Thank you Lindsay and Shashi!
After reading through the book and hours of forum posts and articles, I came to the conclusion that I probably needed to cut back on the hikes that were pushing me to exhaustion and focus on building my aerobic base. I don’t know if hiking was putting me in Z3+ or not, but it was definitely wiping me out from a fatigue perspective and would regularly take 48-72 hrs of recovery.
Would you mind giving me a sanity check on my program? This was the last week of training that I did, but I’m not sure whether I over or undertrained based on my target of 2.5 hrs (going with the original guesstimate from the book).
Day 1: Strength (0:40:00, Grade C)
Day 2: Run (0:44:10, Z2, Grade B)
Day 3: Strength (0:32:44, Grade A), Cycle (0:27:10, Z1, Grade B)
Day 4: Walk (0:31:08, Easy/Recovery)
Day 5: Run (0:22:07, Z1, Grade A), Walk (0:32:52, Easy/Recovery)
Day 6: Cycle (0:10:40, Easy/Recovery)
Day 7: Climbing (5 pitches, Grade B+), Approach/Hike (0:42:12, 33.5lbs, Z1, Grade A)
Weekly Target: 2:30:00
Total time: 6:45:03
Total aerobic: 3:30:19
Total non-recovery aerobic: 2:26:19
I wasn’t sure whether non-aerobic hours (strength, climbing) didn’t count AT ALL towards the volume, or whether they simply don’t scale as you expand the volume (since they increase via intensity, not time).
I also wasn’t sure whether to count things like “went for an easy bike ride / walk around the neighborhood”, even though in the book it says to make up the remaining aerobic time with Z1 and recovery.