00:00.67
Steve
Welcome to the Uphill Athlete Podcast our mission is to elevate and inspire all mountain athletes through education and celebration. My name is Steve House and I will be your host today and I’m joined once again by Jon Lawrie and Martin Zhor. Welcome back Jon and Martin so we just heard Jon tell us about his mostly his summit experience on K2.

00:27.68
Jon
Thank you.

00:28.68
Martin
Thank you Steve.

00:39.20
Steve
Martin you were there this summer on broad peak and what were your feelings. What was your experience listening to Jon’s story.

00:46.18
Martin
Yeah, thanks! Steve so it was great to listen to Jon’s story about climbing K2 without oxygen we actually didn’t meet I was there a bit earlier in the season and that’s another story. We can talk about it another time but I really appreciate listening to his story. How it kind of went and just also having seen the mountain actually just from the base camp of broad peak which is right right next to K2. So it was really powerful and just appreciated hearing what actually went through Jon’s mind and also physically what he was going through up there and maybe it is really hard for people to imagine what it takes and just those last two three hundred meters above the bottleneck to the summit. It was like the whole chapter. At least it feels like it for me and I can appreciate it because I went through some experiences on the mountains and high altitudes. So yeah, just wanted to mention that because it certainly was I guess you’re slowing down. You’re really way above the 8000 metres and physically it’s just so hard and all the factors that Jon mentioned that you cannot control so and then also listening to the way out of the base camp to Askolei. It’s really a long way.

02:18.80
Martin
Beautiful that you really just want to go home and just want to get to the comfort and to your family but it is one hundred kilometers of really hard track and it’s like the last thing you want to do and also then Jon what you went through also physically with the lungs and so yeah I just wanted to mention that and before we move to the training and the preparation.

02:45.56
Jon
I mean look in terms of that final little bit to the summit. You’ve passed the traverse you’ve sort of passed the the technical aspect. Let’s say the tricky aspect and now it’s a snow ramp to a saddle. And then another snow ramp right to the summit and that really for me was where a lot of I really got the the experience that I was looking for and that was this experience of everything really else in my world was was sort of somewhat out of my mind and it was really me in that moment you know with my psychological sort of let’s say my mental and my physical sort of challenges you know going on. Just working with sort of what I had to get this task done and there’s something I find very refreshing about climbing in general and that is that it’s extremely engaging and this was the absolute sort of epitome of that. I was so engaged in what I was doing. I was beginning to feel like this was going to happen and that I was going to get this done. But I needed to continue working with my body that I have and I had to get that body to the top with the fitness and the ability that I brought but then also my mental strength as well to keep pushing and just that mix and for that final five or six hours or whatever it was although very challenging, it took me right to what I would what I truly believe was the edge of what I was capable of. It was exactly the experience that I was looking for and I think reflecting back now I think that’s part of why I feel so satisfied with the entire K2 experience for me because it took me so close to that edge or right to the edge. And was such a representative experience or outcome of my ability. Just that very acute powerful experience pushing that final 5 or 6 hours to the very summit. I kind of couldn’t have asked for more in terms of how my body. And how I sort of coped through those final few hours and the experience itself that I had.

06:09.25
Steve
Yeah I think this is so interesting and it touches on so many aspects of being an uphill athlete and whatever mountain score you’re engaged in and I think that when people talk about mental training and as I listen to you Jon I think about like you said.

06:28.53
Steve
It took you right up to your perceived limits and I think in mountaineering and especially high altitude mountaineering. This is really the essence because what you’re doing is you’re trying to do something that you’re not sure that you’re capable of, but you’re sure enough that you’re going to try and in this case, there’s no backup. You’re in a situation where you can’t actually do it like you know you’re going to die. It’s quite simple. And so it’s this push and pull between confidence and knowing that you can do something and safely return and this is I think what a lot of people talk about when they talk about mental training. For climbing and as I’ve written and talked about before I think that this is 80% of mountaineering is knowing where these boundaries lie within ourselves and the reason it’s so scary and so hard is because the price of being wrong is so high and one of the things that I see time and time again with every uphill athlete. Myself and another coach were having this discussion just yesterday with a person who he was coaching who climbed a traditionally protected five eight route.

08:01.63
Steve
And how that person was feeling about that and the training is where you learn how much more you’re capable of than you may think you are and it gives you the confidence to do these things because you’re stretched a little bit on a daily basis and I think that a mental let’s call it training is very analogous to the physical training in the sense that you just have to kind of consistently stretch yourself a little bit and a little bit and a little bit. And you start to realize that what you’re capable of is much more than you imagined and the only way to to expand that is to keep kind of expanding it in these little bits. These expansions don’t happen in giant steps. You don’t like and it’s just like training you don’t become 20% fitter through 1 workout you become 20% fitter through 200 workouts and mentally the expansion of your own belief in yourself and what you’re capable of. It doesn’t happen in one day it happens in many little little incremental steps that when put together end up being these huge reliefs and I think that’s analogous to so many things in life and I don’t know and I don’t believe that you know your mental fortitude and mountaineering necessarily transfers to sort of like your abilities to kind of handle yourself in interpersonal relationships or maybe in your work life or something. There’s not a direct like if you’re good at one you’re not necessarily good at the other. But in all of these ways in which we show up in the world this process is universal and that’s where I think that being an uphill athlete is so interesting and so useful and so frankly irrelevant as to what level people are at whether it’s climbing K2 or climbing a mountain behind their house. If that’s where your stretch goal is. If that stretches you to like that one little next level then that’s a win. You don’t get to K2 by starting with K2 and that maybe brings us around to where I wanted to start today Jon because we first chatted back in 2016 when you’re contemplating going to climb Everest right?

10:40.80
Jon
It’s actually the whole 7 summits with Manaslu as well. Yeah, so it’s I think Everest was the last mountain but I went basically to do them all. Yeah and brought in over a year.

10:41.75
Steve
So you did the 7 summits. Yeah, you did the 7 summits but and you had done Manaslu as an 8000 or yeah.

10:56.60
Jon
During that year yeah.

11:01.13
Steve
Take us back to that like specifically how is that experience of training forever is different than this time around training for K2.

11:12.50
Jon
Yeah, so I mean I had I would say I was a completely different athlete or I was in a completely different place.

11:21.74
Steve
I can confirm that as your coach.

