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…
Author: Uphill Athlete
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…
VO2 max is often seen as the gold standard of endurance, but is it really the best predictor of performance? This article challenges the VO2 max myth and reveals why factors like economy and lactate threshold may be more important for athletes aiming to excel.
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…