Training for Mountaineering: Tapering and Post-Mountain Blues

00:35.61
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 along with Alyssa Clark. Today we are discussing the final pieces of the mountaineering training journey. Tapering and the post-climb blues to help us with these topics. We have brought on uphill athlete coach Martin Zohr to share his knowledge and expedition experiences. Martin is an expert in high altitude physiology, holds a bachelor’s degree in sports science and is an incredible mountain athlete himself. His personal specialty is speed ascents and until very recently he was the fkt holder on Aconcagua. He has been on expeditions all over the world and has coached athletes to each of the 7 summits. Martin, we are really thrilled to have you joining us today.

01:28.90
Martin
Thanks Steve hello everybody I’m excited to be here.

01:32.38
Alyssa
We are stoked to have you Martin so thanks for being on. Before we dive into tapering, can you give us a bit about your background in mountain sports and what drew you to become a coach and a speedster in the mountains.

01:48.94
Martin
So I’m Martin. I come from the Czech Republic but I lived for a very long time in Chamonix, France in the alps and recently actually relocated to Innsbruck, the other side of the alps. I started as a runner so back in teenage years I was competing in middle distance. Like a mile, fifteen hundred meters, five kilometers so that was my base so after doing a couple of years of like national level competitions I then moved more to climbing. But I always kept the running as my main sport. Eventually then I moved to Chamonix and started doing more alpine climbing. Then I started to work on aiguille du midi which is the high lift taking you up to three thousand eight hundred meters and so I became more familiar with altitude, what it does to your body, how people react and eventually actually started to study more about it. So I studied sport science in Manchester University in Uk but in distance learning as I still lived in Chamonix during that time. So I was always really interested in sports and in the science of it. Then eventually I actually connected the dots and started to do some speed climbing. I really benefited from that acclimatization and so that led me to some big linkups in the alps I did my 3 summits project so that was a really big challenge for me and eventually went to aconcagua and broke that record so that is yeah other my my experience with with the mountains so far. And I’m currently preparing for another big one. 

03:38.11
Alyssa
Awesome I saw your 3 summits and was like I want to ask you so many more questions but we don’t have time for that right now. So what actually brought you to uphill athlete as a coach and we kind of came on at the same time, but I’d love to hear how you were drawn to the company and how that happened.

03:57.33
Martin
So it is a good question so actually after having studied that sports science degree and then doing all those projects, people started to ask me if I could coach them so that was more like a natural transfer to the professional side of things.

04:14.40
Martin
I did that for about 3 years and that was great. You know, starting small but then I think I really wanted to be a part of the team, for various reasons to learn more from the others to maybe have also more options to push my knowledge and experience. Uphill athlete has always been there like at least in the recent years when I became familiar with this world. So I always looked up to them and then eventually picked up the courage and contacted Steve last summer and it kicked out straight away. So I’m really really happy with that. Super grateful to be part of the team.

04:58.70
Alyssa
Me too. Yeah I think we were in similar spots of all right I just got to ask? So thanks for sharing on that.

05:01.90
Steve
I’m grateful to Martin, your great coach and a great addition and we’ve had Martin and I actually are together in Austria right now just sitting in different rooms for audio purposes. And we managed to get in a ski tour this morning and had some great conversations on the way up. So that’s how the magic happens. It’s great.

05:25.20
Alyssa
It really does well Steve we made it to tapering! We got here. Let’s start by breaking down what tapering is and its purpose for mountain athletes as I think it is often a point of confusion and concern as you’ve done all the training. But how do I wrap the bow up and get to the mountain? So Steve can you lead us off and then Martin please add in.

05:56.14
Steve
Yeah I’ll just start off with some sort of analogies where you know we often talk about when you’re training, you’re baking a cake and there’s all these different layers and so on and so forth and so tapering you can think of it as like final touches on the frosting of the cake and there’s not that much you can do to change the overall taste or consistency or size of the cake. At this point there’s probably quite a bit you can do to mess it up.

06:31.62
Steve
You can decorate it really badly. But I think that the reason I like this analogy is as long as you use a light touch and some good common sense that you’ll probably do pretty well in the taper period if you’ve baked a good cake to begin with.

06:51.73
Martin
The tapering is so basically we are reversing the training induced fatigue and we don’t want to lose all those training adaptations we acquired in all those months before. So this might seem to be contradictional but it is very important and finally maybe it might be one of the toughest things for the athletes to do. They don’t want to back off, they want to just keep going all the way to that race and objective and so it’s just really important to know that it’s a very important part of the training process and probably to talk about why we actually do it and how long it’s going to take.

07:39.43
Alyssa
Definitely and I think it’s also the part as you said that it’s really where you gain the strength back. It’s where you are able to use the fitness that you’ve built up from your training and if you don’t give yourself the time to rest you don’t get to use that fitness and all the hard work you’ve put in. I think one of the most complex and confusing parts of tapering is the timing of how long athletes should be tapering. Can you taper too much and can you start losing fitness? When do you start losing fitness? Steve lead us off and then Martin please follow along.

08:19.00
Steve
Okay, well first off I’m going to maybe start a little broader. I always do that right? Go back to the principles but I will preface this by saying I want to limit these answers to mountaineering since this podcast series is specifically about mountain training for mountaineering. And I think I want to sort of pile on to what Martin said and try to reduce it even further and just say that the purpose of a taper is to allow your body to fully recover and what does that mean that means that you’re going to maximize the super compensation bounce that we talk about all the time in training. That super compensation that is what fitness is, that’s what gives you the fitness and you’re recovering from in this case, probably many months of training stress and so there’s a lot going on that you need to recover from and there’s a lot that you can do to help yourself realize maximum fitness during this period.

