The magnitude of your commitment must be equal to the size of your goal. That principle sounds obvious, but it is the one we see violated most often by athletes who come to us with ambitious objectives. They are big on dream and small on commitment. Understanding what elite-level mountain performance actually requires—in terms of training volume, consistency, and years of development—can help you calibrate your own goals and your willingness to pursue them.
Let’s start by looking behind the curtain at what three very successful mountain athletes’ training actually looks like.
What Does Elite Mountain Training Volume Look Like?
Luke Nelson is a mountain runner and skimo racer. He and Jared Campbell knocked over three hours off the FKT for all 19 of the 13,000-foot peaks in Utah’s Uinta Mountains, covering 58 miles and 22,000 vertical feet in under 33 hours. Here is what his training year looked like:
Total annual training hours: 650
Average training time per week: 12:30, including a month-long break. Three weeks over 40 hours; 11 weeks over 23 hours.
Average elevation gain per week: 9,843 feet. Six weeks over 20,000 feet; 17 weeks over 15,000 feet.
Average weekly mileage: 55 miles. Seven weeks over 100 miles; 25 weeks over 75 miles.
David Goettler is one of the top alpinists in the world. He and his partner completed a single-day climb of the Girona Route on the south face of Shishapangma, climbing from the base of the face at 5,900 meters to just 5 meters below the summit in 13 hours. (They did not climb the final 5 meters because they deemed the avalanche risk unacceptable.)
Total annual training hours: 767
Average training time per week: 14:45, including 4 weeks under 6 hours and 10 weeks over 20 hours.
Average elevation gain per week: 11,474 feet. Ten weeks over 16,000 feet; 4 weeks over 20,000 feet.
Average weekly mileage: 42.6 miles. Eleven weeks over 60 miles.
Kilian Jornet needs little introduction. His career-long training consistency is what makes his achievements possible:
He completed an 80-kilometer foot race at age 12.
He logged over 600 hours of training the year he turned 13.
Every year since age 17, he has completed between 1,000 and 1,200 training hours annually.
He has 13 consecutive years of training in excess of 1,000 hours per year.
He overtrained once, caught it early, and needed only a two-week break.
That kind of long-term training volume builds a capacity base so large that it can support an enormous amount of utilization—which translates directly into goals realized and objectives achieved.
Can You Replicate This Kind of Training?
Not immediately, and possibly not ever. A fit weekend warrior who tried to replicate any of these athletes’ training years could not do it. The load would break them. You have to build up to that kind of volume over years of progressive, consistent training. As Kilian himself has said, the first year of training is simply the time spent getting to know your body.
The point of sharing these numbers is not to discourage you. It is to calibrate your expectations. If your goal requires the kind of performance these athletes produce, then the commitment required is measured in years of 600- to 1,200-hour training volumes, built up gradually from wherever you are today. If your goals are less extreme, the commitment is proportionally smaller—but the principle holds. The size of the dream must match the depth of the commitment.
How Do You Calibrate Your Goals to Your Commitment?
Everyone knows that having a dream does not guarantee it will come true. What many people forget is that not having a dream—and not working to translate that dream into an achievable goal—guarantees that it will not.
Goals stage outcomes. But we hear regularly from athletes seeking high-end objectives on untenable timelines. Consider a thought experiment: if someone who had never skied, was 55 years old, had limited time, and had bad knees came to an Olympic-level ski coach and said they wanted to compete in the next Olympics, it would seem reasonable to redirect them. Yet in mountaineering—and particularly with Mount Everest—people routinely set objectives of comparable ambition with comparable preparation. Olympic-size goals are the product of a lifetime of work, or at least a decade of deliberate development.
The honest question to ask yourself: is your commitment proportional to your goal? If you are training 5 hours a week and your objective requires the capacity that comes from 15 hours a week sustained over years, the gap between dream and commitment is real. That gap can be closed, but only through time and consistency—not through a single ambitious season.
What Should You Take Away from This?
When you look at athletes like Luke, David, and Kilian, do not lose yourself in awe over their accomplishments. Lose yourself in awe over their commitment. Their discipline. Their capacity to envision a goal, understand what realizing it actually requires, and then give themselves every opportunity to make it happen through years of consistent, progressive training.
Dream. Yes. But if your dreams are big, understand that your commitment—in terms of both time and energy—must be equally large. And if you are ready to hear an honest assessment of whether your goals are reasonable given your current commitment, that conversation is one we are always willing to have.