Most Popular Entries
April 26, 2015
Posted by: Dave Hahn, JJ Justman
Categories: Expedition Dispatches Everest
Elevation: 20,000'
RMI Guide Dave Hahn calls in from Camp One with an update.
Hi Dave! Praying for you and everyone else on Mount Everest and the people of Nepal.. Safe descent.
Posted by: Jean Tanner on 4/27/2015 at 9:27 pm
Where is the rest of the blog that was there a few days ago. It had a lot of detail that I would like to read again.
Posted by: Greg on 4/27/2015 at 7:27 am
April 25, 2015
Posted by: Dave Hahn, JJ Justman
Categories: Expedition Dispatches Everest
Elevation: 19,900'
RMI Guide Dave Hahn calls from Camp One with update on the RMI team.
On The Map
Our family has been praying for Mark and all of you since the news broke. Mark, you guided us up Kili in 2012 and I have no doubt were one of the best to deal with the tragedy you faced. Continued prayers for your safe return. Dennis
Posted by: Dennis Mulherin on 4/28/2015 at 4:42 am
JJ, glad to hear you are safe! Worried when we heard the news. We’re sad to hear about all the casualties, and our hearts are with everyone in Nepal!
Posted by: Leslie on 4/27/2015 at 11:02 am
September 27, 2016
Posted by: Elias de Andres Martos, Adam Knoff, Robby Young
Categories: Expedition Dispatches Shishapangma
Elevation: 19,500'
Colin, feel excited for you. Nice photo looks like you guys in Mars or the moon with snow
Posted by: Janet on 9/28/2016 at 1:02 am
Namaste!!!!!!
Posted by: Carlos de Andres on 9/27/2016 at 11:38 pm
Black Lives Matter. This isn’t a belief or personal opinion; it is a fact. And here at RMI we feel it is time for us to speak up about it. The last few weeks have been incredibly painful and emotional, but for the Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) communities in our nation, the last few weeks are representative of daily life – this is just one of the times the rest of us decide to tune in. The murders of George Floyd, Brianna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless others are not isolated events. They are the painful and violent windows into the systemic racism that underlies nearly every part of our lives. It is especially noticeable in the outdoors.
We have always seen nature, and specifically the mountains, as the ultimate equalizers. The mountains do not care about your race, ethnicity, gender, economic background, sexuality, or disability. If the mountains do not want you to summit, no amount of wealth or privilege will get you to the top. But the mountains, and their equalizing power, come at the end of the approach, and what we often forget is that the approach is much longer for some of us than for others. So many of us take our privilege for granted, the privilege that allows us to simply put on our boots and start climbing. But for millions of Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color, there are countless barriers between them and the mountains. Economic restraints, white-washed media, a lack of outdoor education, subtle racism on trails and in parks, and a plethora of other issues conspire to keep BIPOC out of the outdoors. According to a 2014 national park study, 91% of all national park visitors in the Pacific Northwest are white. This needs to change.
We have been asked, rightly so, why we have not released a statement clarifying our position sooner. We did not feel it was right to say something without first educating ourselves and understanding the barriers faced by BIPOC in the outdoors. The need for this education can be seen as an indictment of our own complacency over the years. A few weeks is not enough time to call ourselves fully educated on the topic, but we are trying. Here at RMI Expeditions, Whittaker Mountaineering, and Bight Gear we are now in the process of gaining that education with the goal of taking significant actions to reduce barriers and increase representation of BIPOC in the outdoors.
We want to use our voice and our capital in a more meaningful way than a one-time donation or post, because this issue is endemic. To design and implement the kind of long-term, high impact program we have in mind, we need time. We will be releasing an action plan in the coming weeks and look forward to your suggestions and ideas, as we still have a lot to learn about our privilege and the ways we can best help our BIPOC outdoor community. And once our action plan is released, we ask that you check in on us and hold us accountable, whether that is in two months, two years, or two decades.
The mountains have the potential to provide adventure, fulfilment, growth, and wonder to people of all races, ethnicities, genders, and sexualities. It is high time we help BIPOC communities grasp that potential.