09:35.64
Martin
I would say that it’s important maybe to go back to one of those cliches, which is training is not what we do. It’s what it does to our body. We don’t get strong by training itself. It’s really the rest and recovery period when the body has time to rebuild and react to all that training stress and training load. But then there is a fine line and we probably are all aware of that. How long can we actually rest and we don’t really want to do that much. So there is a certain timing of things and for everybody this is going to be individual. So for some athletes. This might be several days but for some it might be two weeks and so we need to be aware of one of the training principles. It’s the reversibility which means that if you don’t use it, you lose it. So all those training adaptations the body will not keep them if we don’t keep training and so the funny thing about tapering is like we really want to reduce their training loads to allow the body to really readapt, but it doesn’t actually mean the detraining which means that the complete cessation of exercise we keep training but at a reduced rate and for a certain period of time and so there comes the question for how long we should actually do it.

10:59.80
Alyssa
And I think it’s important to take the principle that we talk about so often that everyone is different and that you should be focusing on your training, your relationship with the coach and not looking at other athletes for recommendations of how you taper. I just want to acknowledge that looking at other people’s tapers could be very counterproductive if one were to look at say my taper you would probably think that I was not tapering much at all and the reason is because that works for me. Especially at this point of time where you might be itching to train more if you look at another person’s taper and go well, they’re not really tapering or their taper looks way harder than mine like the amount of effort. It’s most likely because they’re highly dialed in. They’re working with a coach. They’ve done this multiple times and so I think it’s just important to make sure that you are doing what’s best for you. Not what someone else is doing so just a little reminder on that part. I think it’s important for people to understand the reason behind the variation though. How long these tapers should be so why is it Steve that the amount of time it will take for that super compensation to produce your peak will vary depending on the length and intensity of your training and also the quality of your recovery during that training a factor in this as well?

12:32.36
Steve
Yeah I think that the answer to the first question lies in the second question. The length and the type and the nature of your taper is going to depend almost entirely on your training history. Individually and so we can pull out some rules of thumb which we’ll do here in a second. But I think it’s important to understand that if you’ve been training and recovering throughout your training really well your need for taper might be less. But if you’re training and working 60 hours a week, have a family, get only five six hours of sleep at night, have a lot of stress in your life for whatever reason you know your taper might need to be longer because you’re going to be exhausted on multiple levels. If you’re a professional athlete and all you do is eat, sleep and train and you get to sleep nine, ten hours a night and you don’t have any stress financially or whatever. That’s a whole different ball of wax. So generally speaking for most of the athletes that we work with. I try to push them for something around a two-week taper and there’s a couple of reasons for this. One of the biggest reasons is that what I said in the opening kind of analogy. There’s not a whole lot I can do with an athlete to make them a lot better at this point but there’s probably a lot I can do to mess them up so you know I want to do everything I can to just maintain, as Martin so eloquently described it, these training adaptations without regressing into detraining cessation of training and I want to keep them healthy and especially for mountaineering. This is a big issue because you’re often traveling in perhaps less you know internationally could be traveling in developing countries. There could be hygiene problems. You could be eating different foods. You could be not sleeping well because you’re changing time zones. There is a lot that can actually go wrong and what I don’t want is for my athlete or myself to become so ill or sick. That’s really something I’m super paranoid about at this stage.

15:10.13
Alyssa
Absolutely so let’s get into what the taper actually looks like for most people, what kind of exercise or training is best during this period.

15:28.23
Martin
So the general recommendations coming from scientists but also coaches has come down to we should actually maintain the intensity of the workouts. Whatever you have been doing in the last specificity period if it comes to a running race, trail race or a mountaineering objective so you keep that intensity. It doesn’t at all mean that you should do everything slower or you should really cut down everything to a minimum. It’s not the case that you should actually keep that intensity. What is actually recommended is to really try to cut down the volume and how to do that you can actually cut down the duration of those workouts. So instead of let’s say 1 hour daily run you bring it down to 45 minutes but we’ll come to the details later. But also you can reduce the frequency. So how many times a week per month you are actually exercising but probably it’s better to measure it by the weekly volume. So keep the intensity and reduce the volume. And so by how much the scientists have come down to numbers to about 90 to 60% but it can actually go down even to 50% and so what does that look like the recommendation is actually to quite a sudden change in the first days so maybe coming from 1 hour to like really 45 minutes then stay a bit and then level and keep reducing slowly all the way to your race day or to your objective or the departure for expedition. So there are different kinds of strategies for tapering. One of them is the step one which means that you all of a sudden reduce the volume to maybe like 50% and you stay at that 50%. That’s one of the strategies. There is a linear one which means that you’re cutting your workouts by maybe to 10 minutes per day all the way to. Your objective and then there is the one that is probably the most ideal one is the exponential. So again being more sudden changed at the beginning the first 2-3 days and then you ease off and use reusing very slowly and you come up to your objective.

17:59.80
Steve
I want to just add that for mountaineering it’s going to be mostly 1 to 2 long zone 1 and zone 2 kind of mixed workouts per week. And you know, like Martin said, you might be training, let’s say 16 hours a week before a trip to Mountain Rainier or Denali or something and then you’re going to drop that off really quickly. But you’re still going to have workouts and you’re still going to have, as Martin said the right intensity. So with the traditional sort of uphill athlete view on mountaineering training or not view, but with the traditional uphill athlete approach to mountaineering training that’s often going to be. A weighted zone 3 pack carry type interval workout but a short one like half, they’re that high intensity that heavy weight is still there but it’s just much less and a long aerobic workout. The other thing that can work is a long aerobic workout paired with a shortened version of the max strength workout. These ways of just adding that touch of intensity that touch of endurance but dropping off that total time volume really quickly and keeping it shorter and shorter making things shorter and shorter as you go closer to the expedition.

