Matt Hart

“Training for the Uphill Athlete: A Manual for Mountain Runners and Ski Mountaineers” by Steve House, Scott Johnston, and Kilian Jornet

Published in 2019 by Patagonia
Pages: 368
ISBN-10 : 1938340841
Date Finished: Jan 2, 2022
How strongly I recommend it: 7/10
Find it at Amazon or Bookshop.org

A visually compelling training book with great insight into the mind of the greatest ultra-athlete of our generation.

My Notes:

I’d climbed thousands of mountains and I’d never trained. I’d earned sponsorships and attention and money as a climber. And I’d never trained.

Now I had to turn around on the biggest, highest, hardest mountain I’d ever attempted—because I had never trained.

The fitness world is a minefield of snake oil salesmen, fads, and claims that are too good to be true that are just that.

Training for the Uphill Athlete is the anti-fad. It contains proven training knowledge that you can apply to yourself, and get better, every day for decades to come. The only promise is that of smart, hard, consistent work.

Early man’s physiology developed a caloric fuel tank in the form of fat stores (both intramuscular and subcutaneous) for the excess calories consumed during times of plenty. Fat could sustain our ancestors on those long days of hunting and gathering as well as give a greater chance for survival in times of food shortages.

We evolved to store fat in vast quantities to last many hungry days before incurring permanent damage to our bodies.

Another interesting aspect of this topic is our ability to recover muscle glycogen stores quickly during periods of rest (e.g., hours instead of days). This is not the case for most other animal species; thus, we could run our prey into the ground since we needed only a short period of time to recover.

According to one popular theory of evolutionary biology, early hominids exploited their endurance and lack of hair (which allowed them to avoid the overheating fate of their prey) to run their next meal to the point of exhaustion. This helped them rise to the top of the food chain despite their relative physical weakness.

We are the product of an evolutionary heritage that has predisposed us to endurance. (Liedenberg, 2008; Billat, et al., 2003).

Endurance is ultimately limited by our bodies’ predictable fatigue response to these activities.

Simplifying: that dreaded reduction in speed that we all loathe is caused principally by 1) your body’s inability to meet the energy demands of the exercise. This is caused by 2) a depletion or an accumulation of certain metabolites, or 3) a reduced motor nerve signal.

What we are doing is creating a model, an artificial delineation and segregation of these systems that are, in reality, intimately interconnected and interdependent.

The Central Governor Theory, developed by Tim Noakes, MD, PhD, postulates that the brain is the ultimate arbiter of fatigue and regulator of endurance. Despite not being able to physically locate the “governor” inside the brain, this model currently does the best job of explaining all of the limitations of endurance performance.

In brief it states that, no matter the source or type of fatigue, the response of the brain is always the same: a reduction of muscle activation (reduced power output), causing you to slow down. The theory goes on to say (and some evidence suggests) that training results in raising of the governor’s limit so more work can be done before the state of alarm is reached and the governor kicks in.

The heart, lungs, and blood vessels make up the oxygen-delivery system responsible for supplying oxygen (O2) to all the cells of the body, including our primary focus: the working skeletal muscles.

Human lungs have the surface area of one side of a tennis court.

Heart. From an O2-delivery standpoint, many scientific investigations have shown that the heart’s pumping capacity is the biggest limiter to O2 delivery in healthy people. However, while the lungs do not adapt after puberty, the heart can be trained to increase its output for each beat, which means an increased output of O2 and improved O2 delivery to the muscles. This adaptability is limited by your genetics and history of endurance training.

Young, as well as older, untrained individuals can see rapid and significant changes in the heart’s stroke volume because the heart muscle is very trainable; but, only up to a genetically predetermined limit.

Long-duration training improves the aerobic qualities primarily of the slow-twitch fibers (ST). Shorter, high-intensity training improves the anaerobic (or glycolytic) qualities primarily of the fast-twitch fibers (FT).

Conventional wisdom and research give credence to the notion that endurance performance is supported on a tripod of three main attributes: 1) VO2 Max: VO2 max is defined as the maximum volume of oxygen you are capable of taking up and utilizing during intense exercise.

Untrained men and women typically show values in the range of 35–40 ml/kg/min and 25–30 ml/kg/min, respectively. The highest VO2 max values for males are in the range of 90–95 ml/kg/min. Females are generally lower due to a lower percentage of lean muscle mass to whole body weight and top out at about 80.

I decided to surrender myself to the circumstances—to these strangers in our group, to the mountains, to the variable conditions and harsh weather. I decided to like things that were otherwise uncomfortable or frustrating.

I chose to be thankful for an abrasive teammate; if it hadn’t been for his constant pushing, I might never have glimpsed what’s possible inside this body and this mind. I continually made the decision to find the good in each situation.

Movement Economy: Just like a car’s fuel economy, this is the measure of how much energy it costs you to move your body a certain distance.

Movement economy combines two components: the mechanical (technique) and the metabolic.

Lactate Threshold:

this is the maximum work rate you can sustain for a long duration. If that sounds like endurance to you, then you’re correct. The pace at LT is the best predictor of endurance performance.

Metabolism: The Energy Transfer from Food to Physical Work The energy in the food you eat is not directly available to the body. The digestive process first breaks down the food into its macro nutrients: fat, carbohydrate, and protein. These fats and carbohydrates are further converted into various fatty acids and sugars that can then be used to produce ATP.

Metabolism is the term for the biochemical process of breaking down the molecular bonds in the fats and sugars for the energy needed to assemble the molecule ATP.

Anaerobic Glycolysis Metabolic Pathway This is the method by which carbohydrates fuel you. All the various sugars contained in carbohydrates are converted to glucose by the liver and either used directly or stored in the muscles or liver as glycogen for later use.

This process does not require oxygen (hence the modifier Anaerobic).

Aerobic Metabolism

It can use those pyruvate molecules produced by the anaerobic metabolic path mentioned above as well as fat to produce additional ATP. Aerobic metabolism produces roughly seventeen times the amount of ATP that the anaerobic path makes but is a more complex and hence slower process.

Mitochondria are tiny organelles in every cell of your body (besides blood cells) and are considered the powerhouse of the cell. These tiny factories use oxygen in the air you breathe to produce ATP, the essential fuel of life in all the cells of your body. Slow-twitch muscle fibers have a high concentration of mitochondria, predisposing them to aerobic metabolism.

Pyruvate, the end product of anaerobic metabolism (glycolysis), can either linger in the cytosol of the muscle cell—a metabolic dead end—or it can be transported into the mitochondria where it undergoes aerobic metabolism, which produces a great deal more ATP (energy for muscle work).

With this understanding of the relationship between metabolism and endurance we can focus our attention more closely on how we can manipulate our metabolism’s role in endurance through training.

Metabolism functions as a recycling plant. The energy contained in the food you eat is used to recombine the severed phosphate molecule with ADP (adenosine

The ATP Recycling Plant Metabolism functions as a recycling plant. The energy contained in the food you eat is used to recombine the severed phosphate molecule with ADP (adenosine diphosphate) making ATP again.

The role of all endurance training is to increase the output of the ATP recycling process.

Endurance is a metabolic quality.

Whether sitting still or running a race, both the anaerobic and aerobic metabolic engines are contributing to your body’s energy needs. The relative contribution from each is a result of several factors: Intensity – As intensity (speed) increases, so does the demand for ATP.

