaks was originally developed by professional cyclists and their coaches who needed to analyze not only the effect of each workout, but the cumulative effect of days, weeks, and months of workouts. Even with the simple basic (and free) version of TrainingPeaks, this monitoring is possible. In this video, Steve…
Back when I was doing a lot of shorter trips to Patagonia, really fast down and back, having success, I coined the term “Daddy style.” It’s alpine style but for a family man with two kids, like myself: show up super fit, crush something, and then head home. Make the most of your pre-trip training so that you can make the most of your climbing. It’s a tactic I’ve always deployed for alpine climbing, and in the past two years I’ve applied it to harder rock climbs—to mastering the 5.13 grade. -by Whit Magro I’ve been climbing since I was…
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…
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…
Aerobic Deficiency is a frequent issue we encounter at Uphill Athlete among new clients seeking coaching and training. While the term might sound daunting, rest assured it’s not dangerous and can be reversed. It often affects athletes who have prioritized Zone 3 or higher-intensity workouts for years. These individuals typically boast impressive anaerobic fitness, feeling strong, fast, and fit—but their aerobic base, the bedrock of true endurance, is significantly underdeveloped, sometimes almost absent. For those who are less fit, Aerobic Deficiency is practically a certainty. The Significance of an Aerobic Base Base training, or sub-aerobic threshold work, isn’t the focus…
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…