19:40.81
Alyssa
Definitely.

19:48.29
Alyssa
You go Martin.

19:52.90
Martin
So what actually are the reasons why we do the tapering so we have to look at the athletes or at us exercising at a holistic level which means there is a physiological side. There is a mental side. So on the physiological side. We want certain things to happen. So when you’re in the training process especially in the last stage you’re doing a lot of volume and so you’re always a bit tired. The certain amount of fatigue is very important and so that’s what we are trying to reduce and what is actually going on in the body. We are increasing our glycogen store so that’s the store of carbohydrates. That’s the energy for moving and in movements and exercising and at the top level. We are also repairing the tears in the muscles that are happening without us actually knowing. Sometimes you feel that muscle soreness and that’s what we are developing by really keeping. 

21:09.93
Alyssa
I think something that is very important to remember is that this time period can also start to make you feel like you’re going insane. So we have this great saying or name for it. It’s called the taper crazies and it’s basically where you start to feel as though you might have all these little niggles or injuries coming up. You’re not used to not moving your body as little as this and your glycogen stores are filling and so you can feel heavy or more fatigued and really it’s just your body trying to repair the damage that you caused from the training and so that often can lead you to feel as though you’re training very hard. You can also be very hungry because you are trying to fill those glycogen stores and your mind has a lot more time to think about what you have coming up. It’s not as preoccupied with the fatigue of the training regime that you are doing So if you are feeling like you’re injured. You’re Tired. You’re eating more. These are all natural and important parts of the taper process. And I promise you you’re not going insane. You haven’t developed an injury that you’ve never had before you’re okay.

22:39.53
Martin
I think those are great points. I think it’s good to just try what works for you because everybody will be reacting differently already due to the training but also to the recovery. Some people will just really be happy just to have that extra sleep just to have that extra rest day. But also then there comes the other part where you’re just hungry to keep training or you just really hungry for that race. But that’s also the great part, like you really want to come to that start line or to the bottom of the mountain like really hungry to go but it actually takes time to get to that point and so you really want to give the body the time to recharge all those glycogen stores and repair the the muscles. There’s a lot of stuff physiologically going on and so I just want to stress the importance of that rest and recovery and the tapering period. But again as we were saying it doesn’t mean that you’re inactive, that you just stop the training for a week or two, you’re still active. You’re just reducing the volume. But yeah as Alyssa mentioned really well it can be just you just get really really tired for a couple of days but don’t stress don’t panic. It’s a part of the process and we’ll be talking about some of those stories we’ve all experienced a bit later. So stick to the process, stick to the plan.

24:12.60
Martin
And also don’t don’t go crazy. Yeah, you might feel at least like with all that recharge in your body with a couple of days of resting you just feel like wow like I’m flying. I’m just so much faster than before. Well that is also being careful. They don’t do that. Just stick to the plan, stick to the intensity. You’ve been doing the duration of the workouts and keeping that energy for your objective. 

24:37.78
Steve
Those are all great points. Martin and I would pile on there and just remind people that you know sticking to the plan and trusting the process is what got you to this point and don’t stop trusting that process now. Don’t start second guessing yourself now which is what will happen because you’re going to as Alyssa pointed out. You’re going to have more time to think and your brain’s going to start. You know that little monkey mind is going to get to work and so yeah, trust the process. I also wanted to just pause for a moment and it’s important to note especially for those super keen students of training out there that we are on purpose sort of sticking to the middle of the bell curve here. We’re not talking about the top. You know 1 or 2 or three percent of athletes. We’re talking about the majority of athletes that we work with because we want to keep this applicable to as many people as possible. So with that caveat out of the way. So let’s talk about travel and how we factor that into the taper period. How should an athlete factor in flying trekking to base camp and what are the risks?

25:53.43
Alyssa
I think the most important thing to note with travel is that travel is a huge stress. I think we’ve all had those moments in an airport where everything feels like it’s falling apart and your plane is leaving and you might not be on it. Your bags are everywhere and so there can be tremendous stress. Especially if you’re flying multiple time changes very far distance multiple changes of planes and so you should not be stacking on training stress while you are traveling. So making sure that you are giving yourself extra space during the tapering period to work in travel as a stress another factor is that for most mountaineers you may have to trek to base camp and this trek shouldn’t be a huge stress on your body that should feel very easy and comfortable. If it is very challenging you’re already kind of starting in a hole as you are getting to Basecamp so really making sure that you feel fresh and rejuvenated and that should feel very easy with the trek. And as Steve already mentioned there are a lot of risks in this period in terms of different foods. Um the factor of illness because it’s very easy to get sick on a plane It’s very easy to get sick in a new environment. Your sleep schedule is probably quite a bit different from the time change and so just doing everything you can to make sure you’re not adding training stress on top of it is very important and that might mean extending your taper a little bit longer than you want to, but it’s going to pay off if you get to base camp feeling. Great. And not being taken down by any weird illness which I think happens to a lot of people.

