Less Pain, More Gain Two-time Everest summiteer shares training tips for long, strenuous climbs and other endurance activity By Leif Whittaker
The writer, Leif Whittaker, at the "top of the bottom of the world," summit of Mt. Vinson, Antarctica. Dave Hahn photo
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efore I learned about proper endurance training and started working as a coach for mountain athletes, I subscribed to the saying, “No pain, no gain.” In 2012, when I was preparing for my second ascent of Mt. Everest, my goal in the gym was to make getting out of bed the next morning an excruciating ordeal. I believed core workouts should leave me feeling like I needed an appendectomy and cardio efforts were ineffective unless I pushed myself to the point of puking. If workouts didn’t hurt, I wasn’t getting stronger. After three months of HIIT (high-intensity interval training) and Olympic-style weightlifting, my body started looking stronger than it ever had. I was living in Salt Lake City at the time and one reason I liked these workouts was that I could complete them in less than an hour and still have time to ride chairlifts at Snowbird or go to the bouldering gym, two activities that contributed little to the fitness profile I would need to summit Everest. Still, it felt like I was training extremely hard, much harder than I had for my first expedition to Everest. Most of my workouts the first time were long hikes and slow jogs. I hiked local trails, sometimes unweighted and sometimes carrying a backpack full of books. I jogged around town and occasionally sprinted as fast as I could up a long set of outdoor stairs. I did push-ups, pull-ups and situps twice per week. I climbed volcanos in the Cascades and visited Colorado to hike at higher altitudes and ice climb in the winter. Knowing what I know now about endurance physiology, it’s no surprise that I ended up performing better on the first expedition. I had extra gas in the tank during each phase of the ascent, which isn’t to say it was easy; it was the hardest thing I had ever done. But I never reached my true physical limit. Even on summit day, I charged up the final slope,
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pushing to a max heart rate just to see how it felt at over aerobic pathway tends to diminish the anaerobic pathway, 29,000 feet. By contrast, my gas tank was often empty during and vice versa, which is why you don’t see marathon runners my second expedition, and although I did reach the summit, built like Arnold Schwarzenegger. I didn’t possess the fitness reserves to do anything beyond Improving aerobic capacity will benefit all types of endurance athletes and provide the physiological foundation for getting myself up and down alive. Training for Everest is fundamentally the same process as higher speed, power and intensity. Aerobic capacity supports your ability to kick past a competitor in the final lap of a race training for Mt. Baker, Mt. Rainier or any other similar peak. or bound up a mountainside with a heavy backpack. It also Climbing big mountains requires an athlete to sustain moderate energy outputs for days, weeks or months on end. It helps you recover quicker from workouts, even high-intenwas foolish and shortsighted of me to think I could develop sity ones. this type of fitness with 45-minute CrossFit workouts. EffecThe only sure-fire way to develop your aerobic capacity is tive training, like the event itself, requires much more patience. The foundation for endurance is your aerobic capacity. Moving the human body requires the contraction of muscles, and the energy for this contraction derives from two metabolic pathways: Aerobic and anaerobic. In a nutshell, aerobic metabolism depends on oxygen and fat to fuel long, sustained efforts, while anaerobic metabolism does not require oxygen and is fueled by glycolysis to produce short, high-intensity outputs. Both pathways can be trained, but they generally develop in inverse to Climbing to the summit of Mt. Everest in 2010, less than each other. Training the 100 vertical feet from the top. Michael Brown photo
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