Genetics – Those naturally endowed with more slow twitch muscle fibers will be able to produce more ATP aerobically as speed increases and delay the dominance of glycolysis.

Training history – Those with a history of high-volume, low- to moderate-intensity training will have slow twitch muscles that are aerobically well adapted and be able to sustain higher speeds aerobically. Likewise, those with a history of higher intensity will have predisposed their metabolism toward the anaerobic/carbohydrates use.

Excess accumulation of these metabolites causes a reduction of glycolytic ATP production. We feel this as muscular fatigue and a slowing of our pace.

A metabolic traffic jam occurs when an athlete has insufficient aerobic capacity to shuttle all the pyruvate being produced by the anaerobic metabolism back into the mitochondria where it can contribute to ATP output.

We perceive this disruption of cellular homeostasis as fatigue—our pace slows and our effort increases.

Since lactate accumulates in lockstep with pyruvate, it can serve as a marker of intensity. More lactate hanging around in the blood indicates a higher production of pyruvate by the glycolytic metabolism. Coaches and sports scientists have long used lactate concentrations in the blood as a measure of intensity.

Your speed is a function of your muscle’s ATP recycling rate. ATP can be produced via aerobic and anaerobic metabolic processes. Anaerobic and aerobic ATP output combine to meet energy demands. The aerobic pathway is mainly used at lower-intensity, long-duration exercise. The anaerobic pathway should* be mainly used for higher intensities. The anaerobic ATP production is limited in duration by the accumulation of pyruvate/lactate. ST muscle takes up pyruvate and uses it for fuel in aerobic metabolism. We’ll come back to this very important point.

Short, high-intensity training depletes the glycogen in the less well aerobically adapted FT fibers but is too short in duration to have much training effect on the important ST fibers. This is why endurance training has traditionally contained so much relatively easy intensity training volume.

The key point of misunderstanding for many athletes and coaches is how much of the high-intensity training to apply. It turns out to be much less than is commonly assumed

1. Increase the aerobic capacity (make a bigger vacuum cleaner) so that you have a larger reservoir of mitochondria in the ST muscles to take up and use excess pyruvate and lactate to produce useful energy. 2. Improve the lactate-shuttle mechanism (make the vacuum more powerful) so lactate that is produced at higher intensities can be effectively converted into useful energy rather gum up the ATP works.

“My crew didn’t meet me and I didn’t get my normal gels.” As the race or adventure goes on and mental strength diminishes further, all of these little items start to “nickel and dime” a runner toward a DNF.

Due to the rapid response to high-intensity training stimuli, adaptations to this sort of training make themselves felt very quickly. Especially as compared to the weeks and months of patience required before seeing significant gains in aerobic capacity.

you can see that both low- and high-intensity training are important to proper endurance training. Neither alone will suffice to maximize performance. It is the balance and timing of the application of these methods that is so critical to this end goal. Increasing aerobic capacity has major benefits to all athletes regardless of the duration of the event they are training for. Most interesting to endurance athletes is that increasing the size of the aerobic vacuum as defined by the AeT will have very direct and profound effects on increasing the athlete’s endurance or LT (the power of the vacuum). You will also see improved recovery rates from workouts, including very high-intensity ones. As you will read in Section Two, this is one of Kílian’s biggest advantages over most other athletes. Having a big aerobic motor will allow you to handle more anaerobic work. Since all training adaptations occur in direct relation to the amount of time spent doing the training, this means you can do even more anaerobic work as a result of improving your aerobic system. The whole fitness house needs to be constructed from the ground up on a solid foundation (high AeT) before worrying too much about the upper floors. The Other Two Legs of the Endurance Tripod: Economy and VO2 Max We have devoted a lot of ink on the previous pages to the role of metabolism in endurance. It may seem like

Technique in anything, from playing the piano to running fast on rough terrain, is something that is acquired only through many, many hours of specific practice. We learn through repetition, creating motor nerve firing patterns that result in the desired movements. By patterns we mean that many thousands of motor units (nerve/muscle combinations) must fire in exactly the right sequence with the right magnitudes to create these skills that we are seeking.

The VO2 max is the least trainable of the three endurance components for the well trained. Of the three, it has the poorest correlation to performance. The preponderance of evidence indicates that, to a large extent, it is genetically predetermined.

Measuring the maximum amount of oxygen that the body could take up and utilize was first carried out by Archibald Hill, PhD, in the early twentieth century. Both the measure itself and the theory that he proposed for the limits it places on human performance won him the Nobel Prize in 1922 and have formed the basis for a huge portion of the study of exercise for the past one hundred years.

Despite its popularity as a metric, this single number, while it does relate to endurance potential, does not define aerobic endurance.

Long-term studies, along with personal testing by author Johnston, have demonstrated that elite endurance athletes will often show no change (and even a reduction) in VO2 max during a competition season and over their careers while at the same time seeing marked improvements in performance.

High-intensity training, while important for any endurance athlete, should be used as a supplement to, and not a substitute for, aerobic base training.

Recall from earlier that glycogen depletion is one of the most powerful training stimuli responsible for aerobic adaptations. Glycogen is depleted from the all-important ST muscles during long training sessions. Engaging in these long-duration, low-intensity workouts also enhances fat adaption. You can boost this adaptation by doing some of your aerobic capacity–building workouts in a fasted state.

Two advantages are gained with improved fat adaptation: The first relates to fuel depletion. Fat stores, even in a lean, well-trained athlete, are virtually limitless (up to 100,000 calories of intramuscular fat). On the other hand, glycogen stores will rarely reach 2,000 calories even in the well trained.

Sipping from your limited glycogen reserves while guzzling from the bottomless fat gas tank enables higher outputs for a longer time before the low fuel light comes on.

The dogma that at higher intensities fat’s contribution to overall energy production dropped to zero was handed down over decades even though coaches saw much higher rates of fat use among well-trained athletes.

These studies show more than two times greater ability to use fat for energy by well-trained athletes and they show this fat contribution continues up to much higher intensities than was previously thought possible.

The more the aerobic threshold is shifted to the right, the bigger the athlete’s vacuum cleaner and then better will be his or her endurance performance.

A strong training stimulus that is ideal for causing desirable adaptations to the aerobic system will have a negative effect on the anaerobic system. Any workout that has a powerful anaerobic training effect will diminish the aerobic system’s capacity to do work. By now you should be beginning to grasp the complexity of the systems working to supply the divergent energy needs during exercise.

The Uphill Athlete Training Philosophy We follow an approach to training for endurance that has stood the test of time in all of the conventional endurance sports for more than sixty years.

You will never maximize your endurance potential without first maximizing your basic aerobic capacity (AeT).

Kílian Jornet Surrounding my house growing up were mountains and forests. I didn’t see my first television until I was five years old.

My mother was a longtime climber and runner, a bit more disorganized, but very experienced. She was much freer in the mountains. She liked to move fast and light.

We backpacked across the Pyrenees—a forty-day journey—when I was ten. We did something like that every year.

I used the weekends for longer training. Sometimes I’d bike to school, my skis in my backpack, and then after school I’d bike 60 kilometers to the snow, ski for two hours, and then bike home. Other days I’d run to and from school—25 kilometers each way. Many times my coach was upset with me because I was doing too much, even though I tried to convince her that the cycling was just my transportation to the training. I was very focused—obsessed, really.