27:51.38
Steve
Yeah, and I want to just cite this famous quote that I can’t place the origin of in my head right now. But it’s something along the lines of an expert is someone who has made all the mistakes and. I’m speaking here as an expert. I’ve made all of the mistakes and my advice to people is budget an extra day for your time. So you’re not stressed. At the airport look at the other flights ahead of you ahead of you if you miss that flight. Is it a week until the next flight to that country or is it the next day you know, try not to book the flight that leaves at 5 in the morning if you can help it. It’s much nicer to have a flight that leaves at four pm. You know pack good snacks, bring a water bottle like you know, take care of yourself like just yeah I like I said I’ve made all the mistakes I could do a whole podcast on just the mistakes I’ve made tapering I think and the other piece with and that I’ve seen other people make and the other thing I want to reiterate and emphasize what Alyssa said is the the trek should to basecamp should be easy and again this kind of goes back to a little bit of discipline and a little bit of self-care Where for example, if I’m in in Pakistan where I’ve done 12 expeditions. You know I start early and I want to be because I want to be out of the sun. The sun is super strong there and I want to be at the next camp by 11 am and walking in the cool part of the day I want to make sure that I have really good snacks I have really good food I’m not going to be sitting there glycogen depleted waiting for somebody to show up and start cooking rice like no I’m going to have like a ton of snacks with me. I’m going to be able to be totally self-sufficient and I’m going to get to that next camp and I’m going to find a shady spot and I’m going to roll out my inside foam pad and I’m going to try to just lay down and chill out. Ah, carry a water filter often or some sort of water purifier. So I can always find some water and stay hydrated. I’m thinking like an athlete even though I’m trekking to base camp.

30:07.61
Alyssa
Excellent.

30:09.18
Martin
I would like to maybe add here just to just note about all the stress. So when we are talking about stress. We often think just about the training one. So the stress we put our bodies through so that they can get stronger through that process. There are other stresses right? So it’s the work life emotional stress, the stress from the travels. The anticipation before the expedition and all those things so when they actually pile up during that last period of training we need to account for all of that because it’s still. Still a big stress so thinking of that we also want to really think about reducing that training because we don’t want to get overwhelmed. We don’t want to get sick or injured just before the expedition. Ah so that’s one point I wanted to make another thing when we are actually talking specifically. About mountaineering so often I can see in the training peaks in the platform you’re using for planning the workouts and training so we put the the date for the objective for the departure date but that is a bit misleading because you actually want to perform maybe two, three or four or five weeks later when you actually going for the summit. Ah, if you’re going forever as you know that that can take you like four weeks five weeks to actually get there first. You need to fly to kathmandu go all those acclimatization tracking track routes and then actually get to the base camp and doing all those rotations on the mountain and eventually somewhere along the line along those weeks you want to climb the Everest so you also want to think about that. So I think what is important is to make it like a long-term plan and so that you know okay like. This is okay I can still be tired here. This is the travel part. But my fitness I want to peak here a couple weeks down the line.

32:07.35
Alyssa
And I guess that leads to another question that we have because mountains don’t often lend themselves to the timeframe that we set or expect. So how do we prolong our tapering period and deal with stagnation of performance as we are sitting and waiting for a weather window.

32:33.80
Steve
This is both a psychological challenge and a physical challenge right? So I think that the first thing I would say is what Martin said earlier is trust the process don’t stress yourself, you can only do what you can do and I’ve literally been on expeditions where I never put my harness on the entire time because the weather was so bad and I’ve been on expeditions where we had almost all sunny days. What I mean to say by that is that if you take up this mountaineering lifestyle you need to accept that there will be expeditions. There will be trips where you won’t climb much and there will be trips where you climb a lot and that’s just part of the process. So keep that in mind psychologically in terms of physically I think it’s important to again sort of think like an athlete by now these sort of rules of thumb and guidelines and you know that you should be resting but not detraining. You know that you need to be getting out at least probably a couple of times a week. You need to be acclimatizing most of the time you know for high altitude. I’m talking about expeditionary climbing now. It’s not that much of a problem because you need to be acclimating. So you’re making various little excursions out to see whether it’s up. An easier route or climbing a neighboring peak or whatever to start to build some acclimatization and that you can do that you can pace that in a way that kind of adheres to these principles that we use in training in terms of.

34:33.99
Steve
Training stress recovery super compensation. So I think that’s an important thing to keep in mind. One of the things I’m hearing people say as they listen to this is like well what about in the mountains I can’t dictate that is like well I actually choose my mountains and my routes with this in mind. So if I go to when we went to nanga parbat you know I knew exactly where we were going to acclimatize and I knew we could do that in pretty much any weather and that was the assumption. It’s been much harder. I’ve been on expeditions like when Vince and I went to Kunyang Chesh in 2007 which was an unclimbed seven thousand eight hundred meter peak nobody or 2006 excuse me nobody had really climbed in that area and we had no idea where to acclimatize and what we thought from the map looked like good peaks to acclimatize on were either too difficult or too dangerous or whatever and we had we really struggled to acclimate and that messed up our whole thing our whole trip. So all of these things need to be thought through and prepared for you need to have a plan and ah ideally you need to have a weatherproof plan.

35:56.88
Martin
So great points I would like to maybe just add listening to Steve I think that specifically to mountaineering. Ah, we can control only as much right? There are some things we can and some many things we cannot. And it’s also part of why mountain learning is so beautiful. I think that’s why we go there as well to face it and face ourselves in those conditions and so what can we control and the training right? Like all the work. The long-term planning and all those months and years of consistency and that’s certainly what we can control to a large extent and get there knowing that okay things will probably go very differently than we planned or a little different that we planned at least. We will lose fitness along the way but it will not be perfect. It will not be 100 % but still try to follow that process, try to respect your body, listen to it and go with that tapering as we are today discussing and knowing that okay like even if we have to stop for a week or two. Even if you get sick even with that little training we still will be at a good solid fitness level and make the climb.

