From the time I decided 100% that Everest was a go, I had 518 days of training. Some of these were recovery days from a climb, and there were the occasional days off for rest, but I often went months at a time without a break. When I left on April 12th, I had an active streak since December 30th when I flew back from Aconcagua. At my peak, I put in 2-3 hours a day during the week, and some longer sessions on weekends. Training was a part-time job.
My training was built around 7 types of workouts:
Stairs: Using the stair machine, I put in time getting used to the motion of climbing uphill.
Runs: My staple sport comes easy to me while for others this is their method of torture. However, I had to back off the running to get the body type better suited to climbing. This meant cutting long runs and not running daily. I wanted to have great cardio but also keep strength.
Core: Doing core work, from planks to ab movements, was crucial. All movement starts with core. Strong legs were great, but I needed a core to stabilize the carrying of a pack for hours on end.
Bike: Great for the quads, which needed to be strong for the uphill battle, plus good cardio. I did almost all of the cycling on the stationary bike using Zwift.
Lift: Hitting the weights is my weakness. It bores me, and I struggle to put on weight. Sessions were usually 30 minutes and I took on 3 sets of 15 reps. To bulk up more, I should have done more weight with less reps but when I did, I would struggle on other activities, so I compensated. My rest is almost 0 when lifting as I go from one exercise to the next, almost like a HIIT routine.
Hike: The most applied of the training, hikes included expedition climbing as well as weekly hikes with a pack. I was able to do training hikes of 5 hours with 40lbs in the pack (just for training; on expeditions, days were often longer). Other times, I set the treadmill to max incline (about 15%) and hiked it out. This comprised the highest amount of minutes in my week, mostly due to the relevance to the end goal, but also because it is low intensity. I must say I hated almost all of it.
HIIT: High-intensity interval training - The quickest way to get into shape, this is a lot of body weight reps with short breaks. These kicked my ass and melted the pounds. However, after the first half of training, I had to abandon these workouts as I was losing weight when I needed to keep it on. Squats and glutes also fell into this category, mostly because I didn't have a better place to put them. Squat sessions maxed out at 1000 reps.
Here are my totals for the training window:
My core work was over 60 hours. Start now and do a plank or crunches while you watch all six Rocky movies....6 times.
I spent nearly 100 hours climbing stairs. That is the equivalent of climbing the 102 floors of the Empire State Building 305 times.
Almost 12500 minutes were conducted running, low volume for me but still enough to have run the distance from Chicago to New York City....and back.
Speaking of NYC, I put in enough miles on the bike to go from East Coast (NYC) to West Coast (LA).
I don't pump a lot of iron, but when I do, I lifted weights for as long as it would take you to watch all 3 of The Hobbit movies followed by all 3 of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and still have time leftover too drive from Detroit to to the Mackinac Bridge.
21311 minutes is a long time to hike, most of it uphill, with a heavy pack, or both. Assuming flatland pace, this is like hiking the 22 miles from Base Camp to the top of Everest, and doing it 50 times.
They say to do the least fun, or the worst exercise there is, do a burpee. Just reach up to the sky, bend down, jump back, jump in, and jump up. Now repeat that 57,600 times for two full days, including nights, you have the amount of time that I did HIIT workouts. Thankfully, they weren't all burpees.
I didn't change much in my diet as I try to eat fairly balanced, but I did make two significant changes. The first was that I cut out alcohol since September. This saved endless empty calories and allowed for more focus and better sleep. Consequently, I ate out less and therefore had fewer burgers and pizzas. To make up for the void in calories, I found myself snacking more and adding dessert to my meal plan.
I took AG1 (Athletic Greens) to help get the right vitamins and nutrients. I also added a hefty scoop of protein powder to my morning cereal everyday, hoping that the additional protein would help with muscle gain. It certainly didn't, and I have to say I think that's a scam. That, or I just was training so hard that even a little supplement couldn't keep the weight on.
Hypoxic Training
To simulate a higher altitude while at home, I slept in a tent that was connected to a generator that pumped in air with less oxygen. Over the period of 2 months prior to each of my climbing endeavors over the last year and a half, I slept in this tent (accounting or over 6 months or 1/3 of the time I spent training for the mountain). Sleeping at altitude alone is challenging as one often wakes up with a jerk, snorting from lack of air. But the tent makes it even worse. Many a night I awoke dripping in sweat with condensation from my breath and body lining the plastic walls. Even small movements lets out air lowering the level and making the tent less efficient. To improve this, I spent the last 9 weeks before the expedition sleeping alone, but because the tent did not fit on our extra bed, I had to sleep on a mattress pad on the floor. This meant waking with an achy back every morning. I was able to simulate about 6,400 m at the highest and over 6,000 m most nights. My experience on the South American trips showed that this did in fact speed acclimatization.
 |
| Intermittent hypoxic training |
 |
| Reading in the tent |
Below is a video showcasing most of the workouts I used to get ready:
 |
| I don't love the shirtless selfie-in-the- |