When I was seventeen I started university at Font-Romeu in France, taking sports science and studying anatomy and physiology. I learned the theory behind what my coach had been telling me all those years.

For me, training in the mountains is a hobby. Sometimes I do things for my sponsors, like traveling and photo shoots, but the training is not my job. I take it seriously, but not so seriously that I lose my love of moving fast in the mountains. Kílian Jornet defines himself as a lover of mountains. He enjoys competition, but above all he conceives of sport as a way to discover the landscape both inside and outside of himself.

Despite the prodigious amount of scientific research examining the myriad qualities that comprise endurance, it is the coaches and not the scientists who have been at the forefront of establishing the most effective training methods.

I learned what the expected result would be from every training action. What an easy run means for my fitness; what a fast-tempo run means for my fitness. And, perhaps most importantly, how it all fits together.

with coaches, especially as a junior, I learned what the expected result would be from every training action. What an easy run means for my fitness; what a fast-tempo run means for my fitness. And, perhaps most importantly, how it all fits together. How to build the base broad before doing faster, harder work.

I also studied a lot about running mechanics during my school years—I really worked hard on my running technique. How to be relaxed.

I think it is very important that training is not stressful in and of itself. It should be fun, enjoyable, with good people, and in nice places.

The stress of training causes certain adaptive responses to occur: first manifested as fatigue and later recognized as adaptations that enable a greater resistance to that same stress when applied later.

Hans Selye’s Generalized Adaptation Syndrome. Selye, a Viennese medical doctor and chemist, coined the term stress as we know it today in the biological context. His theory explained, in a coherent manner, how biological stressors acted upon organisms in both beneficial and detrimental ways.

Endurance training stimuli cause stress that triggers a cascade of events leading to improved performance. These changes go right down to the gene level. Genes are either enhanced or moderated by training stimuli.

Capacity Training: Training that improves the long-term performance potential of the athlete. Capacity Training is commonly prioritized during the Base Period.

Utilization Training: Training that improves the near-term performance results of the athlete.

This training models the specific demands of the event an athlete is training for.

While some noteworthy holdouts exist, the approach of relying primarily upon building capacity before applying limited amounts of Utilization Training has largely won out in this contest of ideas. Kílian’s legendary ability to handle a huge volume of work (and much of it very hard) is a result of his decades of capacity-building training.

Capacity Training increases the ability to do work in each of the various realms required for the sport. In uphill athletics (mountaineering, mountain running, ski mountaineering, and skimo),

Aerobic Capacity: This training improves the main locomotive muscles’ ability to produce ATP via aerobic metabolism. This results from increases in mitochondrial mass, capillary density, aerobic enzymes, and cardiac output. This should be the top priority for all endurance athletes. An endurance athlete can never have so much aerobic capacity that it is detrimental to performance.

Anaerobic Capacity: Increases the ability of the glycolytic metabolism to produce ATP. An endurance athlete can have too much anaerobic capacity and this depends very much upon the event being trained for.

Strength Capacity: Increases the maximum muscular force in sport-specific movements along with local muscular endurance in the main locomotive muscle groups. Greater strength is beneficial up to a point. Excessive strength can cause problems for mountain endurance athletes when they add significant muscle mass.

Technical Capacity: Improves the economy (energy cost) of locomotion, balance, and proper movement patterning.

It’s analogous to building the Interstate highway system: Tedious and dull during the construction process and may cause a slowdown in traffic but once completed, it allows much more traffic to flow (work to be done) more quickly (utilizing one’s capacity).

Anaerobic Utilization increases the fraction of the Anaerobic Capacity that can be sustained in competition. It typically involves training at speeds 5–10 percent faster than competition speeds or under a workload significantly greater than those encountered in the event for a total duration significantly less than the competition distance.

Athletes with a large capacity can and must do much more Utilization Training to maximize results. This explains why elite athletes do more and harder training than do novices, who have less capacity.

Real endurance is built from year to year, not weekly or monthly.

Determining the appropriate intensity for training is of the utmost importance in all endurance sports. This intensity dictates the energy systems and how many and which type of muscle fibers (ST or FT) get recruited to do the work—the effect of the training is directly related to the intensity.

Eventually the lactate removal rate can’t keep pace with the lactate production rate. This point is normally referred to as the LT. It represents the maximum intensity at which lactate levels will remain elevated but stable for up to an hour at a time.

Luckily, it is the most trainable of all endurance qualities. This point corresponds well with a Second Ventilatory Threshold (VT2) where breathing suddenly becomes noticeably deeper and more rapid.

Many adventures followed, until I became so accustomed to mountain travel that the word adventure quit being relevant. Real adventures involve uncertainty, fear, struggle, and the euphoria of overcoming them.

I became a mountain runner who spent very little time in the mountains. My single-minded focus on running success eventually led me to injury. With a “more is better” attitude, I relied on my physical strength to carry me farther than anyone else, with the result that I played myself out in training and suffered in races.

My career, such as it was, began to fall apart because I simply couldn’t do the thing I was best known for. When I was able to train, I returned to the patterns that had injured me before, desperate for a comeback.

I spent so much time training to be a great runner that I never got to actually run, and though my life is centered on mountain adventures, those adventures have been few and far between in recent years.

Let’s be clear that your metabolic response to exercise does not fit neatly into discreet zones with hard boundaries as is implied by the zone system and chart below. Not only is there a great deal of variation between individuals, there is some variation from day to day for each athlete. A heart rate of 145 on a day when you are fully recovered is going to have a different training effect on the day after a hard effort.

This also should cause you to question the parsing of zones into subzones that purport to define intensity zones to within one bpm; this is what scientists call false precision.

ZONE 3: ENDURANCE While this is considered aerobic training, it is of a different nature than Zones 1 and 2. At this intensity, the increase in speed requires the muscles to up their ATP turnover. Glycolysis becomes the dominant source for ATP, both in the ST muscle fibers and as more FT fibers get recruited.

Zone 3 training is seductive because it will give an immediate boost to anyone. This intensity should typically make up no more than 10 percent of the total annual training volume.

With more than a 10 percent spread between thresholds, an athlete still has aerobic deficiency and needs to build more aerobic base.

The conclusion he drew was that they tended to train 80 percent of time below the AeT, roughly 6 to 8 percent between AeT and LT, and 12 to 14 percent at the higher intensity above the LT.

Seiler coined the term Polarized Training to describe this system.

Seiler. International Journal of Sports Physiology

Historically, running wasn’t about individual accomplishment and the spectacle of winning and losing. It was a means of communication. In 490 BC, before the Battle of Marathon, Pheidippides ran 125-plus miles from Athens to Sparta to enlist help against the coming Persian forces. When the Spartans delayed, he ran back to Athens with the bad news. He wasn’t the first to carry crucial information over an ultradistance. The original runners in ancient cultures around the world, from Central and South America to Japan, were messengers.

Rickey Gates Historically, running wasn’t about individual accomplishment and the spectacle of winning and losing. It was a means of communication. In 490 BC, before the Battle of Marathon, Pheidippides ran 125-plus miles from Athens to Sparta to enlist help against the coming Persian forces. When the Spartans delayed, he ran back to Athens with the bad news. He wasn’t the first to carry crucial information over an ultradistance. The original runners in ancient cultures around the world, from Central and South America to Japan, were messengers.