37:21.96
Steve
I think a lot of people talk about contingencies and for me that’s a very important thing to build into the plan is a contingency and I’m talking about a time contingency. So I think it’s great. And ideal if you can have like a 20% time contingency like if everything goes according to what I hope it’s going to take whatever 14 days but I want to have at least 3 or 4 more that are going to be able to account for the flat tire on the jeep. On the way in or whatever it is that happens. It’s unexpected and that is going to really reduce your stress in the long run and as Martin said there’s just a lot. We cannot control. But what we can control is showing up. And that’s what training is showing up for yourself and what going on expeditions is showing up for yourself and for your own experience and your own development.  I really kind of cringe sometimes when I hear people plan trips on really tight timelines because I think you know. That could work but you know you got to keep in mind like what are you doing this for and are you doing this just to tick the objective as quickly as possible are you doing this to experience yourself firsthand with your own mind and body and life and time what that mountain climbing that mountain is going to be like and I think if that’s your answer then it’s worth trying to add in at least 10 if not twenty to twenty five percent of a time contingency whenever possible.

39:07.32
Alyssa
I think it’s also a good reminder because I think that people who are often drawn to these types of expeditions or goals are type A people who want to control variables and truly the mountain does not care. And the mountain does not work on our time schedule and so I think that being able to let go of a lot of these factors that we think we can control when truly we cannot is a very good reminder of our humility and our relationship with the mountains and so I think that’s an aspect of tapering that you just have to kind of laugh and smile and say up the mountain this is just not meant to work and that’s okay and that’s as you, Steve always say it’s part of that journey. It’s not about standing on the summit. Well Martin I think we’re about to get into the fun part for you. How do we manage tapering with altitude? How do we adjust for high levels of increased altitude and the stress that comes? What advice do you have for athletes dealing? With this and what do you advise for your clients. It’s a lot of questions but I believe you can get this done.

40:29.58
Martin
Yes, indeed so there is a lot to talk about here but hopefully I’m not going to go very deep into it and with myself in there I am very passionate about this topic. Um I think maybe starting with acclimatization and the altitude it brings another stress to the body but it’s important we are going to high altitudes  if we want to climb those mountains right? But as we spoke about it all those stresses. Ah that you’re going through. You’re adding another one so when I’m planning the training for the clients that are aiming for some of those clients I’m always looking at the individual athlete and then the objectives. How much time do we have with this kind of training can we manage between now and then the actual expedition and so I need to also account for that time that needs to be done for acclimatizing depends obviously on the mountains. How high is the mountain? If it’s something in a 7000, maybe even five thousand meter range we need maybe a reduced amount of time by the way when it comes to the mountains higher than that you really need to plan for it. So having said all of that and what we just spoke about about the tapering and and the specific phase read before.

41:58.11
Martin
Sometimes people just cannot leave earlier just to spend like that extra week or 2 to acclimate properly before the actual climb and so there are actually tools nowadays that you can actually use at your home which are altitude tents and some things that actually help you to simulate the altitude and have you pre-acclimatize actually and all again brings another stress. Usually it means you really have to sleep in the tent in your room actually and that’s not the most convenient. I can assure you again as we spoke about the tapering reducing all that training load then you’re adding actually another stress like using that altitude exposure so I need to really balance all things out I usually. To just make it simple I use you look at it from a perspective of cost and benefit like how much does it cost and how much do we benefit. So sometimes it’s necessary. Sometimes we just skip that part entirely and just kind of go for it and see how that client will react on the mountain and most of the time it works out but there is so much to talk about here. And maybe just an important part of the acclimatization. It just takes time and those first to probably two weeks of the acclimatization process.

43:33.82
Martin
Is the most stressful on and on the body really and you just need to go through that process and ah, it’s not very comfortable. Your sleep is worse which means your recovery is worse and then so if you actually go to those regions like Nepal for example Kathmandu. And Steve already mentioned this like you have to really be careful about what you’re eating there and what you’re touching the hygiene levels and and all this you really want to avoid getting sick because that’s another stressor right? So all those things. Ah you need to plan for and so how do you prepare for that. How do you fit the training into this two three weeks or time range where your body is actually acclimatizing. That’s a real challenge first.

44:24.49
Steve
Yeah, and one potential variable that we haven’t mentioned yet that I want to touch on because people will ask us about it is that people may be using normobaric hypoxic exposure aka hypoxico tense. And I just wanted to sort of put a pin in that here and note that we will be doing a future series on that and that would also kind of change some of these calculations. But again as Martin has said ah multiple times now. It’s a big topic and we need to be kind of careful to keep to the nuts and bolts of what most athletes and most climbers are going to encounter.

45:09.27
Alyssa
Excellent.

45:10.85
Martin
So yeah I would like to just finish that thought that fitness will always be our biggest asset and so having those tools like how to do the not normal barrack hypoxia allows you to go out for those month objectives. Actually stay home longer and spend the time to do quality training to do the quality tapering the quality of sleep and then actually spend less time on the mountain risking getting sick and just losing that fitness right.

45:43.63
Alyssa
This is great Martin and I can already say that I am excited because we have a couple of really excellent altitude experts on our team and I know that series is going to be amazing. So Steve and Martin any last tips. Travel food, sleep etc that you’ve learned from experience that you would like to share before we switch to post mountain blues.

