Breaking Up Long Cardio For Mountaineers

Now, when it comes down to training for mountaineering, one of the cornerstones of effective preparation is fitting in long, steady state, lower intensity sessions.

Most mountaineers will do this either through running, whether it's road running or trail running or hiking or a combination of two.

Now for me, as we talked about on the podcast before, even if my mountaineers absolutely love running, I always encourage them to do some longer pack-loaded hikes.

And one thing I really, really, really advocate for, pretty much for every single mountaineer that I work with and that listens to this podcast, is in their preparation, try to make sure they get some long days hiking with a pack.

trying to eventually, at the peak of their training, replicate the longest day they're going to do on their climb with the heaviest pack weight they may expect.

So some people may start off doing, you know, three, two, three, four hour hikes or whatever with a relatively light pack and then slowly build up to a seven to eight hour hike with a full pack or a nine to 10 hour hike or even a 12 hour hike or whatever it may be.

Obviously, this isn't always perfect for people who are doing big summit days of, you know, 15, 20 hours, we may not end up doing that much in your training, but you get the general idea.

Now, obviously the buildup to that, there's a lot of details that goes into how we build that up, what we do around that, because obviously there's a lot of different training that helps support that, but that's kind of the general idea.

And while this makes sense on paper, and this looks really, really good, and if you can do this, you can just consistently build up your hiking and your pack weight week after week after week after week and hit that peak towards the end, Fantastic.

Awesome.

Go with it.

Really, really, really good.

But this often ends up being this long hour consuming hike ends up being the trickiest session just to really be consistent with for a lot of people.

Why? Well, you know, it's pretty simple.

Obviously, this is the biggest time commitments you're going to be doing.

Three-hour hiking is hard enough to fit in sometimes if we've got a busy life and a young family or whatever it may be.

Building up four hours, five hours, six hours, seven hours, eight hours, all of that, it can be tricky to fit this in consistently.

Not everyone's doing it every single week, but even so, if you're doing it every two weeks or three weeks, it can be tricky.

Now, weather considerations can be really tough.

You know, rain can just get in the way of a hike and build that out.

Snow, if you're in the middle of winter, some people are like, I just cannot get that length of hiking.

It's not safe for me or whatever.

Same thing for heat.

If you're in the middle of summer and you're like, hey, it is stinking hot by like 10 a.m. It's not safe for me to doing hiking with a heavy pack by then.

There's only so much hiking you can do.