Early in my running life, I chased the spectacle.

This is maximum intensity and can be maintained for less than thirty to forty-five seconds. Due to the lag in cardiac response, heart rate is not a good measure of this workload. This intensity requires that your brain recruit the bulk of the pool of available motor units available for the task.

Zone 5 training can and should be included in most training periods for endurance athletes. Early in the training cycle it will consist entirely of ten-second, very powerful sprints, usually up a steep hill, and only later will the duration be extended to produce an endurance effect. The downside to this sort of training is potential injury due to the high loads imposed.

Occasional bursts (or lapses) of enthusiasm and motivation that result in big changes in training load are a common approach to training by beginners and dilettantes.

What are the implications for the nonelite-level athlete? Any exercise, regardless of modality or intensity, will benefit an unfit person. But the benefits of cross-training diminish pretty fast once you are at the competitive recreational level.

The sports covered in this book are all foot borne and require adaptations that will only occur from foot-borne training.

If these journalists really wanted to be helpful they would be telling us what those champions did for the past ten years that allowed them to not only handle those final workouts, but to benefit from them.

I’ve realized that durability, not speed, should be the North Star of my training. The events that appeal most to me, steep and slow 100-mile mountain runs like UTMB or the Hardrock 100, are races of attrition. People get injured, people slow down, and people DNF.

Instead of striving for speed, I limit slowing down. To achieve that, I cultivate durability. And for years, this desire for durability has informed how I train.

Quality of rest is also very important. Staying at home, working around the house, sitting in the office—this is not proper resting. Rest means doing nothing or doing everything very slowly.

NOTES FROM KÍLIAN

Diet This is most the important component for recovery.

Realize that heavy and prolonged exercise has a depleting effect on your nutritional stores, especially glycogen.

No explanation of what glycogen is?

HGH is one of the body’s primary tools for adapting to higher training loads. Enhancing its production is an easy and smart way to develop better strength and endurance.

Prior to the 2015 Mont Blanc Marathon, Kílian Jornet receives a painful massage from his physiotherapist, Arnaud Tortel. Chamonix, France. Photo: Jordi Saragossa

It should be self-evident that the higher your goals, the harder you will have to work to achieve them. In doing this hard work, you will be pushing perilously close to the boundary of physical and mental stress you are capable of handling before something goes wrong.

3. Neurologic: The electrical signals transmitted from the brain’s motor cortex, along the motor nerves to the muscles, require neurotransmitter chemicals at each synapse to relay the signal along its way to the muscle. When these chemicals become depleted through prolonged high firing rates, the electrical impulse becomes weakened and muscle power drops. Repeated or longer-duration, exhausting efforts of the first two types in this list can result in this form of fatigue. Normal recovery from this is on a scale of a few hours to several days. THE CENTRAL GOVERNOR A credible theory about the limits of human performance was proposed by the grandfather of exercise science, A.V.

What does this mean for you? Noakes proposes that frequently pushing the body out of its comfort zone (away from its homeostasis) makes the governor more comfortable in allowing ever-increasing divergence from homeostasis before it begins to shut things down. You do this when you train.

Group A: Muscular Are your muscles sore or are do they feel dead, heavy, and flat? In the first instance of soreness, this is caused by micro-tears in the muscles. In the second case, of dead legs, the neurological fatigue mentioned above or glycogen depletion are the primary culprits.

Delayed Onset of Muscle Soreness (DOMS). It usually peaks forty-eight hours after the workout.

Do: Light aerobic recovery workouts Swim, or at least lightly kick in the pool E-stim on the recovery setting Light massage Ibuprofen after twelve hours post workout Ice bath after twelve hours post workout Frequent light stretching to reduce muscle stiffness Get extra sleep Eat extra protein, especially before bed Self-maintenance rolling with roller or ball Don’t

Ferritin is a very important protein in your blood that is responsible for storing and transporting iron across the cell membrane into the hemoglobin molecule. Elemental iron can’t cross that barrier without being attached to ferritin. Since iron binds with oxygen in the hemoglobin, when ferritin levels are low, the oxygen-carrying capacity of your blood will be reduced.

The standard for “low” ferritin reading is 12ng/ml. For endurance athletes, a ferritin level below 50ng/ml will result in some reduced endurance performance. Levels below 30ng/ml will show as dramatically reduced performance and chronic fatigue.

An elevated resting heart rate suggests that your body’s sympathetic nervous system is kicked into high gear, possibly as a result of overstimulation from a big training load.

Step Test This very simple test can be used to help gauge your recovery state/preparedness to train. It lightly stresses your nervous system and you simply note the results. Wearing your heart rate monitor, step up and down at a moderate pace onto a stair step. Do this for a minute or two at a fast enough pace to raise your heart rate about 50 to 70 beats/minute. The effort need not be very intense. Just enough to cause a reaction by the sympathetic nervous system. Note the maximum heart rate achieved and then sit down immediately and note your heart rate after one minute.

Training effect indicates, in a qualitative way, how your body reacts and adapts to the various forms of training stimuli. Training load is a term used to describe, in a quasi-quantitative way, the type and amount of stress imposed by a single workout or period of training: the training load causes the training effect. They both depend on the type, the intensity, and the volume of work done in a training bout.

When combined with training time, vertical gain and loss accumulated in a workout or week or month can begin to give an even clearer picture of the training load for the foot-borne athlete.

Our recommendation, after helping many athletes over many years, is that when the first signs of an illness show up, stop training. Your body and its limited energy reserves are fully engaged in producing antibodies to fight the infection.

We have found the simplest prescription for quickly regaining the flow in your training is to return to training with one day of easy training for every day you have been sick and away from training.

I have found that a regimen of intentional “adversity training” can add a valuable tool to the mountain athlete’s quiver—and even provide a mental reframing approach that has applicability beyond just sport.

Reframing Adversity Jared Campbell In my early years training for the Hardrock 100, I would joke with friends that anything difficult or unusually demanding was “good training for Hardrock.”

Six years later, I spent the winter of 2011 to 2012 training for my first Barkley Marathons, a wild 130-plus-mile footrace in eastern Tennessee with arduous routefinding, notoriously bad weather, 60,000 feet of vertical ascent, and a seemingly endless list of things that could go wrong.

Jared Campbell is a Utah-based adventure athlete who is drawn to combining and applying multiple skills to accomplish seemingly impossible projects, from high-alpine linkups to multi-modality routes in the desert. In his teens and twenties, a healthy obsession with rock climbing took him across the globe. This led to bigger mountain linkups and, eventually, ultrarunning. He has completed more than thirty 100-plus-mile ultramarathons; he is the youngest ten-time finisher of the Hardrock 100 and the only three-time finisher of the Barkley Marathons. Overtraining

only as the result of increasing the training stress on the body.

Overtraining Syndrome (OTS)

The elusive goal of every elite athlete is to find the proper balance between training and recovery.

Balancing training loads with the additional stressors of life such as family obligations, school, or a demanding job all complicate the job of maintaining this critical balance.

NOTES FROM KÍLIAN In 2007, I overtrained. I did a big winter with thirty races and then I started running right away. The first indication was that I was not recovering at all. I was super-tired. Since I felt bad for a few weeks, I did a blood test to see if I had an iron deficiency. Sure enough, I had super-low iron levels. So I rested completely for two full weeks. After that I started training again very, very easily. I think I caught it early, so I did not need to take much time off. Which was good.