00:16.50
Jon
Yeah, so back in 2016 when I had started to train for attempting the 7 summits I was a completely different athlete then. I had done quite a lot of fitness other you know I was probably doing a lot more weights in a gym and other sort of recreational activity but nothing structured or with a particular goal in mind at that point really in my life and so I got in touch with you Steve and we did one on one coaching for probably about eight or nine months I think it was prior to commencing the 7 summits attempt which was Denali in the middle of 2017. And at that point when we started out really I probably had very different needs or requirements from a coach and that was you know I needed some structure put into a training schedule. I really needed to be accountable for those workouts and and then also just being able to basically understand how to train something as simple as understanding that I needed to limit myself to zone 2 heart rate while I was doing anything from 1 hour to several hours on a treadmill or with a pack on my back or running. I mean that was something I it seems very logical and sensible now to me. But at that time I didn’t know all those were all really what I needed back then? Fast forward then really to now.

02:29.27
Jon
I kept up a lot of the aerobic fitness over the last sort of the 5 years since Everest I got into training.

02:37.40
Steve
Well can I interject something that I just wanted to touch back on 2016 and 2017 and just say I think this process is really normal right? like you know it’s the difference. And I’ve been through this with a lot of athletes where it’s essentially you learned how to train like prior to working with me. You worked out, you exercised you were fit but you didn’t know how to train especially for an aerobic endeavor like mountaineering and that’s what you learned through that process and I know we had a lot of communications about that and you’re like hey why am I doing all this like it doesn’t make sense at first and that’s completely normal. It typically takes athletes coming from that background like a couple of months to actually get bought in. Honestly, like and I don’t try to force anything down anyone’s throat. So I say like look trust the process we’ve done this before this is how this works. What do you want to know what would help you to understand. Here’s the physiology here’s the background and all that stuff and then one of the things that. And think you’re about to tell us. But I think is really interesting is you stopped working with me as a coach after you climbed everest then you continued to do a bunch of other endurance sports and.

04:07.26
Jon
Yeah, and actually before I touch on that I just remembered that back prior to engaging with yourself back in 2016 I’d already started my own training and I had felt that I was going to be able to train on my own and I had basically the sequence of events there were I decided today is going to be the day I’m going to start training and I went out and started running.

04:43.63
Jon
Went out and ran for an hour and then the next day went and ran for another hour and then on the third day went and ran for a third hour and then I had such severe shin splints that I spent probably about the next three weeks unable to run it all. So that just probably can paint the picture of how naive I was at that point in my own journey and and yeah I mean.

05:12.28
Steve
Um, you’ve never seen an athlete do that have you Martin but.

05:15.61
Martin
Yes, sir.

05:21.11
Jon
Certainly had the ambition and was willing to start enduring some pain and discomfort and I think at that point I believed that training had to be uncomfortable and painful to be worthwhile and you know these were just all things that I learnt as as the months played out at that point with a athlete and then so yes, so then.

05:47.40
Martin
I would really like to I would like to so maybe set the context here because I only started to be involved in your preparation and training last month leading to K2 expedition this year so is this story since 2016 right? So maybe it’d be good to mention to listeners where you actually live so because that is one of the most impressive parts you live in Australia and so there is no mountains around at least not very close and how do you prepare there to climb the mountains I think that’s what many listeners can relate to quite a lot and it is possible and it’s not challenging. But then you know all this journey to K2 without Oxygen. I mean this is impressive. Your story is really impressive and so maybe talk about it a bit.

06:45.20
Jon
Well I think probably the part maybe were not aware of was when I was training for the 7 summits I was living in Muscat in Oman so I was living in the Middle East and I mean if Brisbane in Australia where I live now is flat where I was living in Muscat in the Middle East was dead flat and so that was a challenge.

07:10.54
Steve
And hot if I remember right.

07:17.59
Jon
And hot. Yeah, that’s right? So you know one of the big challenges is that yeah for seven eight months of the year you’re talking about the temperature getting really hot so if you want to go and do.

07:17.70
Martin
Go into denali from there.

07:36.77
Jon
Workouts you’ve got to be either in a gym or go very early. Um, and so yeah, you feel like a real outcast when there was a bit of a slope behind Muscat probably went up about I don’t know two hundred meters or something like that and but there’s no trail or anything nobody ever goes up there but I used to just drive to the bottom and then basically just hack my way to the top on loose rock and dirt with a pack because that was what I had to work with.

08:15.26
Jon
Then this time around I’m based now in Brisbane and Australia and I really didn’t want probably one of the things I was dreading most about training again with Steve was getting back on the stair master I had nightmares still thinking about some of the long 5 hour sessions on the stairmaster. Back in 2016, 2017 so I think when Steve gave me the call well reassured me that this time around we could try and keep a lot of the pack carrying sessions to outdoor. That was certainly a huge relief and I was able to find a section of trail. Probably only about 20 minutes drive from home that had about 100 and 2100 and forty meters of vertical that I could basically climb and then dump water out return to the bottom fill water up again on a public bubbler and then back up again and do laps.

09:33.36
Jon
And not one stair master session in a gym had to be done.

09:41.61
Steve
Yeah, so let’s talk about those intervening years between 2017 and 2022. It was also as a coach. It was a bit of a shock for me because we hadn’t really communicated in that interim and so you’re still frozen in my mind is that athlete I worked with whatever five years prior and then you come back and frankly it took me a little bit to realize like oh wait this is like a completely different person now.

10:14.20
Jon
Yeah, so I think through all the lockdowns I mean I maintained my fitness after Everest. I now really was valuing maintaining a level of aerobic fitness that I probably didn’t really value prior and then with all the sort of covid lockdowns and all of this I got right into road cycling and into truck triathlons because well the triathlons came a bit later but certainly the road cycling was a sport that I could get into when I couldn’t travel to climb mountains and I couldn’t go overseas or anything like that. So with that I built up. You know I was probably doing about 15 to 20 hours a week of cycling and that was probably 80% of it was on an indoor trainer. Friends of mine would all say it was a crazy way to spend time but I always sort of would say well it’s not nearly as hard as an indoor stairmaster. So I built up a reasonably strong engine I think through a number of years cycling and then transitioned into some triathlons and I think at that point I felt like I know it’s now a long term now I see myself as being more of an aerobic athlete as opposed to prior to the 7 summits where I was probably just looking to gain as much muscle mass as I could and had other objectives. So then kicking into the training for K2 it really felt at that point like I knew how to push myself for long aerobic sessions I knew how to train for an event and how to put together a bit of structure for a multi-month program. I think what I didn’t have and will probably always struggle with is an ability to avoid overreaching or over-training. I am probably that personality that when I get excited about an objective. It’s all I can really think about and that’s all I really want to put my time and effort into achieving and that has led me on an unfortunate or negative to a negative outcome time and time again and usually it’s with some sort of injury that really is just trying to ramp up too much too soon. And so really where I.

