My training blog

Change

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 07:51:25 -0700

I’m pulling up roots and moving to south-western Colorado. Oregon, for all the great things about it: Smith Rock climbing, perfect climate, amazing athletes, my mother, father, sister, niece, and nephews, it has not been able to come up with good snow to ski, steep ice to ascend, or mountains to run.

By Halloween I hope to be re-situated in Ridgway or Ouray Colorado where I plan to be for a long long time. That community has a lot to offer: many great friends who already live nearby. World-class ice climbing such as Bridalveil Falls, Ames Ice Hose and many smaller hidden gems. The Black Canyon offers serious rock climbs a half hour away or one can score a couple of hours of cragging by walking to the Pool Wall from town. Red Mountain Pass can be incredible backcountry skiing, not to mention nearby Crested Butte and Telluride Mountain resorts. To top it off a small airport is but 30 minutes away in Montrose.

Living in the ‘Rado (jeez, I hope I’m cool enough) will allow me to be more effective in my role as an ambassador for climbing. To a similar end it will give me a much better environment to work in as a field-tester developing products for Patagonia and Grivel.

I spent eight years of my younger life training to achieve certification as a Mountain Guide in 1999, and that has largely been missing from my life in Oregon. To that end Vince Anderson and I will be working together at his Colorado-based guiding company, Skyward Mountaineering. http://www.skywardmountaineering.com/

Being close to more diverse climbing will also help facilitate the mentorship program I am helping to develop through the American Alpine Club. It is my hope that within a few years this program will blossom to aid alpinism's future students.

As some of you know, I leave a wonderful woman and her two amazing children. There is a massive hole in our four hearts right now that will take a long time to heal. I want you all to know that we part on good terms, each understanding that this change is necessary. Perhaps in Colorado I will be able to take part in creating a family of my own.

Have no doubt, I still have a couple K2's and Makalu's in my near future, but I turned forty last week (barely, luckily). Perhaps it took an eighty-foot fall for me to realize that I've done a lot for myself, it's time to move on and it's time to give back.

Fifteen Weeks,

Wed, 7 Jul 2010 21:43:32 -0700

or nearly four months since my fall off Mount Temple. After so much time, there is much to dwell on. The negatives: the pain of so many fractures, the sleeplessness, the drugs and the messed up things they do to you. It’s easy to get stuck in the negative; yet some part of me is drawn there by some morbid fascination.

So on to the positives. The things I wouldn’t have done if I had not been hurt. Banal things like floating the Deschutes River on a hot day because, well, why not? Visiting my Mom and going to my niece and nephew’s swim lessons. (Long lost are the days where I could pick up new skills in 30 minutes as they can.) I travelled to Baker City, Oregon to watch and support my good friend and climbing partner Mark Twight in a bicycle stage race known as the Elkhorn Classic. He went into the final stage wearing the pink leader’s jersey, threw his chain on the initial climb, and the peloton dropped him. Watching him solo for forty miles over three big climbs warmed my heart in a familiar way; some part of me loved watching him try, suffering well. I know that he, like me, is nourished by such experiences. And there’s the nearly completed greenhouse Jeanne and I are building onto the side of our garage. I have trouble imagining having ever finished that had I not fallen.

Some time ago a friend asked me how I was coping with my anger about my accident. I was surprised and told him that I felt no anger, he questioned me in a disbelieving way. I stood still, trying to intuit how I felt about my fall.

“Disappointment and relief,” was my response, “in nearly equal parts.”

Disappointment because I was going so well; I had climbed well in the weeks before my accident; redpointing 5.13 and soloing WI 6. I was strong in mind and body, and getting stronger every week.

Relief is more complex. I feel free to make plans past August, when I was due to return from K2. A new route on K2 is not Everest with fixed ropes across even the flattest glacier. K2 brings the risk that one misstep, one mis-calculation, or simple bad luck could end my life. I’m not trying to be dramatic; this shit weighs on me. Once I decide to go on an expedition like that I think about it every day. It makes it impossible to make plans for Thanksgiving.