Over- Versus Undertrained It is far better to be slightly undertrained than to be even a little overtrained.

A Lesson Learned the Hard Way: Training Isn’t Competition Marc Pinsach Rubirola

Learning to accept this performance gap—these differences between my body and Kílian’s body—took time, some seasons off, and no small amount of psychological struggle. It nearly drove me into a burnout situation.

You shouldn’t train like your favorite athlete or your friends, because there aren’t two identical people, and workouts don’t produce the same effect in two different bodies.

garden-variety fatigue that all endurance athletes learn to live with. When you step over this threshold, you are entering a medical condition that is poorly understood, multifaceted, and very difficult to diagnose except by those who have experience with it.

Overtraining is not your garden-variety fatigue that all endurance athletes learn to live with. When you step over this threshold, you are entering a medical condition that is poorly understood, multifaceted, and very difficult to diagnose except by those who have experience with it. Your family doctor is likely to call you a hypochondriac if you present the typical symptoms of overtraining.

OTS represents a breakdown of your body’s natural adaptation processes. The endocrine and nervous system no longer behave as you have come to expect them to.

You have to completely recalibrate your concept of hard and easy. Most of us are unprepared for this dramatic shift and unwilling to accept that we can go so quickly from feeling like an athlete to feeling like an invalid.

Overtraining is more easily recognizable if you are doing training on measured courses or using measured paces and see your times drop off. It’s much harder to recognize in mountain sports where the track is different every day. This is one reason that we advise having benchmark workouts you can do to check for progress or regression in your program.

The cost of overtraining and underrecovering is so much worse than undertraining, it is far better to err on the conservative side.

Many endurance athletes get a little overtrained at one time or another and hopefully only once. The dramatic wasting effects of overtraining need to be treated with respect when training loads become high.

Periodization The concept of periodizing sports training into discrete blocks with distinct training aims first arose in the former USSR and gained widespread recognition in the West largely from the writings of Soviet sports scientists.

Thankfully, it takes much less training stimulus to maintain a capacity than it did to first build it.

microcycles, typically seven days in length.

macrocycle. This can be an annual or seasonal cycle. Once the length of the macrocycle is set, then it is divided into several mesocycles. The mesocycles are where the distinct training targets occur.

This is where the base of training is developed. You need this foundation to be rock-solid if you hope to construct a skyscraper of fitness on top of it. During this period your fitness will be increasing, but this will be masked by a low level of fatigue.

Examples of workouts in this period might be: If preparation for a VK: 8×3 min uphill in Zone 4 with 4-min easy walk-down recovery. If preparation for a 100-mile race: back-to-back eight-to-ten-hour days in Zones 1 and 2, three to four weeks out.

Aerobic Threshold Testing Determining your AeT establishes the most critical metabolic reference point you can know and serves as the foundation from which to build your training plan.

If the AeT is more than 10 percent below the LT in terms of heart rate, then you can still make considerable gains in raising the AeT.

You will never maximize your endurance without first maximizing your basic aerobic capacity (AeT).

While genetic gifts play the dominant role in preselecting who is going to be good at power and speed sports, perseverance and the ability to suffer are the hallmarks of the successful endurance athlete. No wonder endurance sports appeal to the type A personalities for whom more equates to better. A question we often get is, “Just how much is enough?” That is an impossible one to answer.

It is much easier to adjust the training load upward after you determine that it is too light than it is to crumple, dejected or injured, from doing too much too soon.

When it comes to basic aerobic training (Zones 1 and 2): If you can’t do the same workout you did yesterday again today, and tomorrow and the day after for days on end, then you are doing too much.

Average hours training time per week: 12.5 hours. With three weeks over 40 hours, and 11 weeks over 23 hours. Annual total = 650 hours. Average elevation gain and loss per week: 9,843 feet (3,028 meters). With six weeks over 20,000 feet (6,154 meters), and 17 weeks over 15,000 feet (4,600 meters). Annual total = 512,000 feet (157,538 meters). Average running distance per week: 55 miles (90 kilometers). With seven weeks over 100 miles (160 kilometers), and 25 weeks over 75 miles (120 kilometers). Annual total = 2,860 miles (4,576 kilometers). At the top end, Kílian trains in the range of 1,300 hours per year and over 1.5 million vertical feet.

So, why not just do what the pros do? Because you will not have the work capacity of a pro and will likely end up overtrained and/or injured if you merely copy a world class–level training program. The human body has an amazing capability of adapting to imposed loads if it is allowed sufficient time for the adaptation to occur. There is no secret or magic. It is just a work ethic and building a lifestyle around that work ethic.

So, the first step is to get that aerobic base built as well as you can manage, given your time constraints, both in terms of your annual plan and your daily schedule. Just remember: when in doubt, go long and easy.

As a general rule, the higher the intensity of the workout or race, the longer the warm-up. For workouts in Zones 1 and 2, a perfectly good warm-up can be accomplished by easing into the pace of the workout for ten minutes.

PICK-UPS A very effective, and fun, workout is to include short pick-ups (speedy segments) into long Zone 1 and Zone 2 workouts. These pick-ups will range from eight to ten seconds in the earliest stages and up to fifteen seconds in the later stages.

We have found that a single workout per week of these is plenty. If done consistently in the base aerobic phase, these will do a good job of preparing you for the harder work to come.

Tempo workouts involve continuous fun, fast efforts (Zone 3). They are usually from twenty to sixty minutes in length. Their intensity can span the full breadth of Zone 3 (between the AeT and LT). Remember that if you have done a good job of increasing your aerobic capacity, then your AeT will be within 10 percent of your LT. This will translate into a narrow Zone 3 heart rate range; often fewer than fifteen beats. The goal should be to hold as steady an effort/heart rate for the entire time.

Example progressive distance workout: Start with forty minutes in Zone 1. Then move to thirty minutes in Zone 2. By now you should have a sense of whether this is a good day to push harder or if it would be smart to back off and finish the workout in Zone 1, saving the hard work for a day when you feel better. If you do feel good, add on twenty minutes in Zone 3. If still feeling strong, increase the effort for a final five minutes in Zone 4.

In the late 1930s German track coach Woldemar Gerschler coined the term interval training when describing his method of intermittent training where high-intensity work bouts were separated by intervals of rest.

It depends on: What training effect is desired What training background the athlete has When during the training cycle the interval training occurs

If you are new to this training method, start with short-duration repetitions such as three to six minutes. Use short, active recoveries in the ratio of 3:1 or 4:1 work to rest. Experienced endurance athletes may work up to 3×20 or even 2×30 minutes for one of these sessions.

Aerobic Power Intervals (Zone 4) Aerobic power (often called VO2 max) intervals are conducted at intensities greater than LT; usually at near 95 percent of max heart rate. Total volume of the work bouts can range from fifteen to thirty minutes.

We like to start athletes with 2×6 min of 30/30s with a couple minutes’ easy between the sets so they can get the feel of the pace and effort. Next session, go to 2×8 min, then 2×10 min until you are doing 2×15 min, then go for one twenty-minute session.

ANAEROBIC INTERVALS

It turns out that improving this type of sport-specific strength also improves economy.

