Take a Himalayan expedition and eat whatever looks good
Colin Simon
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ParticipantParticipant
I never use hoses, they always have problems. Frequently even regular bottles have icing problems at the nozzles.
I prefer one hard bottle and one soft, each about 500-600ml. The hard bottle usually goes in the crampon pouch of the pack, accessible without removing the pack. I like having the one hard bottle for aid stations in longer races, it’s much easier to fill up on the fly, especially if you ever hand it to an aid station volunteer.
The 500-600ml soft bottle goes nicely inside of my skin suit. For a ~3hr race, I’ll usually consume most of it before the end of the first hour, so it’s really not a lot to have against your chest. Then it stays nice and warm, and also closer to your center of gravity. After emptying it, sometimes I’ll throw it into the pack, especially say during a downhill to uphill transition where taking the pack is more likely. But if an empty soft bottle stays in your chest pockets, that isn’t a big deal either.
ParticipantI would stay away from almost all stress Friday except from “walking the dog” or stress-relieving recovery activities. And just stay at Springs elevation.
The other question is how well you sleep Weds night. Hopefully after visiting 14k that day you get to bed early and sleep well. If you feel good Thursday, you could go for an easy jog around Crystal Reservoir or some other area in the 9k-11k range. Have a picnic up there too. Then you’ll still have Thurs and Fri nights to adapt.
The effect of this should be that you’ll feel like crap higher than previously, hopefully not til 13,000+.
ParticipantI think if you do both of those things, sleeping at 6,000+ and then showing up early and visiting 14k, that will have a dramatic positive effect on your performance.
ParticipantI’ve tried this:
1. By just skipping breakfast for about a year and transferring to a more fat-based diet
2. By also fasted running at lunchI had gold-standard lactate threshold tests after each. #1 didn’t improve fitness OR fat burning, #2 made a tremendous improvement in overall fitness and fat burning.
However, I believe #1 helped train me psychologically and physically to go without food for longer periods of time, very similarly to what Dane said. Just don’t expect #1 to make you “perform” better just because you are still sitting in an office eating different things.
ParticipantMaybe it’s just me, but I find the hrTSS to work very differently for running than for hiking or ski touring. Even with “fudge factors” applied as typically suggested on this site, if someone were to generate 500TSS over a week through hiking, it will have a dramatically lower overall impact on anyone than 500TSS of running.
I’m not a complete amateur runner, but a 200TSS run is a significant impact that I could not repeat daily, whereas I could generate 200hrTSS from hiking every day for months on end. I find this discrepancy difficult when I, like so many frequenters of this site use a variety of modalities between running, hiking, approaching, ski touring…etc. Some local pro cycling coaches talk about how “chasing TSS” or “chasing CTL” is a great way to simply become fatigued and not become a better cyclist. Perhaps they also deal far more with athletes who overtrain.
ParticipantColin Simon on March 25, 2019 at 3:49 pm · in reply to: San Francisco Bay Area Hills with 20-50% grade #19097Black Mountain, but from the lesser-known and much nicer Rhus Ridge trailhead. Skips most of the flat bits:
ParticipantColin Simon on February 20, 2019 at 10:09 am · in reply to: Transition – Zone 4/5 Impacts w/ Zone 1 #16864I completely share the desire to do strength training in a group environment – instructor-led classes are a great way to break up the monotony, motivate yourself to go…etc. Some gyms have instructors who are really great at helping you develop your form, and some are really not.
I’ve found that some gyms have great instructors, great facilities, and the only thing that needs to be changed is they should remove the “for time” component. If you did that, you would still get the strength training without the “I-feel-like-vomiting” intensity that Scott and Scott keep steering you away from.
You can ask the instructor to do it at your own pace, but this isn’t usually a “fun” path; even if they do say yes, you may feel weird doing something completely differently from the rest of the class. It can take some real discipline to consistently NOT do what everyone else is doing, and to slow yourself down. If you do find that A+ instructor who is great at teaching you form and also understands your path, they are a keeper.
As for your question:
If I wanted to actually do a ski tour or bike instead…Do you ideally want it focused in Zone 1, 2, or just all over? Should I limit the session by time
Spend as much time as you can as close to the top of Z2 as you can, while keeping it “repeatable” meaning you’d have to be able to do it a couple of days later. If some ski tour is so long that you couldn’t repeat it a couple of days later, then you are probably “using” fitness instead of accumulating it.
ParticipantThanks Scott. I may be spending time on classic skis! Any particular spot in Boulder you use for hill sprints or Z3/Z4 “steep” workouts? Some trails like Amphitheater up Green have a lot of stairs built in, I’m curious if is suboptimal for foot/leg stability training.
The guy who won the 2018 flatirons event is young(early 20s) and ascended Green Mountain by various different paths over 200 times in 2017, lots of times by going up the First and then social trails, mostly in the morning, so probably mostly fasted.
Another interesting fact, the current record for the First Flatiron, car-to-car, was set by a guy who grew up running to school in the Dolomites, and his last name is Messner. He says there’s no blood relationship to Reinhold, but I am skeptical!
Aholle, the Jacob’s ladder does seem like a good idea for athletes in scrambling-deprived areas.
ParticipantColin Simon on February 5, 2019 at 12:00 pm · in reply to: Diet at 8000m to keep fat adaptation #16454Carbohydrates are essential for recovery. All those acclimatization days force your body to do a lot of work to adapt, and you have the physical exertion part layered on as well. So ideally you’d be eating a ton the way Scott Semple suggested. At some point laying off the carbs with that much exertion just runs you into a hole.
ParticipantScott, do I have this correct?
Athlete 1 lives at sea level and trains optimally for their event. Lots of hills, just not high altitude.
Athlete 2 lives at 1500-2000m and frequently trains at 3000-4000m, but training is not quite optimal. Done with good principles, just not 100% accurate.
Event 1 is a race like the pike’s peak ascent or another race with a lot of time at 3000-4000m in North America or Europe… Athlete 2 is likely to win despite suboptimal training.
Event 2 is a climb of a 6000m peak or higher. Athlete 1 is likely to perform better, because neither athlete can really prepare perfectly for 6000m, or 7000m, or higher. Athlete 2 may feel better acclimatizing to 4000m, but above that, genetics and fitness play a larger role.
ParticipantColin Simon on February 1, 2019 at 2:29 pm · in reply to: Diet at 8000m to keep fat adaptation #16349Sounds like The Colonel…
ParticipantThere’s the psychological component, but also the nervous system component – that training is teaching your brain to fire all of the correct muscle fibers.
If you restart pull-ups after some time off, you may find that when you fail, it doesn’t feel “hard”, you just don’t have quite the same capacity to try hard. If you’ve been doing them quite a lot, and are feeling strong, you can probably reach a deeper strain.
So besides being stronger, you are also probably better at doing lock-offs.
ParticipantSometimes the hardest part is simply showing up with a cohesive, acclimatized, uninjured team where no one is sick.
I’ve met expedition partners in “easier to get to” expedition locations, where there are likely to be other teams, for example the Kahiltna(and Talkeetna). I’ve heard of some great partnerships being forged in the Khumbu as well.
If classic mountaineering is your thing, you’re likely to meet people on the popular mountaineering peaks… Aconcagua, Denali, Pik Lenin, any 8000M peak.
ParticipantIf your ME day falls on one of those AIARE days you could bring watermelon, beer, or something else hilariously heavy to share with the rest of the class at the top of the hill.