46:12.85
Steve
I think we’ve kind of run the gamut here from you know, staying healthy, getting up, sleeping, eating well, destressing your travel and your itinerary as much as possible and a lot of this is just. Practical common sense and our audience doesn’t need special instruction in that they’re already very smart and reflective people. So I think that that’s all good there and I’d really love to perhaps just kind of hear maybe an anecdote from Martin maybe he’s made a mistake or maybe he’s had to succeed. He could share from his personal vault of experience.

46:57.87
Martin
Yes I agree so there’s so much to talk about and I think I would say just train hard and then go and enjoy the experience. Whatever that is and for me, it might sound. Strange but it’s not really about reaching that summit. It’s really whatever happens out there I know that I will give it my all but sometimes it just doesn’t work out or or doesn’t really work out the way I wanted to so I had some good ones and I had some. Bad experiences as well and it’s always a big learning experience I guess and again, maybe what actually happens what actually isn’t interesting is what happens afterwards when you. Come after those clients and you are trying to reflect what actually happened and, what I can do better next time.

48:01.67
Steve
Yeah I’ll give you a tip and a story first. The story in 1999 I went to try to climb Gasherbrum 4 and one of the things that happened that I realized not too shortly. Afterwards that was a mistake. One of the guys on the team and we were all guys decided to say like hey you know we’re climbers. We have to carry our climbing gear to base camp. So it became this sort of macho shaming kind of thing. Of course everyone had to then be in a competition and basically about how much weight they were actually going to carry on the track and I ended up with like a climbing rope and a rack and this was a huge mistake because you know we we had to go to a base camp that was over five thousand meters over eighteen thousand feet and it’s like a 10 day trek and we could have hired someone you know which is what we did with most of our equipment to get to basecamp to carry that weight and it would have been much cheaper and and all it did was drive us all into fatigue. It made us crabby. It. It eroded the group dynamic. There was sort of bickering around this topic and you know it could have just been completely avoided in the beginning. 

49:30.51
Steve
If you feel like this is happening in a group dynamic and especially I would say in my experience I’ve seen this happen in a lot of mixed gender groups. You know, just speak up and just in a non confrontational way. Say redirect the conversation and say something like hey, what do you guys think is that there would be another way to accomplish this without facing ourselves you know or I don’t know just just try to flip this script.

50:05.54
Steve
Best tip ever when you get to Kathmandu or Islamabad or wherever and you’re one of these places buy the biggest umbrella you can. It’s the ultimate trekking tip because it’s waterproof breathable rain gear and it’s a sunshade. So I always track with a huge umbrella and if it’s beating down sun I’m using that to keep myself cool and to keep myself from getting sunburned keep myself from getting dehydrated and if it’s raining I can wear like a normal shirt and I have this huge you know rain shadow and it keeps my pack dry too. Essential gear for every expedition.

50:46.23
Alyssa
I love it. I think another quick point to make is that Steve and I have often talked about keeping a calm mind while you’re climbing. Well, start keeping a calm mind while you’re traveling. I can tell you when travel has gone poorly for me and I have reacted badly to it by getting even more stressed or thinking this is the sign that everything’s going to fall apart. I do not race well it carries directly into the event itself and when I have kind of a Duck mentality of just letting things slide off of me and laughing about things going wrong or things not going as expected and having a really positive attitude about the trials and tribulations that come up in the travel I nail the event that I’m going to so it’s never too early to use the mental calmness in your travel.

51:43.60
Steve
That’s great. You know in our current mountaineering training group. Our mascot is the little rubber ducky emoji and it’s for this exact kind of mindset of like as you said, let’s let stuff slide off of you because when you’re out training every day. It’s the same thing that happens right?

51:47.65
Alyssa
I love that.

52:00.63
Steve
Bad weather or it’s muddy or it’s snowed or I don’t know all the things. So it’s great. I love it.

52:05.00
Alyssa
We are definitely not going to do this full justice. But I think it’s very important because so often the training plan ends and the training group ends and we don’t have an after we don’t have that support or that practice. As we’ve done building up to the event for the post event so we often call this the post race blues in running I’m calling it the post mountain or the post climb in mountaineering. But how do you two deal with the comedown after a big expedition? How do you fit back into society and adjust to normal life because it is very very different and can be really hard. I think it’s hard for most people, Martin if you want to lead us off.

52:55.76
Martin
Yes, so maybe I can mention my 3 summits project. So the link up of Monte Rosa-Mont Blanc-Gran Paradiso I did so in 29 hours. I believe that it was in 2019 but well I’ve been training. All my life but really specifically for that project I did a really big 2 year block of training 2018 and 19 and so actually I first tried the project in 2018. I think in September I was trying to be as ready as possible. I did some but I wouldn’t call it the training. It was just muscling in some ways and I thought I was ready but that day everything went wrong. My lower back started to hurt straight away. Um, yeah, just just didn’t happen. I still made it up the and down those 2 mountains, grand paradiso and Mont Blanc so still a big day out. I was disappointed I thought I would make it but looking back at it now is different from the experience when obviously I was right there and I remember that it was probably the biggest burnout. I’ve experienced in my life. It took me probably a couple of months to recover from that. I was just lost and disappointed and didn’t really know what to do and what to focus on until I actually realized eventually that it’s okay and it’s even better. 

