I’m in week 13 of the essentially endless Training for the New Alpinism log book regime; a few weeks into the maximum endurance cycle. I’m in utter flat land, so my long zone 1 session is 3-9 hours along the local prairie path, my maximum endurance hill climb is usually a stair climb in a local high-rise, and I fill the volume out with lots of low heart rate aerobic activities, including gym wall climbing.
In the time of pandemic, I’ve evolved this. The ME climb is a heavily weighted slog up the only hill for tens of miles, an overfilled landfill hump, vey much in the spirit of Andy Hampsten doing laps on that interstate on-ramp. The long prairie path walk remains viable. It is the low level aerobic activities that have completely stopped- I can’t go row or elliptical at the local gym, for example.
What I’ve done is to add much more strength than usual. Instead of the 1 max strength session the training plan calls for in week 13, I’m doing 1 max strength, 2 long slow killer cores, 1 hill sprint, 1 transition session a week, in addition to the ME hill climb. 30-60 minutes of strength work, M-F. I do get in some low level aerobic activities (I -hate- flat-land running, but suck it up and do it!), just not as much as in normal times. The strength sessions seem to be working for me- I feel the usual fatigue that I do in this part of the training cycle.
The question I have is that the TftNA Log book specifically says to limit your strength training to less than 3 hours a week. I’m blowing right past that. What’s the effect of this? Trading aerobic capacity for strength? Why did the Log book spend precious text space on that particular admonition?