13:25.73
Steve
And can I stop there because I want to say like you were injured when we started working together tell me about that remember that how yeah paint the picture for those listening. How you presented when you know you first started talking to me about.

13:47.97
Jon
Yeah, so I actually broke my foot in at the end of November last year and it was a silly accident.

13:59.35
Steve
Yeah, but nevertheless you had a broken foot.

14:04.40
Jon
Yeah, and I had again it was around the same time that I’d said I’d want to go for K2 in the following seasons to sort of 7-8 months ahead so you know three weeks after breaking my foot I take the boot off the big moon boot off and sort of felt like that that’s usually how long people wait with broken bones and before they get back into activity again and so I started running and of course it hurt and I sort of tried to push myself through it and was really excited about this goal of K2 ahead and trying to push myself straight back into hour long 90 minute long runs and see the pain didn’t go away and then went back to see a doctor and they said look this is just far too soon. You’re not going to be able to run at least three weeks or even 4 or 5 and I ended up having to wait nearly ten weeks before I could even go for short runs.

15:15.10
Steve
Yeah, and we were talking during this period because you were anxious to get going and you know I was counseling you to keep playing the long game and would let this thing heal and then when we started back. Remember the runs we started back with that I prescribed when we first started how long were they?You were about to reach through there and throttle me with what I told you that I’ve only wanted to get running for 15 minutes

15:39.59
Jon
But 15 minutes and and I mean frustrated. I mean I was almost feeling so uncomfortable with it like I don’t know if that’s even the right word. But yeah that I almost went and did runs and didn’t upload them or something you know to training peaks which went and did like unreported runs just because I couldn’t get my head comfortable with the thought that all I was doing now was 15 minute runs. I mean I was doing cycling that was obviously the work around a bit for building that aerobic fitness but just fit.

16:24.35
Steve
Yeah duration we were getting some longer indoor cycling so super safe on the train or you can fall over something like that. But yeah there was some definite workarounds with that.

16:43.25
Steve
And and if you could say something to that Jon of almost a year ago. What would you tell him.

16:51.46
Jon
Ah, that yeah, don’t stress out about the little bumps that occur. I am always I think in some ways training I find training. It’s almost it’s therapeutic because it makes me feel like I’m doing everything I can to get that goal and when I’m denied the opportunity to train it does bring you a lot of I would say brings on a bit of anxiety. I probably don’t do a good job of of managing exercising when I’ve got colds and flus and whatever because I really don’t need to be doing that. Because at the end of the day you’ve got a seven month horizon or something to your goal or whatever it is and just being a little bit disciplined and stepping back and saying look I’ve just got to focus on getting back and in fact, it’s by stepping back and allowing yourself to rest properly that actually gets you back quicker and then training properly again quicker and probably gives you a better chance of being where you need to be come game day.

18:19.19
Steve
Hundred percent and you know it’s really hard to do for yourself. You never had an athlete do this right Martin.

18:26.94
Martin
We certainly recognize myself in there and I think many clients. Also you know there is this therapeutic aspect of training. But then there is a difference between training for training I call it. You just get out because you just love the feeling and maybe like also helping with the anxiety maybe in the mental stress throughout the day so you just want to go and move and train and it feels good, but it’s not always the smartest thing to do on a given day we need the recovery we need the training like the smart plan for the training right? So there are those two aspects. So I really recognize a lot what you’re saying Jon that you know sometimes it’s really hard to stop the setbacks feel hard the injuries and your anxiety am I doing enough will I be ready in time and all of that but now respectfully I guess that wow like it all made sense and yes I lost a bit but it doesn’t take that long to get back. And it is not perfect. We are not perfect and it’s just good to be out there and pushing yourself.

19:45.70
Steve
And I’ll add on to that I mean you know I’m thinking about the uphilli athlete coaching staff you know and we’ve got 4 athletes, 4 coaches who are really active in their athletic careers right now and you know Martin and Alyssa particularly competing and doing things on a world-class level and I think Martin you’re the only one of those four that don’t have a coach like the other three all have a coach and these are coaches that have coaches and the reason is it’s really hard to have that perspective. You are absolutely forgiven if you need someone to do that because yeah, there’s also this saying the reason a coach has a whistle is to tell people to stop not to start and it’s so true. It goes both ways sometimes people need motivation and accountability and sometimes people need to know what’s the smart thing to do and this was absolutely for me a really hard period of our relationship Jon because I know that you hated it. I know you thought I was being too conservative and I was telling you like look like it doesn’t matter if you do a 15 minute run right now or 30 minute run right now like on the day you summit K2 that is not what’s going to make the difference. But it’s going to make the difference like if your foot still broken or not and I know that’s hard to hear and it really is powerful to have someone kind of holding the reins and someone you trust and I think that goes to the heart of the coaching relationship. You really trusted me and I have to thank you for that and there’s only so much I can do. I can explain, I can talk, I can cajole, I can send you messages, I could try to sweet talk you I could try to threaten you or scare you with what might happen if you don’t. Kind of you know, stick to the kind of quote, unquote right path. But ultimately it’s your decision to trust me as your coach that’s the right thing to do and you’re able to do that. So that’s not easy. Yeah, we got through that it was a tricky period but we got through that.

22:08.73
Jon
Yeah, and perhaps to tie that back to the probably one of the primary reasons why I got in touch with you back in 2016 was I wanted to feel like comfortable that everything could be done to prepare me for this mountain as best as possible was now being done. I was being advised on all the fitness related steps to take to prepare myself as well as possible and as soon as I can still remember it. It’s seven years ago when I first got in touch with you and we had a call and when I hung up after that call I remember. Immediately feeling a sense of pressure come off my shoulders that I’ve now felt like okay now I don’t have to feel anxiety that I might be training the wrong way or that I’m overtraining or under training or whatever now I feel like somebody who absolutely understands this and is going to control that and it was a huge weight off my shoulders and by the same token fast forward now to earlier this year I had to recognize that I wanted to bring in someone that I trusted and I had to recognize that in trusting you I have to trust every decision. Everything you’re telling me. I certainly found myself thinking is this really going to be enough for this mountain in five months but I think there’s probably there was also a part where I was thinking for completely honest I was kind of thinking like Steve doesn’t know who I am maybe he doesn’t recognize that I’ve gained all this fitness since last time we spoke or something like that and so you know all those sort of thoughts go through your head when you are looking forward to a workout tomorrow and it’s posted in training peaks as a 15 minute doesn’t really feel like it’s not kind of what I’m certainly not telling all my friends that this is what training looks like for K2..