54:27.16
Martin
I can just go back to it and I will know better I will be stronger so I trained for one more year and eventually made it and so I think that was actually the most important lesson for me there but something related to the tapering which we were discussing here today. So in September 2019 I  finalized the project and physically I was actually fine after all. I think two weeks I ran a trail race I think about fifty kilometers nothing spectacular, just I was really not broken as I thought I would be because it was a really big day out I think was about hundred kilometers and ten thousand meters elevation and for me that’s big I mean it’s you know going up and down four thousand Meter peaks but what what happened actually a couple months later I went to aconcagua where I managed to break the speed record. But what I want to bring up here. It felt easy. Not the actual day. Not the last thousand meters on aconcagua that felt super hard but just that I’ve really felt like flowing and that made me think until now and to keep thinking about it. Maybe all that training all the way to September was really like big volumes. But then I actually reduced all that volume to maybe even 50% for like October, November until December when I actually left for Argentina and climbed the Aconcagua speed record. My body felt great. I was flowing. I thought I would just feel so powerful and so maybe that’s something to think of. Maybe we just don’t allow ourselves enough of that recovery or that reused volume period and we don’t know what could happen if we actually did that.

56:27.99
Steve
Yeah I think that’s a great story Martin I love that? Yeah I think that it’s important to kind of bring this subject up as you have and Alyssa, because this is the norm. That people come back from a project and something is missing essentially from their lives like you know whether it was like one of these big projects as Martin was talking about or maybe it was going to climb Mount Rainier or whatever your goal is and then something will happen there on that mountain. And you’ll either have a great day or you’ll have a horrible day or most of the time it will be somewhere in between those 2 extremes. But then you’re done like and especially if you’ve climbed it. You’re really done like you’re not going back again. Most people at least not immediately and so it sort of leaves this little hole in your life like everything you know, especially when you’re really stretching your capabilities and building new capacities in order to achieve a goal that you’ve set out for yourself. You know and then that goal was gone because you did it. And let’s not be surprised when you really miss that presence of that great magnetic thing that you had in your mind all the time and I mean I know people who will like to get a photo of the mountain that they’re going to go climb. They’ll tape it next to their bedside so they see it right? The last thing they see every night before they go to bed and the first thing every morning and now all of a sudden like you know what do you do? Do you take that down off the wall? Maybe you put another one up or maybe you don’t do anything most people don’t have an answer for that they have not prepared for. So it’s important to prepare ourselves for that just psychologically and understand that that’s the norm and also the people around us, let your family and your friends know that this is part of that process and for me I would often be very depressed after big trips and. Often it didn’t matter whether I climbed the thing or not it was just that it was over and yeah, it was great to just eat as many hamburgers as I want and drink an extra beer or whatever like kind of just give myself permission to. I mean I was super strict with myself like I didn’t drink alcohol, I didn’t drink coffee, I didn’t you know and then afterward I could be permissive with myself in that way and like eat what I wanted, drink what I wanted and stay up late if I wanted all of those things. So that’s sort of nice but that doesn’t replace the goal and we need that I’m always you know there was this great scene in, I’m forgetting the name of the movie. It was one of the movies about Iraq.

59:35.10
Steve
And the soldier came back from the war and was asked by his wife who had like all this chaos going on at home with kids and so on and say hey we don’t have anything for breakfast. Go to the store and buy some cereal and he walks into this grocery store and he’s in the cereal aisle right? Like just a couple days ago. He’d been in combat and I felt that too as a climber like been up on this mountain, being in these extreme environments fighting for my life. All these things and then I’m back in this environment. I’m like in the cereal aisle and all of a sudden there’s like 700 choices of breakfast cereal. And it’s completely disorienting and I think that it’s good to be gentle with ourselves and realize that this is part of the process. This is actually what we sign up for and that what we’re doing is engaging in something that is actually physically and mentally transformative for us as individuals and for our families and friends as well. Even if they don’t go along with us and this is what we signed up for you are having to get to know a new you each time you come back from this. And like Martin didn’t know he was that powerful before he ran up aconcagua in 4 hours or whatever it was but afterwards he had to be like he had to come to terms with that. That’s a new part of him that he didn’t know that he possessed, that’s a new human. That’s a new person.

01:01:06.84
Steve
It’s a new layer and isn’t that fascinating right? And that’s what this is all really about for me and I think it transcends mountain athletes across all disciplines. This isn’t limited to climbers and it’s not limited to runners. it’s part of the process of spending your life. You know training and I use that in the least loosest sense of the word like preparing yourself going off and you know doing things and having experiences and finding out who you really are. That’s what this is all about. So don’t be surprised if it’s a little bit of a shock when you come back home and you yourself are different and you don’t know who that is yet and it feels funny, feels strange and it takes some time.

01:01:55.30
Alyssa
Yeah I always feel a little bit like an alien when I’m coming back. I actually think that one of the most fun days is the day afterwards. I love the day after you’ve accomplished a huge goal because you can just be. It’s probably one of the few times in my life where I feel content because I don’t feel content most of my life. It’s both a blessing and a curse and there’s just one day when I am most content. I think the other part of it though and I have struggled with it a lot is that while becoming that new person. It also doesn’t mean that the only thing I am is that event or that moment and it’s actually in doing that event or that moment that makes me realize I’m so much more than just winning a race or summiting a mountain because you can. Only hold on to that for so long without it consuming your identity and consuming who you are because you’re holding on to something that happened not what’s happening and that’s part of the whole journey of this experience and it’s something that I’ve had to realize over the years is that. I would do a race and I’d be like how long can I hold on to the fact that this race went well or it went badly or I did this mountain and when I found that I felt like I was the only thing I was, was that accomplishment or non accomplishment I realized that I had to look a lot more outside of. Those moments, those races to figure out who I was and by being proud of that moment but also saying but here’s all these other things that I’m good at here’s okay I can invest even more into my clients after this I can invest more into my relationships. Because I don’t have that stress that really helped and has helped me grow beyond just being the results that I most recently put up and I haven’t perfected it. My husband still always prepares himself because I am grumpy when I get back because I just don’t really know how to exist.