Sincerely,
Peter Whittaker
Owner of Bight Gear, RMI Expeditions, and Whittaker Mountaineering
September 1, 2020
Posted by: Brent Okita, Hannah Smith, Avery Parrinello, Dominic Cifelli, Nikki Champion, Camille Leininger
Categories: Expedition Dispatches Mount Rainier
Elevation: 14,410'
The Expedition Skills Seminar - Muir led by RMI Guides Brent Okita, Hannah Smith and Avery Parrinello reached the summit of Mt. Rainier today. Brent reported a beautiful day with windy conditions and challenges. The group has spent the last several days training at Camp Muir. Tonight will be their final night at the 10,000' camp and they will descend to Paradise tomorrow. We hope the team enjoyed their time on the mountain. Congratulations on reaching the summit!
When training for any sport, the best training advice is that you need to “do the sport.” If you are training to run a 5k race, you should spend a significant amount of your training running. 24 hour mountain bike race? You are going to spend a lot of training time on a bike. Crossfit competition? You’d better flip a lot of tires, do a lot of burpees, and swing a lot of ropes. So what do we do when our chosen sport is mountaineering?
For the lucky amongst us, we have mountains and hills nearby. We can lace up a pair of boots, put on a weighted pack, and head out the door for a several hour hike. So many of our climbers don’t have the luxury of living nearby mountains (for many, not even many hills), yet so much of our training advice relies on gaining vertical elevation throughout the workout. For flatlanders, one of the best options to still achieve vertical distance during a workout is to use a treadmill set at its max incline.
On Mt. Rainier we aim to climb at a pace of about 1000 ft/hour. We use this measure because our pace varies with the terrain. In flatter terrain with less rise per step, we’ll up the tempo and move a bit faster. As the terrain gets steeper and the effort increases, we back the speed down somewhat, all in an effort to continue to move efficiently. 1000 ft/hour, therefore, is a useful benchmark in your training.
A treadmill typically has a max incline of 15%. To climb 1000ft. on a treadmill therefore, you need to walk roughly 1.25 miles of horizontal distance (what the treadmill measures). Setting the pace to 1.25 miles per hour on the treadmill will approximate the pace of the climb, at least on paper.
There is a physics argument around frame of reference that argues that a treadmill should be the same effort as hiking outside (the same argument is made for stairmasters), however, physiological studies show that heart rate and oxygen consumption (a way to measure effort) are lower on a treadmill for the same pace on solid ground. This suggests that a treadmill then requires somewhat less effort and is in effect easier. How much easier? This is a difficult question, that doesn’t have an answer. With this knowledge, we can simply set our pace to be faster than 1.25 miles per hour and increase the difficulty through speed. If we increase the difficulty enough, we will approach the difficulty of the climb.
Other great options for tailoring your training to the vertical gain involved in climbing include stadium or office building stairs. In this case, you are moving your center of mass uphill, just like in mountaineering, so 1000 ft/hour will feel similar to the actual effort. Embrace the options that are available to you, grab a pack and some weight, and see how much vertical you can incorporate into your training!
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Comments? Questions? Share your thoughts here on the RMI Blog!
I love your training articles. However, once again the article I received 1/20/2020, “Training for Vertical Gain.” perpetuates an incorrect notion about training on an inclined treadmill, “Keeping your body in place while moving your feet to keep up with the treadmill is easier than actually climbing that same incline however, since you don’t have to actually push your weight up the hill with your legs.”
This is just incorrect. One does push one’s “weight up the hill with your legs” on an inclined treadmill. Because the platform is moving down you must lift your body up to keep from falling off the end of the treadmill. If the statement I quoted from your article was correct, it would not be any harder to walk on an inclined treadmill than a flat one. You do not need to be a physicist or engineer to understand that—go walk on a flat treadmill then incline it to a 15% grade—It is easy to feel it is harder and that is because for all intents and purposes you are walking uphill.
I would agree that it is harder to ascend a mountain than it is to walk on an inclined treadmill but that is because the mountain has an irregular surface, you never walk in a perfectly straight line, you are always stepping down some even if you are largely ascending, etc.
If you do not agree with me, please talk to a physicist, an exercise physiologist or a mechanical engineer and stop putting this idea in your articles about walking on an inclined treadmill or a stairmill / strair-stepper. People (me included) consider RMI an authoritative source so it is important that the info you distribute is correct.
Thanks for listening to my long comment.