I did not expect to meet my demise on Mount Temple, on a training-climb. A simple winter excursion in the Canadian Rockies, one chosen because it was close to the road, because it fit with the avalanche conditions and our weather window. Here is where hubris steps in.

I fell because I was 100% sure I would not fall. Or at least I fell such a distance, around eighty feet, for that reason. I did not give as much attention to my protection as I would have if I was scared or intimidated by the pitch. I wasn’t scared at all. Quite the opposite: I was rushing. I was climbing as if I couldn’t fall. As if I was invincible. I was being cocky.

It’s true what they say, that the bigger they are, the harder they fall. I now know how big I am.

Some part of my mind rationalizes my accident, thinking of the fall as another step along the road of an alpinist. I was due. I’d gotten away with a lot already. My number was up. But each of us believes that you’ll be the lucky one. I compare it to a soldiers’ fear of being shot. Every day they go out on patrol they’re afraid. When they see a friend get his head blown off, they may never get over it. They also see that many survive. Some part of their mind rationalizes it: Why won’t the right combination of luck and smarts see them through? So too did I fear falling off, up high, in the big alpine. And so too did I half-expect to fall and get hurt. Eventually. Maybe. Probably. I am now happy I that have a 'good wound'. Once I will recover completely from. This time.

How big am I then? Not very.

I made a mistake, a pretty small mistake. Or more honestly, I made a series of pretty small mistakes. I almost died for these transgressions. I would have died if it had not been for a cell phone and the chain of events it was able to put into motion. (I’ve owned a cell phone for barely six years.) I might not have died that very day, March 25, 2010, but from where we were, we were a long, long way from the medical care my injuries demanded: a trained trauma surgeon in an Emergency Room. Perhaps I would have lasted one night. Maybe not. It changes my perspective about what a day means. Carpe diem no longer seems some frat-boy cry to party. Today, means everything.

Fall off Mount Temple

Sun, 9 May 2010 12:47:23 -0700

As I fell, I was relaxed at first. A flake had broken, not all that unexpected considering the incredibly bad rock quality on Mount Temple. Then the gear started pinging out of the partially decomposed limestone. One...two....three....four....the fifth piece, a large cam in a solid, but flaring, pocket of rock almost held me. But it too ripped as the rope started to slow my descent. The sudden jolting free-fall flipped me upside down and I crashed my right side into something hard, something painful and was spun around again when I finally came to a stop half-sideways eighty feet lower than where I’d started. I was on on a sloping snow ledge with Bruce just twenty-five feet to my right. What probably held me was a groove in a snow-mushroom that I’d stamped out with a boot. Old-school terrain belay saves the day.

What happened in the next few hours will always be a bit fuzzy. I hurt like I have never hurt before. I remember telling Bruce to get out the cell phone; to call 911. He didn’t know how bad it was, I knew.

Over a half-hour I crawled towards Bruce while he pulled me to him. At the belay-stance I laid face-down in the snow. Here is where my right lung collapsed. I knew I had a flail-chest, a section of what turned out to be six ribs broken multiple times, one or two were smashed into innumberable pieces. I didn’t know about the two large, bleeding fractures in my pelvis. Or the seven smaller fractures in my spine. That didn’t matter, because I could barely breathe, tiny, shallow baby-breathes.

The shock was incredible. No sensation, no blood-flow in my arms or hands or legs or feet. It didn’t seem to matter. I was conscious enough to know I needed to keep working my hands. Bruce removed my wet gloves and put my mittens on for me.

Some time later, maybe an hour and half had passed, and the Parks Canada heli broke the silence. At first in the far-distance and then it roared overhead. I couldn’t see it because I couldn’t move at all. A hostage to the pain, afraid that if I moved I would lose the shallow but sure little breathes that came fast, panting, never enough.