Anaerobic intervals will make up only a tiny but important fraction of any endurance athlete’s overall training. Increasing anaerobic capacity is a slow process because the amount of work that an athlete can handle in this realm is quite small compared to the daily and sometimes twice-daily aerobic workouts.

it is important that the anaerobic system is completely (or very nearly) fully restored so that each repetition can be executed at the same maximum intensity. This requires very short work periods of eight to fifteen seconds separated by long recovery times of at least one to two minutes if the intensity of the reps is in the correct intensity range.

A very effective anaerobic capacity, leg power workout we like to use is Hill Sprints or Hill Bounding once a week during the Base Period. These are repetitions of very short duration (eight to ten seconds) with complete recovery (one to two minutes).

The first several of these workouts may not even make you tired, so they don’t feel like training and you’ll wonder, Why am I doing this? The rest periods feel way too long, so endurance athletes want to shorten them.

If it feels ineffective, then that’s a sign that you need it even more. As your brain learns to recruit more fast-twitch fibers, you will become more powerful. This will translate to longer stride lengths and improved economy.

Hill Sprints are exactly what the name implies: a sprint uphill with normal (albeit modified for the steeper grade) running technique.

Hill Bounding is done with a bounding stride where you exaggerate the length of the stride and spend more time in the air with both feet off the ground and with a lower-tempo leg turnover than the hill sprint running. This can be done with poles by skiers and without by runners.

ease into this program by starting the workouts at 80–85 percent of maximum effort and slowly increasing the output during the repetitions for the first two to three workouts.

the main work. 1. Execute 6–8×10 sec of maximum power bounding with a long stride or running sprints. Take a two-minute easy downhill walk as recovery between sprints and a three-minute rest between sets when and if you increase the number of repetitions beyond eight. 2. Twenty minutes’ easy jog cool down.

1. You will progress by adding more repetitions to the workout.

this is a potentially injury-causing workout. Start with using 90–95 percent of maximum force. Only add force after you have handled two to three of these workouts with no problem. 3. Add no more than two repetitions per week to the total volume.

Maximal work bouts of two minutes with a work-to-rest ratio of about 2:1 repeated four to six times or until exhaustion.

A second type involves going the maximum speed for twenty to thirty seconds with a recovery of two to three minutes, repeated eight to twelve times.

NOTES FROM KÍLIAN Before every race season, I do two to three shorter-interval sessions for my maximum speed. These intervals are short and I go as fast as I can on a slight hill. These are bouts of twenty, for a maximum thirty seconds. I will do ten rounds, then rest for a bit, then do another ten rounds.

They calculated this to be around 2,800 to 3,000 feet per hour, which would give him the necessary buffer for transitions and descending.

Over the three months leading up to mid-March, Foote averaged 29,233 vertical feet per week and racked up a staggering 42,360 feet, 50,526 feet, and 50,942 feet during his three biggest weeks. Most weeks saw him training over twenty hours, with a peak of twenty-four hours.

Strength is largely a neurologic quality while endurance is largely a metabolic quality. Restating this: Strength depends on the brain’s ability to recruit the greatest number of muscle fibers for a task. Endurance depends on the rate of metabolic turnover of ATP molecules.

Ski mountaineering, skimo, and mountain running are all locomotive sports involving single-legged propulsion.

You need to examine the strength demands of your sport before diving into a bench press program when your goal is improving your VK time.

These workouts should model the ranges of motion and speeds of your event quite closely. Why? The brain’s muscle-recruitment patterns are a learned skill.

A simple exercise that meets the needs of the mountain sports being covered in this book is sprinting or bounding uphill. Both the speed and gradient add the resistance and result in the desired strength-training effect using the sport-specific movement patterns for all these sports under consideration.

for athletes participating in an endurance sport, sufficient and especially, sufficient specific strength do contribute to better movement economy. How? Increasing strength allows for longer strides with less effort.

Especially for ultrarunners, the decrease of stride length during races is one of the most powerful predictors of race results. Muscular endurance training can greatly improve the ability to ward off the sort of late race neuro-muscular fatigue brought on by pounding down hills.

Then, approximately thirty minutes to three weeks after the last agony-filled shitstorm, you find yourself sheepishly researching your next race. How are we so stupid?

You’ll pee blood. You’ll poop blood. You’ll crap your pants and dig so many holes that you’ll lose count. While flying downhill, you’ll hit a sharp rock exactly on the blister on your big toe, causing it to sear so badly that you’ll see black dots. You’ll yell at your selfless friend who gave up her weekend to pace you. Then you’ll cry, begging her for forgiveness. You’ll threaten your boyfriend: If you don’t find me some ibuprofen… You’ll sob at evergreens, appalled that they are not helping you through this. You’ll laugh with aspens, complimenting their breathtaking golden leaves. You’ll wonder if you’ve lost your mind.

I live for the quietness. Where it’s just me, a little human creature moving by her own steam somewhere on this beautiful planet.

Don’t Forget to Pack the Why Clare Gallagher

For the lower body, the goal is first to ensure better single leg, hip, and knee stabilization so that you can apply power more effectively through the major joints to propel yourself farther in each stride. Single-leg stability originates mostly in the hips, specifically in the gluteal muscle group. Without adequate strength in this important muscle group, it is common to see unhealthy knee and ankle alignment. At best, this will have a negative effect on movement economy, power output, and stride length and, at worst, this will set you up for overuse injury.

If while standing on one leg, your knee makes a side-to-side movement during either knee flexion or extension, you may have some weakness that warrants remedial work best done with basic strength exercises.

It will be informative to assess your basic strengths and weaknesses by testing yourself using a few simple exercises before launching into a strength-training program.

The simple assessments provided below are not a substitute for professional advice. Air Squat Test (easy) This is the simplest assessment. Assume a normal squatting position:

Do your knees collapse in at all? Can you hold your knees outward so that they remain aligned vertically over your toes? If you cannot maintain knee alignment over your toes, you can stop the test here and start with the Stage 1 strength program. If you can hold them in alignment with conscious effort, go to the next test.

Box Step Test (medium) Stand facing a box or step that is just below the height of your knees. Your toes should be no more than twelve inches (thirty centimeters) away from the box. Step up onto the box while watching for any inward collapse of your knee toward the midline of your body.

Fig. 7.2 Box Step Test Stand about 12 inches (30 centimeters) in front of and facing a box or bench that is just below your knee height. Step up and note whether your knee moves inward or if it tracks closely over your toes as you step up.

Fig. 7.1 Squat Test To perform this test stand with feet shoulder width apart and toes angled outward slightly. Squat to where your thighs are parallel to the ground, and stand back up. Do your knees cave in toward your centerline? Or, do they track in line over your toes?

Fig. 7.3 Sit-to-Stand Test Lower yourself to a sitting position on a bench or chair. Immediately raise yourself back to a standing position using only one leg. This is very challenging to perform at all, let alone with good knee control. The illustrations above show the difference between good form where the knee tracks over the toe and the poor form where the knee caves inward.

Initially use high reps with low resistance; four sets of twenty reps or until you fatigue. Take a one-minute rest between sets. Between sets of these leg exercises, insert a set of upper-body exercises that are described in the next section. Retest for knee alignment after a couple of weeks and move on to Stage 2 when appropriate hip stability is gained.