01:04:06.85
Alyssa
It’s also helped me to realize that I am not just 1 success or 1 mountain that I’ve climbed. All of those pieces are parts of who I am but I’m also a lot of other things too and I also enjoy a lot of other things so that’s kind of. But I’ve learned a little bit.

01:04:26.79
Martin
Sorry, thanks for sharing. I just wanted to add here that I think it helps us to become better. Ah, even though it’s easy to say and definitely harder to process all of these. But I think it’s a bit of a love and hate relationship with this whatever that is and that obsession. But I also think that without that obsession. You wouldn’t maybe be able to achieve all those things but it comes at a price and so I think. This is important that it’s not all we are who we are. It’s a part of us. But I’m still trying to have a relationship with that because again it comes at a price and it’s a very powerful feeling. It’s beautiful. But at the same time. It’s hard to be around people or for people. It’s hard to be around me. I think that and that yeah I don’t know you’re.

01:05:27.24
Alyssa
Totally.

01:05:29.00
Steve
There’s 2 threads I’d like to pick up on here and this is a rich topic I can tell we are all excited about sharing but the 2 threads one is that I think it’s really important to be careful. What narrative you tell yourself in this time period after a trip. Especially when the trip doesn’t go well, it’s really tempting yet unproductive and potentially destructive and hurtful to yourself and your own personal life. Well-being and personal mental health too. Start down the rabbit hole of blame and excuses and all of that like we need to be better and I need to be better at accepting that sometimes a group or a partnership doesn’t magically gel and sometimes the weather isn’t good and sometimes just accept that for what it was accept that as one of the experiences accept that as one little piece of your story and learn what you can from it and. You know, look forward to the same thing if it’s a success. You know you don’t don’t make yourself that into that success. The bigger, the success the harder that is to do especially in today’s world of awards and praise and all of that you got to be kind of careful about about that and then the other thread I wanted to pick up on is what I heard and maybe I’m projecting likely I am I think we need to be really careful of the inner critic. The inner critic is something that lives in all of us lives in everyone and that’s that little voice that’s going to be telling you what you did it wrong and why you weren’t good enough or why you weren’t a little faster or why you didn’t pass this person that person on that kick turn when you should have. Um, it can say all kinds of things and I think it’s really important to put boundaries up with the inner critic and you know acknowledge that that is there and that’s a part of you. It’s a part of everyone as I said but say okay. You’re going to be over there and you’re going to be kind of taking your pot shots at you at me but like I’m not that doesn’t mean anything I’m going to connect to these other sources of information and to connect to these other sources of my experience I’m going to connect to. My other partners in that experience I’m going to connect by looking at those photos and feeling that reliving the awe I felt on that summit. Those are the things that you need to focus on and don’t pay too much attention and a lot of us do these sports. I know for sure for mountaineering and I think this is true in mountain running and ultra running. It’s a lot of people with very strong inner critics in their heads and we have to be respectful and set some good boundaries with that little voice.

01:08:41.91
Alyssa
That’s a great point to wrap this up and I really don’t want to because I would love to keep going on this but we’re running out of time if you could give one piece of advice or something that you have done after a big mountain or a big achievement. What has it been and I’m happy to go first I’ll just say so I always try to arrange something fun whether it’s a friend gathering or oftentimes if you know I’ve won prize money or something like that I’ll take my husband out to a really nice dinner. Just as a celebration of whatever happened and also it gives me something to look forward to on the other side where I’m not just consumed by the actual event. So like a nice event is kind of something that I’ll always try to plan.

01:09:36.75
Steve
Yeah I got one that’s similar but a bit of a variation you know I would always try to write out before at the beginning of the expedition traditionally for me, it was on the plane. Spend as long as I need to to really write out what my expectations and hopes were for that journey and then I do the same on the way back and really just stream of consciousness just go full beatnik style. Let it all out and not because of anything magical that happens in that moment but that is such an incredible record for years later to look back on and you know see who you were like it’s such a wild experience I have journals like that. Are twenty years old and I can open those up if I want to go back to that time I read a few words and I’m fully back into that person I was twenty years ago and I don’t know anything else that has that ability to transport me through time the way my journals do so that’s that’s my recommendation.

01:10:53.50
Martin
I will say that right now I’m preparing for an expedition on a pretty big project. I’m actually having a bit of anxiety about what comes afterwards. I’m still dealing with that. I have to say but I know it will be okay. I just don’t have I don’t know the answers yet. But it’s a good point Steve I will actually try that out. Maybe I think this is very powerful to have those notes from before and what happens after but I think it will come to really just being with what I’m experiencing and um, relax and go to see the family go be with the kids of my brother which I just love because they are just in the moment they just don’t care about some mountains or whatever that means and just be there and maybe those those answers will come later.

01:11:50.35
Alyssa
I like that I’m glad that you know we come on as having experience and you have a lot of experience and I think it’s lovely that you can say I don’t know because I think that’s a very valid and honest part of this journey for us. For all of us. So follow up. Is there anything else you two would like to touch on before we wrap?

01:12:19.14
Steve
Now that was a great discussion and I really enjoyed it. Thank you both.

01:12:24.50
Martin
Thank you! It was fun.

01:12:27.26
Alyssa
I think so too. Well thank you for listening to the Uphill Athlete podcast if you can rate review and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform that really helps us and we really appreciate you taking the time to listen and join in on this conversation.

01:12:49.71
Steve
It’s not just one but a community together. We are uphill athlete, thanks for listening.