When the rescuer, Steve Holeczi, announced himself I was relieved. Steve is a friend, a fellow mountain guide, a past climbing partner. So it should be easier to forgive him for the moment he reached under the snow, grasped the front of my harness and wrenched my unwilling body over. The miasma of pain distorted most of the next half hour. I remember flashes: his hand clipping a carabiner to my harness, the shock of the jerk when we suddenly were picked off the face. Pulled heavenward with the quick snap of the taunt long-line. Looking back, I realize I never saw Steve’s face. He hung behind me, supported me. We landed, I was packaged on a backboard, loaded into the helicopter and delivered minutes later to waiting paramedics in Lake Louise.

There were no niceties onboard the ambulance as I was loaded up, just words:
“Full lights. Full siren.”
And scissors, two pairs of scissors slicing through my clothes until my clothes were filleted and I lay naked before them, shivering. I got an IV in each arm. The first of many cool pushes of morphine into my veins. The shivering stopped and here my memories get very hazy. I woke up sometime later, still naked and on my side, with a man pushing on my chest, actually cutting a hole in my side. It took him two tries. So now it looks like I was shot: one entrance and one exit wound. I was told I was in the ER in Banff. “I was just in Banff last fall” I tried to say. “I won a book-award here. Good memories.” The second try he successfully got the tube into my lung and sucked out the offending blood.

There was another helicopter ride. This time wrapped comfortably in blankets, on my side with a view out the door. Another hospital, another ER. This would be Calgary, I guessed. I was sent down the dark tube of the CAT scanner and woke up who knows when.

“Anytime you need pain relief you push this button.” The nurse said as she pressed a worn metal cylinder into my hand. Looking at it I saw that on one end was a black plastic button, on the other a cable that led to a small hanging digital box with a clear bag of IV fluid hanging above it. “You can press it once every six minutes.” I pushed. “That’s the morphine.” It felt good. I pushed again. “Beep,” the machine scolded and counted down the seconds until I could call upon another few minutes of opiate-bliss.

There were many visits. Most I probably don’t remember. I do recall friends from Calgary and Canmore. Phone calls. The days blur together. The doctors stopped by once a day, moving as a pack. They said little but that my fractures were stable and that I’d heal in time. The nursing staff was amazing, friendly, helpful, there in an instant, no indignity too great.

They counted twenty-some fractures. I had the most incredible bruising down my legs, a result of my pelvic fractures copious bleeding. I had three IV’s: two for drugs and fluids, one for units of new blood, and a 1/2-inch diameter chest tube leading to a glorified vacuum cleaner which kept my right lung inflated.

My chest tube and some of the bruising seven days after the fall.
The rib fractures are not visible since they are on my back, to the right of my spine.

As I write this it’s been over six weeks since that fall. I spent a total of eleven days in hospitals; first in Calgary and then in Bend. I am now able to do physical therapy, acupuncture, and daily walks. I’m up to five flat miles. But I still have three rib fractures where the bone ends are over one centimeter apart. It will be another six to eight weeks before I can start normal levels of activity. One thing I’ve already learned is that it’s impossible to predict the pace at which my body will heal. For now I’m still in quite a bit of pain most days. I still sleep part of each afternoon. I’m just starting to be able to reach above my head with my right hand.

No expedition for me this summer. No K2 attempt. Yet popular Sinologists tell us that the Chinese ideogram for Crisis is made up of a combination of the characters for Danger and Opportunity. I have survived, thanks to the collective Parks Canada rescue teams, ambulances, life-flight helicopters, ER doctors, Global Rescue Services, lung specialists, orthopedic surgeons and physiatrists. Time will reveal what opportunities this will bring.

Rest

Mon, 1 Mar 2010 19:14:54 -0800

Rest. Rest, is a four-letter word. Funny, I like a lot of four-letter words, but I, like many of you, have a hard time with this one.

It has been observed that we get stronger when we rest, not when we train. And that is true, yet how to rest? How to know when to rest? And how much should we rest?

In the last three weeks I trained 76 hours and in the process I climbed 101 pitches of ice. During this time I was also traveling, sleeping in different beds almost every other night. I guess I’m moving up in the world, or getting old, because not once in the three weeks did I sleep on a floor. Though I did spend two nights on a nice couch in Calgary.