Posted by: Robert Taylor on 1/21/2020 at 5:37 am
Hi Glenn,
We totally agree that climbing stairs with weight is a very effective way to train for climbing as well (and you get the descent with weight which uses a different set of muscles and is equally important!). We struggle to convert stairs to miles as well, but what we really care about in the mountains is vertical gain rather than horizontal distance. Thought of this way, we tend to pace ourselves to climb at approximately 1000ft/hr. One story in the US tends to be about 10ft. so if you could climb 100 stories in an hour, that would be very close to the effort of climbing.
But for the sake of curiousity, the average stair in the US is 7 inches high and 11 inches deep. That means that the hypotenuse is about 13 inches. It sounds like the stride length for stairs that you found overestimates it by a bit. With that distance, that leaves you climbing 325 flights of your stairs to climb a mile as measured by the hypotenuse. Yikes!!
Good luck and happy training!
Posted by: The RMI Team on 4/12/2019 at 2:27 pm
VERY NICE BUT HOW TO JOINING
Posted by: Jigyansa meher on 8/3/2021 at 6:35 am
These strange times have many of us off balance and out of rhythm, and our training routines have felt the toll as well. Stay at home policies across the country have closed fitness centers and kept us at home without our usual tools. Body weight core exercises are a great way to continue to improve your strength and functional mobility, and taking your strength workout outside is a great way to break your routine and inject some new energy to training. The Dartmouth cross-country ski team uses this type of workout (and it’s where many of the example exercises come from) as part of a base and strength building cycle each fall.
Choose a jogging loop that has areas that you will be comfortable getting down to the ground on (a park, forest loop, or city parkway).
- Set out for a good warm-up, 10-15 min at a gentle pace that is still conversational.
- Find a comfortable spot (grass or a forest floor are much nicer than concrete!) and complete a set each of two different core exercises (pushups and crunches for instance). This style of workout will build more endurance strength since they use just body weight, so try to pick a number of repetitions that you can do several sets of, but still push you hard in the individual set. 60 full crunches and 40 pushups is a great example.
- Jog easily for 200 meters. The active recovery of jogging easily will still allow you to recover, but will train your body to recover while maintaining at least some level of effort.
- A set each of two more exercises (dips on a park bench and side planks).
- 200 meter jogging recovery.
- Complete a third set of exercises. 6 exercises is a great number to start from for your total workout.
- Continue until you have done 3 sets of each exercise (9 total strength stops).
- Cool down and head home!
As you progress, you can vary the workout in the number of repetitions you do during each set, or by varying the total number of sets. Try to mix up the exercises that you use, so that you get a complete core workout, without stressing one group of muscles unduly. This a great workout to do with partners at a safe social distance. You can spice it up by having different partners choose the exercises for a given set, which can add variety and show you some new exercises to add to your routine. If you don’t have a loop that is suitable, try a couple of laps of a small park. While it may take some imagination to get going, getting outside and breaking up your strength routine is a great way to keep the upward progress of your training going!
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These three resources have a number of good core exercises for inspiration:
http://www.brianmac.co.uk/exercise.htm#cte
https://experiencelife.com/article/core-circuit-workout/
http://www.sport-fitness-advisor.com/circuit-training-exercises.html
Comments? Questions? Share your thoughts here on the RMI blog!
You should contact Maria Faires at My Active Nutrition. She trains mountaineers all the time including individuals climbing Everest, and has trained many for Rainer, etc. on her own and through Climb for Clean Air.
She is an excellent resource for your climbers and clients.
Posted by: George R Naumann on 10/23/2021 at 10:53 am
RMI Guide Adam Knoff originally wrote this for the training blog a few years ago. As we have all been more or less stuck in our homes, with life looming front and center for many, Adam's message again seemed apropos.
Today I was surprisingly asked a question that, as far as I can tell, is as old as human curiosity, parental affection and plain ol’ sibling rivalry. This may seem strange because I only have one child, and my somewhat unhinged three wingnut dogs can’t speak and honestly don’t care about the answer as long as they are fed and played with. As you may have guessed, the question so abruptly put on me this morning was: “daddy, who’s your favorite?” Harder to guess was, who asked it?