24:50.31
Steve
Doesn’t fire you up.

24:59.61
Steve
So once we got your kind of confirmation that your foot was healed through kind of I would say there was a two-pronged approach. One it was these easy runs and just continuously checking to make sure that there was no increase in pain and you know tolerating the movement and you know going back to the doctor and kind of getting some film and knowing that it was healing. And there could be a situation with a foot fracture that isn’t allowed to heal properly where a part of the bone can actually die because it’s not receiving enough blood flow and that’s obviously to be avoided at all costs that has like lifelong consequences especially for an endurance athlete so that was in the back of my mind as you know a worst case scenario that we wanted to just steer well clear of so now go into the let’s fast forward a little bit and workouts start to get longer. You did a lot of training on your on your bike, because you do live in Australia and in Brisbane and it’s part of your life and part of your social network and you and your wife ride together and things and then I want to kind of fast forward to you know as we get, this typical progression where we start off very generalized in our training. But workouts need to become more and more specific look more and more like the event and so as we got into the spring. We started to shift things around and try to get you on your feet more and then we brought in Martin as well for some help let’s talk about those footborne workouts first.

26:47.44
Steve
And you mentioned earlier you know about the weighted carries. How did that go for you and living in Brisbane. In Brisbane’s you know there’s topography there but it’s not big mountains right out the back door.

27:04.91
Jon
Yeah, that’s right? So those pack carry sessions which I was able to do on a local little peak which were probably 120 meters vertical. I think one of the real benefits I was getting out of those workouts was as you instructed me to do so I just wore trail running shoes rather than really supportive hiking boots and in doing so moving on the uneven surface sort of quite a steep incline I could really feel that was demanding a lot of stability through my knees. My hips and ankles and so I think probably one of the real benefits that I got out of those sessions was building up that stability perhaps you know, even the aerobic gains I was getting then might have even been secondary to the benefits that I was getting through building up all that stability. Otherwise the other workouts certainly that I feel like I got a lot of benefit from were these muscular endurance workouts I’d never done anything like these before and perhaps just to quickly summarize what they look like I would do these once a week and I would start off just with no weight at all and progressed up to about 20% of body weight in a vest on my chest but I would start by doing 20 step lunges and then straight after the 20 step lunges I would do sorry it was 20 jump lunges then I would have say a 1 minute rest and then I’d repeat that.

29:18.37
Jon
And then have another 1 minute rest and then I would do about 8 sets of that and then there was 8 sets of jump squats and then 8 sets of box step ups and then 8 sets of normal lunges with weight. And with each week I would do either the weight that I was holding would increase or the rest between each of the sets would reduce and right up to I think about week fourteen I’d be doing after my 20 jump lunges I’d have a ten second rest and that would be with a twenty kilogram or eighteen kilograms in a vest and then again another 20 and then 10 seconds rest and that really was something I really had to build up to but once I achieved even by about week eight, nine, ten I noticed that when I would go for my waited pack carry sessions outdoors that my resistance to fatigue had increased and dramatically so I could hike up for whatever it was 15 minutes and at you know quite a pace with thirty kilograms in a pack.

30:54.41
Jon
Just was not feeling that burning in my legs that I would always have expected to feel. I really feel like these workouts played a big role when I went on to K2.

31:11.30
Jon
Which is particularly as everyone would know is a particularly steep climb where it is very intense on those working muscles in your legs and that resistance to fatigue that I’d been able to build up.

31:19.93
Steve
Probably.

31:30.41
Jon
It was really helpful as far as not burning myself too much during those days not arriving into camp absolutely wasted and in need of all this you know who just did several days of rest or going down to base camp to rest properly. I could bounce back again the next day and do it again. Those workouts I think made a big difference.

32:04.88
Steve
Yeah Martin I’d like to hear your perspective on this because what you know Jon did 2 kinds of Muscular Endurance workouts is you know we did the gym-based and we did the outdoor and this is frequently a question that people have. Maybe they’re using a training plan and both are presented as options and people always have a lot of questions about this like which one should they switch back and forth like talk to me, talk to the audience, talk to the listener about these Muscular Endurance protocols and how you use them as a coach for an athlete like Jon.

32:48.40
Martin
Yeah, this is a good point. So I would start maybe with the specificity as you mentioned so I started to help out with Jon’s plan and maybe three months before the expedition so that’s really the period where you need to be specific towards the goal and this the goal was K2, a really steep mountain. So how to best prepare for it. What do we include in the plan what we don’t include in the plan to really make the good use of his time so I had to look and at the plan how much time Jon you have for training per week per day. And then really determine. Okay, usually I do it as a key workout. So usually there’s like two workouts per week that are like kind of making the difference in that training block right? And then the rest is really mostly zone 1 zone 2 training. So in this last block and before the expedition one of the key workouts is the muscle endurance because that really is very impactful as Jon you mentioned that you really felt the difference within maybe a couple of weeks and months you really felt it already during your outdoor uphill hikes. So the second then the other session. The other option is also the outdoor one. So I usually try to mix it with my clients or also for Jon that I know the mental aspect the impact it has on clients to do it indoor but sometimes there’s just no other option right.

34:19.57
Martin
Best would be if the client if you live in the mountains if you live in Chamonix or in Boulder Colorado or I don’t know close to mountain Rainier that you can actually train in the mountains and you have the specific terrain really right at the door but that’s usually not the case. Actually I think most cases. Our clients live in the cities or in a very low altitude. So how do we connect the dots. How how do we make it specific so it’s a lot about the kind of inventing and sometimes you just need to do the work. You need to stand in the gym and you need to really stress the importance of those workouts and that really the adaptations coming out of those will make a big difference and so I would say back to muscle endurance. It’s I think one of the, how to say signature workouts of Uphill Athlete. They are really making a big difference and then the rest of the workouts was really to keep the volume even increase it but then also we were coming closer to the the expedition and so there’s this really important factor. We needed to address and what’s really challenging was the altitude right? So how to acclimatize and ideally.

