In the last post I talked about planning the macro-cycles of a year-long training plan. In this post I want to talk about the building blocks of the training cycle: the hour.

So what’s in an hour? An hour of strength training feels a lot more difficult (and therefore a lot more like training) than an hour of hiking. What about an hour of downhill skiing with friends at Alta? Or an easy hour on the road bike? 

An easy hour: this is what 80% or more of my training time is. Why? Because it’s well established that the gains achieved by intensity work are directly proportional to the size of your base.

What’s in a base?

This fundamental truth of training simultaneously explains and exposes why programs that emphasize circuits of intensity work so well for people who have been athletic their entire lives. Those people, and I include myself in this group, have an enormous base from years of athletics.

For me that was cross-country running, track and field (My senior year in high school I ran the 1500 meters in 4:15, pole vaulted 14 feet 2 inches, and consistently ran the third leg of the 4x100 meter relay fast enough to help place us state-meets and I climbed my first 5.10 rock climbs.) When I was fifteen I was ranked third in nordic skiing’s pacific northwest division in the 10 km skating race. When I was 12 I completed my first seven-day, fifty mile backpacking trip and did a 50-miler every year with my Scout troop. It wasn’t uncommon for my friend Chris and i to ride our bikes 11 miles one way to fish for trout.

My base-building continued in my twenties. I worked as a mountain guide, pulling 200-plus days a year nearly every year for ten years. I remember a lot of months that I would guide 25-28 days in a row without a break. Sleeping on the ground every night, waking up every morning and putting a pack on my back, teaching self-arrest, wearing plastic boots and crampons on my feet, coiling wet ropes and pitching tents in windstorms. Talk about developing a base for mountaineering. If you assume an extremely conservative average of eight hours a day for 220 days you have 1,760 hours of base training per year.  And that doesn’t even count all the days I went climbing for myself during that period.  With some guess-work and rough calculations, there were almost surely years in my twenties where I was active, with a heart rate of over 135, for 2,500 hours a year!  I was young, I ate like a horse, slept like a rock, and I recovered quickly.

The fact remains that all this base is impossible to quantify. It all happened long ago, yet my body carries the imprint. I believe that this is a significant reason behind the success of my climbing career, I’ve always been the fittest guy on the team. I wasn’t always the best climber, and I wasn’t always the one who acclimated the best. But I was always the fittest.

It wasn’t until 2002 that I hired a coach and started tracking and planning my training like a true professional athlete. To my surprise I found myself actually doing fewer hours that I was used to. But, I kept up with the guiding schedule, adding hours of activity that I wasn’t quantifying as training. The resulting over-training put me in the hospital, I’ll write more about that in a future post, but suffice it to say that it is important to be honest about what an hour of activity is. And yes, down-hill ski guiding for an hour is as much training as an hour of nordic skiing.

The truth that remains from all of this is that the best way to make large gains in fitness is to do the least fun, least glamorous, most boring kind of training: Long-Slow-Distance.

Let me explain a little more about my thinking on my theme: an hour. How do you decide what constitutes an hour? When I plot my training for the year, an hour of strength training may get the same value as an hour of hiking uphill. And what about climbing? I go to the crag for five hours and climb six pitches, do I record five hours?  The answer is no, I record the actual amount of time I spent climbing. If I did six pitches and each took me 20 minutes, I record 2 hours for that day, not five.

In my spreadsheet I use to keep track of my training-hours I have a column for hours climbed as well as a column for pitches climbed. The later doesn’t get recorded anywhere, but it is a good reminder:

Here are the categories by which I track my hours. In the summertime this may change to include other activities not listed here, but with a spreadsheet, that’s very easy to do.

Date

Week

Notes:

Intensity

run

bike

x-c ski

mountaineering/ski touring

Climbing

LSD total

Strength

Hours climbing outside

Pitches climbed outside

Hours climbed in gym

Forecast Hours

Actual Hours

The first few categories are self-explanatory: Date, Week (the number of the week since the beginning of the training cycle.), Notes to myself about what’s going on at that time, what my immediate goal is (ie: eat well, sleep more, etc). Intensity refers to simply whether this is a easy, medium, or hard week. Then the activities: run, bike, nordic skiing, ski touring, and climbing. Next come places to tally the time spent strength training, and a few ways to quantify the climbing I’ve done that week.

Forecast Hours is what I build out months in advance, but my Forecast Hours and Actual Hours almost never match.  Two weeks ago my forecast hours were 24, but I felt like I might be getting sick and had to travel so I cut back a little yet I still ended up with 20.5 hours.

This past week was supposed to be a hard week. Luckily I was in Ouray Colorado for seven days and it was a great opportunity to climb a bunch and I also got in a long ski tour with Vince. I forecast 30 hours, but ended up with 33, even though I skipped my two strength work outs for climbing. In total I spent 26 hours last week hanging on my ice tools (belaying isn’t training) and five hours skiing up hill after Vince. As I write this I can feel the effects of all this activity and plan on this coming week at another ice festival (this time in the Adirondacks) being a very easy week with plenty of good food and lots of sleep.

As you can see, I spend a lot of time on my base. The gains made in intensity-work towards the end of the training program will pay dividends based on the quality of the hours I’m doing now. For me there is no doubt that a lifestyle that emphasizes being outside, for me guiding and working on testing Patagonia equipment, makes training volume easy to come by. But for most people, you have to make the LSD (long-slow distance) part of your routine, part of your social life, and part of who you are, and the hours will quickly start to stack up.