Fig. 7.4 Squats with Knee Band

Fig. 7.5 Single Leg Lateral Band

Fig. 7.5 Single Leg Lateral Band A more advanced hip-strengthening exercise is done by placing a rubber band around your knees (either above or below) and while balanced on one leg, extend the unweighted leg to the side and back at about a 45-degree angle.

When you can do three sets of thirty reps with perfect knee control and balance, move to Stage 3.

Skimo is a quadrupedal sport: all four limbs are used for locomotion.

general strength that plays a critically supportive role in locomotive sports like skimo and running. It serves this function by stabilizing the pelvis, spine, and shoulders so that the arms and legs can perform their propulsive functions most effectively.

Many running injuries can be traced to weakness or imbalances of the core muscles, most of which attach to the pelvis.

The core muscles are mainly made up of slow-twitch fibers. This imbues them naturally with a lot of endurance, but typically not so much strength. So, increasing their strength even a little can make a big difference for most athletes.

How to Activate the Deep Core Muscles

The TA is the deepest muscle in the core musculature and protects the spine and connects the upper and lower body.

the TA muscle is not used for movement. Its purpose is purely stabilization.

WINDSHIELD WIPER This exercise tests the strength of the obliques, which are used for transferring power from the arms to the legs.

Fig. 7.21 Standing Trunk Rotation

Stage 3 Workout Four times through the following circuit: 1×6 reps of box step-ups with weight One set of appropriate stage push-up exercise (include appropriate stage pull-up exercise for skimo) 1×6 reps of box step-downs with weight One set of appropriate stage push-up exercise (include appropriate stage pull-up exercise for skimo) 1×6 reps of front lunge with weight Rest three minutes and repeat

When I began to climb the race’s infamous Hope Pass at mile forty, I actually ran every step and went on to win the race in my personal best time, which remains the third-fastest time ever in the history of Leadville. The point is, don’t get rattled if you feel off—or even downright awful—early in a long outing. The body’s peaks and valleys of energy are unpredictable and often hard to explain—especially when coming off of a long taper before a goal effort.

The point is, don’t get rattled if you feel off—or even downright awful—early in a long outing. The body’s peaks and valleys of energy are unpredictable and often hard to explain—especially when coming off of a long taper before a goal effort. But the thing to remember is that you are totally capable of rebounding and performing at your very best later on, no matter how improbable that may seem in the moment.

However, a particular strength-like quality called muscular endurance is very important. In fact, it is one of the major components in determining endurance performance.

the ability to do many repetitive movements with a relatively high percentage of the maximum strength. By relatively we mean that the more repetitions you are doing, the lower will be the percentage of your maximum strength. The immediate effect you should feel during these workouts is fatigue localized in the working muscles. While anyone can benefit from this method, the best results will be seen by those athletes with high strength and aerobic capacity. It is tempting to overuse muscular endurance training because the performance benefits are felt quickly and dramatically. When using muscular endurance workouts, it is critical that you do a high volume of basic aerobic training in Zone 1 for maintenance. There are several ways of improving muscular endurance. We will show you workouts we have used with many types of athletes with universally positive results. As you read through these, notice that despite their very

extra resistance. By artificially imposing greater muscular loads during training than will be encountered during the event, we can force local muscular endurance of the working muscles, as opposed to cardiovascular fitness, to be the limitation.

by either the use of added weight or by using a very steep hill.

The slowing you feel with that leg fatigue is caused by the muscle fibers that are allowing the high speed in the first place dropping out of the pool of recruited fibers.

The problem is that by virtue of them having higher power, they have less endurance. They are right at the frontier of your endurance at that speed. Every speed will have its frontier fibers: that last group (the highest power bunch) of fibers to be recruited by the brain for this speed.

A good warm-up is essential for this workout. You need to be sweating before you start the workout.

Do 200 total reps of your choice four or five different core exercises without stopping.

Fig. 8.1 Box Step-Up Stand about one half of your stride length in front of a box or step that is just below knee height. Step up onto the box mainly using the front leg to pull you up with minimal assist from the rear leg.

Front Lunge From a standing position step forward about half your body length dynamically so that the front leg catches most of your weight. Keep the knee behind the toes of that front foot. Fig. 8.3 Split Jump Squat From a front lunge stance spring upward and switch feet before landing with the opposite foot forward. You can add resistance best with the use of a weight vest or weighted pack. Count reps on just one leg. Do, ten reps on each leg. Fig. 8.4 Squat Jump From a squat position spring upward as explosively as you can.

Workout 6×10 reps each leg of box step. Rest one minute between sets. Ten reps with one leg before switching. 6×10 reps each leg front lunge. Rest one minute between sets. Ten reps with one leg before switching. 6×10 reps each leg split jump squat. Rest one minute between sets. Alternate front legs each jump. 6×10 reps squat jump. Rest one minute between sets. Complete all six sets of each exercise, taking one minute of rest between sets. Take no more than two minutes’ rest between exercises. The tempo of the exercise should be about one repetition per second. Workout Progression First and second workout use body only weight. Third and fourth workout add 10 percent of body weight. Fifth workout do eight sets of each exercise add 10 percent of body weight. Sixth and seventh workout do six sets add 10 percent of body weight and reduce rest to 30 seconds. Eighth workout do eight sets with 10 percent body weight and 30 seconds’ rest. Continued longer-term progression: Ninth workout do six sets with 15 percent of body weight resting one minute. Tenth workout do six sets with 15 percent of body weight resting 45 seconds. Eleventh workouts do six sets with 20 percent of body weight resting one minute. Twelfth workout do six sets with 20 percent of body weight resting 45 seconds. Use a weight vest or a barbell on shoulders or hold dumbbells for added resistance.

OUTDOOR ME WORKOUT

Look for a hill that is in the range of 20 to 50 percent in gradient. The steeper the hill, the easier it is to feel that your legs are the limitation in your rate of climb, not your breathing or heart

running or hiking straight up the fall line at a gradient on excess of 20–50 percent.

This is what Kílian is referring to when he talks about doing long, steep uphills in Zone 3 as a muscular endurance workout. Settle into a pace you can sustain for many minutes with a subtle, low-level “burn” in your legs.

Stride length/bounding: Use a long, bounding stride. This adds a significantly high muscle load and cannot be sustained for long. This is what Kílian is referring to when he mentions doing two minutes of long strides followed by a short rest until his legs recover, then two minutes of short strides. If you are bounding aggressively, two minutes is a long time.

Start this workout progression by running or hiking (which you choose depends on the steepness and your muscular endurance) up the hill for eight to ten minutes with that low-level leg burn. Repeat two times, taking a five-minute moving recovery between reps. If you need to walk back down between reps because you do not have a long enough hill, that’s fine. This can build to a full 40 minutes of steady uphill grinding.

If you use the bounding variation: Start with 10×10 sec of bounding up a steep trail. Between the bounding parts, walk back down until your legs are recovered and then repeat. There is no one prescription. For the aerobically fit who recover fast, this workout might look like 15×15 sec bounding with about one minute of running or walking down recovery (depending on steepness) between repetitions. This workout could progress to 20×20 sec of bounding with two minutes of recovery running.

However, a successful coach or successful athlete must operate in shades of gray on a daily basis. This gray territory is where the experience of a coach can help even the most seasoned athlete.