35:33.48
Steve
Before we talk about the acclimatization Martin sorry to interrupt. But before we talk about acclimatization I just want to stay on the muscular endurance workouts for a moment because you’re right. It’s a signature workout and as Jon pointed out it makes a massive difference your legs just don’t get hired and when you’ve experienced the benefits of this it’s like oh okay, yeah I get it this really works and it’s really valuable. One of the things I like to tell people when I talk about these workouts is you know why is the gym base muscular endurance work out good. It is good because it’s easy to control all the parameters right? We can adjust by two kilograms really you know we can adjust that load. We can adjust those work-rest intervals and we can get kind of let’s say geeky about what the load we’re prescribing and why do we choose a particular load because we’re looking for a particular response so as a coach when you’re looking for a particular response you can you can go into the workout and make small adjustments that as an athlete, you might not really notice like oh wait we went from like a sixty-second rest to a twenty second rest why is the coach doing that you might not even think about it. But as a coach you’re like okay like now we’ve done this many times I’ve seen this kind of response I’ve got this kind of feedback.

37:05.28
Steve
I’m going to make these kinds of adjustments to this workout or the work rest interval or the weight carried and it’s also always in relation to the goal right? Like how heavy is that pack going to be how high is Jon going to be. You know where is the lowest hanging fruit for this athlete in terms of making a significant game between now and their goal and these are kind of all the things that a coach is thinking about and I don’t have a recipe like yeah you have to actually sit with hundreds of athletes and go through it. And you know get a feel for it and a lot of it’s communication right? What Jon is telling me when he’s writing in his comments what he’s writing about his rest all these things and the good thing about the outdoor workout is he’s said Martin is like mentally it’s just more fun and it feels more like climbing. And you know it’s fun to go hard. It’s fun to do these things you get to see views. You get to see the sunrise or the sunset or whatever like it’s easier to do a big workload. It’s harder for all of us to at least I think motivate to do these workouts in a gym setting. So it’s okay to mix them back and forth if I’m just putting on my geeky scientist hat like I would prefer to do them all in the gym where I could like tweak all the little variables and try to maximize or optimize this athlete.

38:32.24
Steve
But this athlete is also not a robot, the athlete is a human being and has emotions and other needs and it’s important to feed those as well and not like get them burned out and stuff so there’s this balance and this push-pull of this and some athletes I just honestly well only have them do outdoor workouts muscular endurance workouts even because their limiting factor may not actually come down to optimizing the physical part. Their limiting factor may be coming down to optimizing the mental side of things so these are all the kinds of considerations that go through my mind. You know when prescribing and working with these different types of muscular endurance workouts and you need a community like on the coaching team. We talk to each other like you know Martin you kind of became my partner coach with working with Jon and gave me a conversation partner to talk to someone about like bounce ideas off and just have discussions around like how to proceed and how to optimize for Jon. I think if you’re working with a training plan or a training group. Also it’s really helpful to have some kind of community of people whether it’s on our forum or like with friends or on similar journeys. And to sort of balance ideas because there’s a worst case scenario and there’s the best case scenario but most of the scenarios are somewhere in the middle of the bell curve and that’s where we live most of the time and that’s where we want to stay so just wanted to kind of put that all out there.

40:01.13
Martin
Yeah, hey I agree there’s just so much to talk about here about how we work as coaches and on the individual coaching level. Especially so the individual it really important as you mentioned so.

40:18.60
Martin
What is the responsiveness of the athletes to training so that is different for everybody. So it usually takes quite a long time to actually figure that out and it comes to communication and just following the process of training and obviously it helps if we have this long-term relationship as as you have with Jon.

40:37.92
Martin
And so listening to the history of the athletes where if he or she comes from the strength power background or from endurance but then also mentioning the muscular endurance gym-based and the outdoor-based I like to think about it. Also like a spectrum from let’s say maximum strength to endurance right? So it really comes to let’s say one like squat. So the maximum strength is really the individual movement that you can do like a maximum what kind of weight can you carry doing that and then it comes to basically running where the load is so small that you can just do like repetitively for hours and hours on end. So it really is this spectrum from strength, endurance and so the muscular endurance is somewhere there on that spectrum and so I would say that the gym-based one is closer to the maximum strength because you’re doing the lower amount of repetitions right? And with more weight and as you say it’s controlled and it should be also because there is a chance of getting injured. Also if you do a bad movement and with heavyweight and maybe then the outdoor-based it’s usually longer. It is about going up the hill with the weight on your shoulders. A good thing about it is really specific to the mountaineering but I would say it’s a bit closer to endurance.

42:00.84
Martin
On that strength in your end spectrum. That’s how I like to think about it helps me also to determine when should I start the gym-based one maybe further from the event, from the objective, from the climb, and then really introduce the outdoor-based bit later how long it should be that those session, how long should they be, but it’s very individual comes also about what the objective actually is what it does, what it looks like and yeah, so it’s not a one size fits all approach. It always needs to be individual.

42:45.42
Steve
Sorry I didn’t mean to walk or step on you there. Okay Jon for you? I think that going back to so connecting to some of the things you said earlier for me as I was coaching you through this.

42:45.59
Martin
No, it’s good I’m finished.

43:03.36
Steve
Two things that I had to adjust to one when I first worked with you in two thousand and sixteen seventeen you were more of like a gym rat learning how to endurance train and then in the interim, you’d suddenly gone off and become like a really good endurance athlete and done all this really long, you know long duration cycling and triathons and stuff. And you were I would say, you were always good. You were never lacking motivation. You always did your workouts that was not the thing with making sure you didn’t kind of do too much and that can be hard for a coach because when I’m trying to tell what Martin said the individuality of your response from this to the workouts like how is the workout actually affecting you. You know your responses are always like I feel great I can do more. And that’s really hard for a coach because knowing that’s always the response I get and I would always have to ask like more questions or dig in like well what about this or what about that or are you feeling this because I’m looking for people working with the coach. You know the best thing you can do is just be really truthful with them for you and everyone’s different right? Like you’re an optimistic guy Jon so you know you paint things in that way and I learned that and I tweaked and knew that.