Sometimes it’s easy to know when to rest. Last week was one of those times. I was tired, and a little sick, with a cough nagging me. Saturday I didn’t feel like doing anything, I read and watched a film. Sunday I cleaned my garage and washed my truck and was exhausted. Obviously I needed one more rest day, so I went climbing on Monday. Just sport climbing, so it wasn’t like real climbing. Of course, being type-A, I can’t just go climbing, I got on an old project and had two pretty good goes at a 13a called Darkness at Noon. Not restful. So today’s planned strength training followed by the three-hour run was cancelled. I woke up heavy.

I think that one of the important lessons a mentor of mine, Mark Twight, said to me once. We were on the phone and I was spinning off ideas for climbing, and Mark just said: “You just can’t live there all the time.” And he’s right, on many levels. Both the psychologically and physically you need a break.

But objectively, how do we know when to rest. Here are a three methods I’ve used, from simple to sophisticated:

Waking heart-rate.
I started doing this when I was a teenager training for cross country ski racing. My coach had me take my pulse for 10 seconds as soon as I woke up. I’ve been doing it so long, I don’t even have to count. I can feel whether I’m rested or not. Slow, and ready to train again is for me around 36-42 beats per minute. Not recovered, fast, for me, is anything higher than 48, but usually if I’m tired I’m most often at 52.

Box-Step Test
Another, more objective method, is the box-step. I like this because I can do it in base camp where the waking heart rate test can be thrown-off by the altitude. For this test you need a heart rate monitor. Find a step a little lower that knee-height and step up and down rapidly. Push hard for 60 or 120 seconds, get your heart rate high, maybe as high as 170. Then stop, lean against the wall, walk around, do whatever you do to recover as quickly as possible. Note both your Max HR and your HR after 30 seconds. If I’m rested I’ll go from 170 to 70 in thirty seconds. If I’m still tired, it will stay between 100-120 after 30 seconds and maybe after a minute it will drop below 70.

Rusko Recovery Test
The Rusko recovery test is a modified test created by Heikki Rusko, the reknowned Finnish researcher who worked with cross country skiers. He is affiliated with Polar so they have adapted this test into some of their high end HR monitors and tech-support. This requires their fancy software but essential acts like an EKG test as it gathers data then makes a call on your fatigue state. Many, many tests show its efficacy. Polar calls it the Own Optimizer test, Ruskos studies call it an Orthostatic test.

Without a HR monitor.
Lie on the floor calmly for 4 min and record your lowest Heart Rate. Stand and record peak HR then record HR at 1 minute and 2 minute intervals. The minimum HR along with the body's reaction to the stress of standing is a very good indicator of the relative conditions and balance of the two main autonomic nervous systems; sympathetic and parasympathetic. For this to work you need to record this daily over a period of two weeks while rested to establish your baseline. Future deviations will show up and need to be heeded.

With Polar HR monitor: The beauty of the Own Optimizer test is that it not only does all this stuff for you it does a much more sophisticated EKG-like test of actually measuring HR variability. HR variability is the spacing of the actual electrical impulses in the heart-beat. It turns out that the greater the HR variability the fitter and more rested the person. If you normally have a certain level of variability when rested and the OO test shows a drop in variability it looks at the other parts of the test and makes one of nine recommendations based on a proprietary algorithm. This test has been shown to predict illness and over-training several days in advance. The simple orthostatic test will give you useful info for sure. (AFTER you establish the baseline.) But for $300 you can get an amazing tool. It could be useful for showing acclimatization too, but I have not tried this. Only certain models include the OO test feature.

For the record, I do not use a Polar Monitor. I broke a lot of Polars, they just didn’t handle the abuse I was giving them, and have since switched to a Timex Ironman “Race Trainer Kit” . I’ve been happy with the Timex Ironman especially as I can wirelessly download and store my workouts and log them on the TrainingPeaks website.

So these are a few tools that are useful for us to identify when to rest and when to train. Next time, why it’s so important and a bad story about what happens when good people over-train.

A rested Ian Caldwell nearly redpointed Chemical Ali (14a) this weekend.

What’s in an Hour?

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 15:31:15 -0800

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.