The writing of a plan, by necessity, uses a mechanistic view: Do workout A, receive benefits B. That mechanistic approach provides the guidance. But, on a daily basis you must subtly assess and interpret your preparedness to not only do the mechanistically prescribed workout, but also to apply those same skills in evaluating the benefit from it.

If you have never run consistently for months on end or have not been running consistently during the past three to four months, you will need to be cautious with building running volume. Jumping back to daily running before your connective tissue is ready is a surefire shortcut to injury.

much of the focus here will be on improving uphill performance.

The purpose of the Base Period is to increase your work capacity and improve your fatigue resistance. You build this fitness base so that you can handle more work and eventually more intense work, which prepares you for the races themselves.

The purpose of the Base Period is to increase your work capacity and improve your fatigue resistance. You build this fitness base so that you can handle more work and eventually more intense work, which prepares you for the races themselves. You’ll do this by using the progression principle that we discussed in earlier chapters: slightly exceeding your work capacity in many workouts, then recovering and repeating this process for months at a time.

Neither this book nor the plans in it are intended for those looking for shortcuts. There are no shortcuts.

but one sure way not to do this is to do in training only the things you are good at or enjoy. What’s wrong with that approach? Plenty.

For most readers and for all the sports covered in this book, the number one area of training focus must be on increasing that all-important aerobic base. Without this base all the rest is mere window dressing.

refer back to the Ten Percent Test (see page 91). If the difference between your AeT and LT (in terms of heart rate) is 10 percent or less, you should include up to two weekly high-intensity aerobic endurance sessions in your Base Period.

refer back to the Ten Percent Test (see page 91). If the difference between your AeT and LT (in terms of heart rate) is 10 percent or less, you should include up to two weekly high-intensity aerobic endurance sessions in your Base Period. If your AeT-to-LT spread is greater than 10 percent, delay the introduction of Zone 3 workouts and limit the higher-intensity workouts to no more than once a week.

For the smoothest long-term progression, keep distance, vertical, and time increases at 10 percent or less from week to week except after a recovery week, when you may increase these much more. Do not increase distance and vertical for more than three weeks in a row.

Guidelines for progressing the training load: For the smoothest long-term progression, keep distance, vertical, and time increases at 10 percent or less from week to week except after a recovery week, when you may increase these much more. Do not increase distance and vertical for more than three weeks in a row. Do not increase distance, vertical, and intensity in a single week.

Typically you should follow large jumps (near 15 percent) in weekly distance, vertical, or intensity with a recovery week to allow your body to adapt.

Rest before you are forced to.

Recovery weeks should drop the training load typically at least 40 to 60 percent of the last big week’s volume. Don’t do more than one intensity session.

Begin to add one Zone 3 workout each week when within two months of your first race. Adding intensity should not require reducing the volume of training more than 5 percent.

Kílian’s preferred way of introducing high intensity is with Zone 3. Include one Zone 3 workout per week when you feel like you are handling the Zones 1–2 volume well. While a highly trained athlete may be comfortable with two sessions per week totaling as much as one to two hours in Zone 3, it will take years to build up to this volume.

Keep in mind that strength for the sake of strength is not the point. Strength in endurance sports is used only in a way that improves performance and prevents injury.

For Zone 3 workouts, they use Elghuf (Moose Hoofing), which is a loping, long stride somewhere between Ski Bounding and the Ski Striding in intensity.

It is not a run because you are exaggerating the stride length and reaching farther out in front of your body with the uphill leg. It is intended to simulate ski striding up a hill at an intensity you can sustain for minutes rather than the seconds you can sustain actual bounding.

When you get to within two months of your first competition, the training focus must shift to more race-specific workouts with the inclusion of high intensity in Zone 3. Some points to remember: Replace the Zone 2 workouts with one Zone 3. Zone 3 workouts will be stressful. Maintain the aerobic base with Zone 1 volume.

Start to add high intensity workouts no later than two months before your first competition. Some suggestions: When Zone 3 volume is 5 percent of weekly vertical, replace Zone 2 workouts with Zone

Prioritize your races: A races are the main focus of the season. B races are less important, but you may want a day or two of lighter training before them. C races are those that you use as hard workouts and train through.

kilometers (the minimum covered here), weekly distance numbers can take months of continuous running training progression. Recall

Recall from the sidebar “How Kílian Records His Training” on page 127 that he records time, distance, vertical, and the technical difficulty of the terrain.

100-mile race: Before starting, you should be comfortable with the 100-kilometer training loads (above). Peak week = 145–160 kilometers (90–100 miles). Average per week for biggest 18 weeks = 100 kilometers (75 miles).

When I was younger, I did a lot of interval training and strength training, but now I do no strength training and almost no interval training. Instead, I get my speedwork done during races, and when I’m not racing, I do volume. I enjoy volume; it works well for me, and I have a fast recovery so I can assimilate it all.

take these seven recommendations to heart. 1) Consider the stress of everyday life.

They train a lot on top of work and family obligations, not realizing that when you train something, it’s a stress to your body.

2) Don’t overdo it. Many people work full-time and train on the side because they really love running. Sometimes these runners get better, get a sponsor, and decide to work less and train much more. Then their performance drops and they burn out because they have become overtrained. Just because you have more time to train more doesn’t mean you should fill it all with training.

Structuring a Category 1 Athlete’s Mountain Running Training Plan If you fit into this group, the biggest single thing you can do to improve your race performance is to train more. Not train harder, just train more hours, accumulate more vertical meters, run more kilometers. That’s because your performance in the sports covered in this book is almost entirely dependent upon your basic aerobic capacity to do work.

There is no shortcut, no secret workouts. You need to first condition your body to handle a lot of training; then later as you become fitter, you can start to layer on higher-intensity work that will allow you to run or ski faster for longer. But right now if you can’t run continuously for an hour or two, on mountainous terrain, day in and day out, you do not need to worry about high intensity.

a twenty-week plan is what we consider as the minimum training period if preparing for a first-time 50K race.

The volume of high-intensity training in each week, and within each workout, should not start too high and should increase gradually. Add only as much as you can before it forces you to drop the volume of your aerobic base (Zones 1 and 2) training by more than 5 percent. If you can’t maintain your volume of Zones 1 and 2 training, you risk having a short peak followed by a decline in performance.

Include one Hill Sprint workout (see page 182) in most weeks to build and maintain specific leg power.

3. 2×20 or 30 sec medium-to-hard effort hill run or bound. These wake up the anaerobic energy system and the associated fast-twitch muscle fibers you need to do this sort of work. One to two minutes’ slow walk downhill between these. 4. 2×20 sec skipping uphill. This gently introduces the dynamic and ballistic loading that you will be working next. One to two minutes of slow downhill walking between these.

I caught glowing eyes in my headlamp to my right.

setting—a hundred-meter flood that illuminated not one but two mountain lions lounging on a slab of rock above me.

Do not increase distance, vertical, and intensity in a single week. Try to increase only one at a time. If you need to increase two of these, then keep the increases to under 15 percent. Example: 10 percent distance increase with 5 percent vertical increase, or 8 percent increase in Zone 3 time with 7 percent increase in distance. As with distance, increase vertical no more than 10 percent in consecutive weeks and no more that 20 percent in a four-week span (three building weeks followed by a recovery week).

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