44:36.27
Steve
And the other piece of it is as a coach as an athlete gets fitter. There’s less and less you can do to make them better and there’s more and more you can do to make them worse. There’s more and more you can do to make them regress by stepping over a line. So the fine tuning becomes more and more fine and it’s like I just got to stay on this side of the line because if I go over the line. He’s hit K2 is off, right? So I’m you know there’s always like this little judgment. The other piece of that now that I want to go into is hypoxic training and with you Jon we wanted to do this. It is something that in the past with uphill athlete. We’ve been very skeptical of the benefits of normobaric hypoxic. You know, stimuli of all different kinds whether it’s sleeping in a normobaric hypoxia training or using one of these restrictive masks and there’s a bunch of different modalities. Because the jury was really out and one of the things that we’ve kind of settled on over the years is we’ve realized through just the good old school of hard knocks that coaching athletes while they’re sleeping in a tent for example, use that case. They just can’t recover because the quality of sleep is so poor and there is a kind of conventional wisdom out there that what is it Martin you need around 300 hours in a tent. That is the number that people are kind of throwing around these days to get a fact.

46:20.10
Martin
Um, yeah.

46:26.49
Steve
And so you know that’s a lot of hours. So we say okay, we’ll do this with people but we will have them training-wise. We’ll have them in a maintenance mode while they’re in this pre-aclimatization phase whether they’re sleeping in a tent or whatever. And with you, we couldn’t get a tent in Australia. We elected to use a mask and Martin you want to talk a little bit about how you help set that up and then Jon I’d like to hear about your experience.

47:05.45
Martin
It’s such a huge topic and so why I stepped in to help out with Jon’s plan again two to three months before so there was really about time to ask those questions. Can you acclimatize how long will you have on the mountain? You know how will you actually be in Pakistan so there is a lot of this information that I need to know before we actually should invest into deep pre acclimatization I call it so doing it at home. And so again, another question I ask is can you join maybe travel to some mountains like a trip before Pakistan where you can train, where you can maybe even work online or something just being away from home but actually acclimatize in the real altitude? So many questions to ask first before we actually start talking about using the hypoxic tent or the mask right? So there is a difference. There is the hypoxic tent. It’s a normobaric hypoxia. So the altitudes. The difference between that and the altitude is that the pressure changes when you go to high elevation and that really affects how you get the oxygen into your body. So the options for Jon were limited for traveling.

48:31.82
Martin
So we needed to try to use the hypoxic machine. Then as you mentioned Steve the tent wasn’t possible so we had the mask. What’s the difference? There is actually that the tent allows you to spend quite many hours per day. Whilst you sleep in the tent so you can maybe do 7-8 hours per day and so then the aim is to really accumulate enough time for the body to go through the first stage of acclimatization and for that you need at least 200 hours but ideally 300 hours before you leave for the expedition and if you count what that means is actually about twelve days I think you know 24 hours per day to 300 hours so it’s really as if you went to the mountains and acclimatized in a classic way trekking in or climbing some acclimatization peaks there and a lower altitude three, four, five thousand meters really going up gradually. But you cannot do that so you need to try to accomplish that using the tent wasn’t possible. So then the next next stage is to use the mask and so sleeping with the mask I’ve tried that with clients. It’s not great. Because you can imagine that is just not very comfortable and the sleep quality is really reduced and so that is always this cost benefit as you mentioned Steve yes we are getting the acclimatization effect but we’re really losing the recovery effect of the sleep.

50:06.34
Martin
So there’s always this discussion to be had you know, but we really need to make sure that the client is prepared the best possible and I used to be skeptical about it as well in the last years but actually in the last couple of years I’ve been studying altitude physiology. It’s school and just learning about it. The new research coming out and all of that. So now this last year I had this great opportunity to work with Uphilll Athlete as a coach to use it with many clients and the results are just confirming it works. It’s really the best we can do if there is not the option to go to the real mountains and the real altitude. So then going to using the mask. So it’s really the protocol where you’re exercising with the mask on and with the reduced oxygen content in the air you’re breathing. So you’re actually creating this hypoxic situation. Your body senses it and starts to adapt and so the body adapts on many levels. The physiology of acclimatization is very complex and it really is that you’re getting the EPO effect the erythropoietin. So in the process but trying to start to acclimatize by forming the red blood cells increasing the hemaocide and so increasing the oxygen carrying capacity. But also there are really important processes happening and the muscles actually because you are exercising in the hypoxia. So for me, that’s a very important factor where you are actually doing something really specific for your training in in the hypoxic situation. I would like to actually hear from you Jon like how did it actually work for you because we couldn’t really accumulate the 300 hours that’s the ideal situation to try at least twelve days in the total amount of time for acclimatization before K2 so we couldn’t do that where you were only able to use the mask. So how did you actually feel up there and also how long did you have to actually before the actual climb and how many rotations did you do before the summit push because the conditions also were really complicated for the acclimatization process on the mountain right?

52:30.38
Jon
Yeah so I guess the initial advice from that I’ve got from you both is to try to source the unit and the tent I could be in Australia and probably a lot less opportunities to rent the unit. So I couldn’t actually find anyone who would supply used or new tent in the country so that was then going to have to come from the US which I think was going to take I think by the time we decided that I was going to do this. I think there was about eight or nine weeks before I was off and I think you know I was going to probably end up burning two weeks just getting the tent and then I think the cost of getting a tent was you know suddenly made the whole exercise quite a lot more expensive so I rented the unit and just with the mask and then I did the two different types of sessions. So either the bike trainer or stationary trainer with the mask on for anywhere between I think twenty and forty minutes I think we sort of worked up to about 40 minutes by the end.

54:03.99
Jon
And on other days I was doing the intermittent breathing so just sort of on the couch at home I’d have the mask on for I think about 4 minutes and then off for about 2 minutes and then repeat that about 10 times I think or maybe even slightly more than that by the end.

54:20.88
Martin
For about an hour total.

54:23.12
Jon
Sort of having some bit of a progression that’s right yeah about an hour and whilst doing both of those I would have the oximeter on my finger. So I’m measuring the blood oxygen saturation in real time and I’m effectively adjusting the oxygen on the hypoxic unit to ensure that I had an oxygen saturation at the particular target which was usually at around 80% or maybe a little sometimes 78% I think I was sort of aiming for.

54:56.84
Martin
Yeah, start probably a bit conservatively so that we don’t though and encourage people to do that. But yeah, you want to start about like 90% usually to really let it drop down so that’s actually.

55:00.26
Jon
And that in itself 95% or something initially or something and then working down.