Things started normally enough; I made breakfast for my kiddo before packing him up and carting him off to preschool. I fed my dogs and chickens, cleaned the kitchen, and prepared for a day of light recreating before my afternoon duties began. It was when I entered the garage, home to my all important man cave and location of all my beloved fly fishing and climbing gear that things took a bizarre turn. Standing in front of me (I kid you not!) side by side, with puppy dog eyes looking up, stood my 12’6” Echo spey rod and my carbon fiber, oh so beautiful, Cobra ice tools. These sorts of things don’t just happen so I double checked my reality button. Dreaming? No I don’t think so. I have been up for three hours, had my coffee, and still felt the throb in my left big toe where I slammed it into the chest at the side of my bed. Ok, I’m awake. Drugged? No, I quit taking hallucinogens in high school and my wife, I think, genuinely cares about me. Then what? My two favorite activities in life, swinging flies for big trout with my spey rod and ice climbing, which is now doable in Bozeman, Montana, have come to a head. With a few free hours, my fishing rod and ice tools came alive and wanted me to pick favorites. Sheeesh! What’s a guy to do?
As time stood still, I began to reflect on the week long steelhead fishing trip I took just two weeks prior to the Grand Rhond, Clearwater, and Snake rivers. Ohhh, the joy of that trip made me quiver. It made me want to reach out, grab my spey rod child and declare my love for him. 28 inch ocean run rainbows on the swing, the thrill of the next hook up, not wearing a heavy pack; the reasons almost overwhelmed me. Yes, yes, you will always be my favorite!!! Then I saw my ice tools. Hyalite Canyon is in! I can’t wait for the thrill of running it out on newly formed thin ice over a stubby ice screw, waking up before the sun, and realizing this day was bound to hold everything but the predictable. Ohh, ice tools, you are my favorite, “let’s go climb something!” I think you understand my dilemma.
Parenting has taught me much in the five years that I’ve been at it. Love, patience and compassion are always at the forefront of dealing with children. Frustrations always arise. Liam spills my wine on the new rug, my spey rod whips bullets at the back of my head leaving welts the size of cheese curds on my scalp, ice tools rip out unexpectedly and send waves of sudden panic through me that make me want to puke. All part of the landscape I guess. So how did I answer the question, “who is your favorite”? Here I leaned on the invaluable lessons gleaned from seven years of blissful marriage. I compromised.
That day I took the ice tools out for their first climb of the season. I packed them up with the rest of my climbing gear all the while psyched I had just promised my fishing rod we would get out tomorrow. It’s a difficult web we weave, balancing work and play. I honestly felt troubled that I had to recreate two days in a row, climbing then fishing, but then again parenting is also about sacrifice.
As readers of the RMI Blog, most of you are probably cracking a smile but are also curious how this story is relevant to the mission of mountain climbing, training, and/or preparing for an upcoming goal. Here is how I connect the dots: Fishing for me is the yin to my climbing yang. It is a glorious mental escape which allows me to shelve my daily stresses and exist purely in the moment. Everyone needs this periodic meditation to reset and clear the mind. For many, exercise accomplishes the same release but regular exercise does not necessarily constitute “training”. The expectations I put on myself when climbing on my own are very high and the specific training schedule I follow can at times be demanding, painful, and sometimes unpleasant. Here is where we tie in sacrifice. Everyone’s life is managed by time. Somewhere on that big round clock is time you can utilize for yourself. If you have a goal of climbing a mountain, running a marathon, or bench pressing a Ford truck, you need to prioritize and then commit! Finding enjoyment and purpose in life comes when these commitments are made. Being a husband and father keep me grounded. Being a passionate climber and guide keep me psyched and motivated, and the hunt for big fish calms me down. In the big picture I think I have found some balance. Remember it takes the black and the white, the yin and the yang, to complete the circle. The web you weave and balance you seek are your own, but seek it with conviction and purpose and you will be just fine.
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Comments? Questions? Share your thoughts here on the RMI Blog!
Regarding the stair climbing interval training, would it be acceptable to use a steep hill as a substitute for stairs? Where I live there are several nice long steep hills that would be perfect for running, but no long flights of stairs.
Posted by: Rob on 3/6/2018 at 7:37 am
Any specific exercises you would recommend for the strength circuit training? I have an elliptical at home but no weight set to use. Are there some weight-free or gym-free strength circuits I can use as supplement?
Thanks,
Greg
Posted by: Greg Duncan on 1/12/2016 at 8:34 am
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