55:16.25
Martin
The reflection of the body senses the lack of oxygen and so you offset these adaptations. The first stage of adaptation and then you can allow yourself to try to let it drop down to even eighty-five percent but that’s really a bit later in that process.

55:37.72
Jon
Yeah, and I can say that it was a real learning curve for me to use the machine. So I know I would get on a bike trainer and I would warm up without the mask on and then I would put the mask on and I’d be trying to keep my heart rate where I wanted to sort of keep it and keep the saturation where I wanted it to be. What I found was quite tricky and it probably took me two weeks at least of workouts that were quite ugly just trying to work out how you know there was obviously there’s the volume of air that’s coming through that you can control as well and so sort of working out how I could breathe timed with the pulses of air coming out of the unit. I would say to anyone who’s listening that if you’re using one of those for the first time you have to expect a bit of a learning curve I mean in the first week or two I was getting frustrated that I couldn’t figure it out and then of course if you just take the mask off and stop. You’re not actually getting any closer to figuring out how to balance everything delicately you kind of just have to keep persevering through that workout and just keep doing those little fine adjustments to either your intensity. So I’d be adjusting the watts on the trainer or adjusting the sort of knob on the Hopoxico unit. Um, but you know once I would say that those sessions that I got on the trainer really I felt I was getting a real benefit. I’m sure there was a great benefit occurring on the level that you just described there with your red blood cell count but what I was actually finding was I was getting more and more comfortable breathing air in a sort of in a restricted capacity and so initially I would be almost panicking a bit when I couldn’t get air in when I wanted the air and I’d be tearing the mask off and gasping for air and then I found that as things evolved I got more comfortable with that.

58:04.69
Jon
That sensation of really having to suck air in and I have this sort of belief that pain had a secondary benefit. Perhaps when I was on the mountain and I was now in this oxygen-depleted deprived environment and I was really having to suck the air in quite actively. It I felt like that was another benefit.

58:29.67
Steve
I think it’s great to hear about your experience Jon and I think I want to kind of Zoom out for our listeners for a second and kind of make a general observation about training that you know this is sort of how things progress we don’t know exactly why this works. We don’t know how well it works and honestly like we’re not even sure if the benefits truly outweigh the risks because there are just so many factors that we do not understand and that’s how this all progresses and it’s typical I think endurance you know the 100 years of endurance training research and practice that’s been done is you know coaches and athletes work together and they’re trying to figure out better ways of doing things from preparing for events and you know you try things and they’re awkward and clumsy and difficult and frustrating and all of those things and we think they help. Then like it can be years later we find out well what we are doing man. That’s actually really bad and now like everybody who did that is going to have I don’t know like permanent problems with their hematocrit or something like who knows. One of the things that I always think about when I think about how to do that. A patient in some unpublished research that I’ve seen by Dr. Robert Schny who’s a researcher based out of Colorado where he’s doing these series of long-term studies on people going to roughly I think it’s a little above five thousand meters and he’s mapping the human genome of these people as they go through the acclimatization process and there’s like forgive me if I get these numbers wrong. But I think it’s like there’s 6000 switches on the genome and I think like he said you know of those 9000 are sort of downregulated and 2000 are upregulated like there’s far more going on in the human adaptation to altitude than our old models said like it used to just be this model around you know we’re respiring more so that we’re breeding off more carbon dioxide so that puts us into you know, it changes the balance of carbon monoxide. Carbon dioxide and oxygen in the bloodstream and causes blood acidosis and like it used to be a model and it was relatively simplistic and there are certain observable things about that we can say yes that happens. But there’s a ton more that is happening and it’s interesting to think about what you were just saying Jon like okay you’re comfortable with breathing and you just wanted to rip off the mask and you became more comfortable like what’s actually happening there like the reality is we don’t know but this feedback that you have that I became more comfortable and I think it helped me when I got to high altitude. Like we also have to give that weight is that a measurable thing that we can like you know write to nature and publish a scientific finding, of course not it’s totally anecdotal but this is kind of the way we progress and we probe and we figure things out and we think okay this is working and then Martin’s involved in really interesting research in his master’s program on you know, other things of about high altitude adaptations and trying to understand like the role in his research if I may say the human spleen and how that role that organ plays and in a compilation how that might be a factor and how that might be something that we could actually stimulate and measure and another thing that we could tweak in terms of preparing people for a high altitude and it’s really interesting to be I feel like we’re on the ground floor or not really on the ground floor but like on the first one of the first floors of like building this piece of human knowledge around how to acclimatize.

01:03:03.60
Steve
It wasn’t that long ago people thought that if you climbed everest without supplemental oxygen that you’d come back permanently with brain damage and never be able to talk again that was literally what they told Reinhold Messner and Peter Hapller before they went and climbed Everest without oxygen for the first time in seventy eight and obviously like those guys are both still alive. They’re super competent. They’re super charming. You know they’re highly functioning individuals. All that was false right? So yeah, it’s just fascinating. It’s just so cool to be part of this I get so excited about it.

01:03:35.42
Martin
Yeah, it is fascinating just that like an anecdote they hear that now I’m involved in the research in the study and so many Journal articles. Even the recent ones usually finished with okay so we observed whatever but the mechanics behind this are still obscure which is why we just don’t know why it’s happening. It’s just observed that acclimatization people experience this but we just don’t know why or you know it’s so old.

01:04:10.40
Steve
Yeah, and that’s completely normal. That’s the way this process works. We don’t know why and then later they figure it out and say oh this is why.

01:04:14.28
Martin
Normally it’s multi so many factors. Yeah maybe I would like to ask Jon, how did it actually go on K2 then we going back to the mountain now. What was the protocol? We already sat in the previous podcast that the hike in took about a week.

01:04:37.40
Jon
Yeah that’s right, it was about a week the actual expedition itself was about 10 days shorter than pretty much all the other expeditions or all the other main expeditions and I think when Steve and I had a call a little bit before I left and I sort of just started to sort of introduce the possibility of trying to attempt without oxygen. Steve sort of looked at the start date of the trip and when we expected to be at base camp versus when the summit windows typically come on K2 and he basically said look I think this is not enough time you won’t have yeah you will need to get a rotation up to within a thousand meters of the summit and in the three and a half weeks that I had at Basecamp. It was not going to be sufficient to do a summit push and then probably what would have needed to be two rotations. So, obviously, I’m sort of perhaps somewhat regretting being on an expedition that’s got a shorter total duration.

01:06:11.82
Jon
Feeling I guess like my hand was now forced with this start date that I would have to climb with Oxygen. So anyway did the hike in I mean the trek in is as sort of mentioned on the previous podcast. It’s a challenging trek in it’s nothing like an Everest base camp kind of a trail defined trail or anything like that. It’s quite uneven and not defined.

01:06:48.99
Jon
Probably more than half of it. You’re just on rocks that are moving underneath your feet and so you can’t really move very fast and although you don’t gain a lot of altitude with each day I think the actual trek itself is challenging enough that it’s probably already kicking that acclimatization process off at least that’s sort of how I kind of felt. Then we got to base camp and we couldn’t really move for the first 4 days or five days because it just snowed. It was just effectively a blizzard for four to five days. We had probably about ten inches of snow just sitting at base camp. And of course with that, everyone all the negativity starts to spread around basecamp that this is not going to. This is not going to go this year um but then when the snow did good then when the the sort of the storm passed. We started with you know, just a walk up to advanced base camp and then a day later went for a rotation so we went and spent one night at camp one and then one night at camp two and my hope was to get beyond that. If I was still to keep any hope at all of being able to attempt without oxygen. However, the weather came back in again. And after those two days on the mountain, we had to descend back to base camp. The man who runs imagine nepal the expedition I was on. He was supportive of my ambition to attempt without oxygen and so he offered me to do another rotation when the weather cleared and it just so happened that the weather cleared after only one day in base camp and normally you would have come down from 7000 metres having really put yourself under a lot of stress and you’d be wanting several days at base camp eating base camp food enjoying the five thousand metre altitude and all that oxygen so I was certainly nervous about only having a single day before going back up onto the mountain and effectively having to get significantly higher on that next rotation. There was one other guy in the group as well who wanted to attempt without oxygen but he just didn’t feel that the one day in basecamp was enough so I went with a sherpa and we went up and we did one night camp two straight to camp 2 and then we did a night at camp three or this japanese camp 3 and then we did a day trip up to the actual camp three so we’d now got up to about seventy-five hundred meters or so and then back down to base camp and I mean those two rotations I found I would say very challenging I would say I felt like I was obviously I didn’t we were pushing I think as far as an acclimatization schedule, a rotation schedule. You know we were probably being quite aggressive there with minimal time in base camp before going for rotation one and then almost no rest before going for a second rotation.

01:11:15.66
Jon
With the second rotation, I felt at least the first time up to camp 2 felt easier. So I felt like things were improving but still felt pretty nervous about the prospect of going any higher without oxygen. But anyway completed those two rotations and then back down to base camp knowing that there was potentially just enough time to recover before the sort of potential summit push might go.

01:11:46.70
Martin
Okay, there is just, that’s what we talked about what you can control and what you can’t out of those factors there. The scale of the mountains, the conditions, the weather’s just totally out of your control. So it comes to a really deep preparation physically as much as you can which you did and so then the acclimatization plan you can have a plan but then the plan also goes out the window because the weather just doesn’t play out so you need to do the best you can.

01:12:19.16
Jon
I think what I had told myself before I even started training was I wanted to reach a level of fitness so that I have the options to be able to potentially go for a short window weather or if the weather windows suddenly were at base camp and suddenly a weather window appears in two or three days from now. I have the fitness to be able to get up the mountain quickly and be able to participate in that or I want to be able to have the fitness so that I’m not completely wasted when I arrive into camp and despite being at altitude, I’m capable then of getting my resting enough that I’m able to get back to a point where I can go again. That was always sort of the logic I was just trying to go by. You know that I can tick as far as preparation and you know I guess with the training ticket. So comprehensively that I could potentially accommodate some of the things that I can’t control like a short weather window or that sort of thing and then go to the mountain knowing that I’ve done everything that I can do and then there’s going to be these other puzzle pieces that really need to fall into place and they’re a bit beyond my control.

01:14:13.49
Steve
This is really Jon what you summarized what uphill athlete and what training for the new alpinism was really built upon with that first book which was how I approached my expeditions which is this core thing that people need to understand is one of the hallmarks of fitness is that you recover really quickly. So this is where like you touched on you would be able to turn around and make use of a short weather window. When I was climbing and doing things in alpine style. The recovery was sometimes six or eight hours in a tent night on a bivvy ledge right? So it’s a similar thing and I would often sort of look to things like the race across America or long three-week stage races like the tour de France or something like that where you know as an athlete, you’re performing at a high level every single day. Could you show up in one day and ride faster or climb faster or harder or whatever. Sure. But that isn’t actually the objective. The actual objective is your K2 base camp for six weeks you don’t know which day is going to be the summit day. You don’t know how many rotations you’re going to get you don’t know what’s going to happen to you on those rotations. Are you going to be breaking trail? Are you going to be drafting or is it going to be icy? Is it going to be deep snow like there are so many variables. And so yeah, the fitness you’re gaining is really one of a kind of a high level of resilience and ability to bounce back given all these factors altitude of course is a major one but it’s still only one of them.

01:15:56.30
Martin
Yeah I would like to maybe just these are great points Steve as sometimes I think about it when I’m coaching athletes and bring a bit of adversity into the training as well just to prepare yourself physically and mentally for these moments when you just have to get out. Even if you’re so tired and so ready physically but also mentally for when it gets hard when there are just really bad days and you know things are not perfect. They will not be especially in the mountains.

01:16:27.85
Jon
Thanks.

01:16:29.59
Martin
And specifically on K2 without oxygen so I think all those setbacks that you had maybe the last year with the injuries. All those that anxiety you felt but you still push through and maybe it wasn’t perfect, but it prepared you also for the adversity of this climb.

01:16:48.47
Jon
Yeah, certainly.

01:16:48.98
Steve
Yeah that’s a great point. I want to thank you Jon for all your time and willingness to share your story and everything you learned along the way of these years of training and climbing Martin thanks for showing up today being my discussion partner my sort of co-coach for working with Jon. It’s a lot of fun to have those conversations and I always learn a lot in working with my fellow coaches and hearing other perspectives. So thanks to both of you for being here today.

01:17:24.65
Martin
Thanks Steve, thanks Jon.

01:17:25.80
Jon
No thank you. Thanks for the opportunity guys. Thank you.

01:17:28.88
Steve
Of course, it’s not just one, but a community. Together we are Uphill Athlete. Thanks for listening.