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Hello again. After a rest day yesterday at Ama Dablam Base Camp, where we practiced some of the rope techniques we'll implement on our ascent, today we're in a holding pattern for the weather. Our camps are stocked thanks to the help of our Sherpa, and we're ready to go when the time is right. In the meantime, we continue to execute expedition life; patience at it's best. RMI Guide Elías de Andres Martos

Buenos Dias Bloglandia,

I’m sure many of you out there have been gnawing on your steering wheels and passing up Instagram to check on today’s happenings of the Ecuador skills seminar. Well, wait no longer because the moment has arrived. 

Beginning with last nights dinner (food and drink report) the team all gathered around a big table in a classic Ecuadorian restaurant, sharing stories and laughs eventually waiting for Dan’s guinea pig to arrive, his main course.  After realizing it didn’t really taste like chicken, we all focused back into our potatoes and meat happy we didn’t follow the adventurous Dan’s lead. 

Come morning we all returned to the table for breakfast while preparing for our bus ride to the giant volcano just out of the city where our first team climb would take place.  

After 15 minutes of solid Quito traffic we arrived at the trailhead.  Except here, as it should be on all mountains, the trailhead is actually the ticket office to the cable car waiting to zip us up the first 3,000 feet so our legs won’t get too tired.  No one botched getting into the moving car so we were off to a good start.  

With swirling clouds and occasional views of the city thousands of feet below, we all made quick and steady progress up to the 14,000 foot mark.  Soon afterwards my GPS began to rock a lady Gaga song as we broke the 15,000 foot barrier, marking the altitude PR for half the team.  Thirty minutes later we were all giving high 5’s on the summit of our first real mountain.   Pichincha Rucu, 15,300 feet!

The descent was uneventful except for a hummingbird which almost flew full speed into my face but crisis averted due to my lightning reflexes.  Maybe that’s exaggerated.  

Anyhoo, the team did great and gets the green light from both Hannah and me to climb again tomorrow.  I expect the same results barring anything loco!!

If Yellowstone wasn’t enough, give Ozark a try.  It will get you through until tomorrow.

RMI Guide Adam Knoff

A very pleasant day of walking up the Vacas Valley put our team at Casa de Piedra, the last camp before basecamp. The team is doing very well, enjoying the meditative beauty of this walk. We had just enough cloud and wind to keep the heat at bay and still have a stunning first view of the mountain as we rolled into camp. Tomorrow we'll get closer still and say goodbye to our trusty mules and take the loads from then on. But not without a rest day to set ourselves up for success. Buenas noches, RMI Guide Jake Beren

On The Map

Today was the day! We woke up early to clear skies and absent winds. A first in over a week! We walked out of camp 2 at 2:30 hoping to get ahead of the numerous climbers that had stacked up waiting for the same weather window. Unfortunately, we weren’t early enough to beat all the other climbers out the door and ran into a fair amount of traffic. However, the extra traffic couldn’t spoil the perfect weather or the stoke emanating from the climbers, all of whom had been chomping at the bit for a chance to climb all week. The route felt extra steep this year, but the climbing was aided by good quality snow for much of the upper route leading to the summit. After nine hours of climbing and dodging other climbers, five out of seven of us stood on the summit of Aconcagua, the highest mountain outside of the Himalaya. It was a perfect summer day with almost no wind and clear skies for epic views all around. After enjoying our hard won success for just a few minutes, believe it or not it can be hard to breathe at 22,841 feet, we turned downhill and continued walking downhill all the way into basecamp around 7:15pm. An absolute epic of a day for those that managed to climb to the top. Despite the sore muscles and blistered toes, the crew was smiles all around the dinner table sharing stories from the day. Tomorrow we walk out to the trailhead and make our way back to Mendoza for a much needed shower and a good night sleep in a proper bed.

Congrats to all those who summited! And good luck on your next adventure!

RMI Guide Nick Scott

After enjoying a day of training at Ingraham Flats, 11,200ft, yesterday, the Five Day Climb June 29 - 3 July led by RMI Guides Steve Gately and Emma Lyddan put their training to good use. The teams climbed 4,500' from Camp Muir to the summit of Mt. Rainier this morning.  Steve reported a pleasant day on the mountain with a bit of a breeze towards the summit.  The teams began their descent from the crater rim just before 7:30 am en route to Camp Muir.  Once back at camp they will have a short break to repack before continuing the remaining 4,500' to Paradise.

Congratulations to today's climbing teams!

Hi, this is Brent along with Leon and Lindsay calling from 17,000’ camp on the West Buttress here on Mt. McKinley. We have just gotten up to our high camp here today after a grueling but a great climb in which everyone climbed super well. Right now it’s about 10 o’clock and the guides are just getting into their sleeping bags after getting dinner and filling up water bottles and all that good stuff. Currently the conditions are pretty good, a little windy just 20 mph winds. We are in a bit of a white out, a little snow blowing but not too bad. We are up here now, the forecast isn’t for horrible conditions but not bluebird, perfect conditions either. And that’s ok for us because we wouldn’t mind a rest day after our big climb up from the 14,000’ camp this morning. We’ll be waking up early to check the weather just in case we have a perfect day. If that’s the case and there’s no wind then we are going to go for the summit tomorrow morning. So wish us luck on that. Otherwise we’ll be here and we have plenty of supplies to last us through any storm that might come our way. That is all from 17,000 foot camp. RMI Guide Brent Okita

On The Map

Clear skies and light winds greeted the Four Day Team on the summit of Mt. Rainier. RMI Guide Jess Matthews called in to let us know the team reached the summit at 6:05 am. They spent some time on the summit before starting their descent. The team will be back at Rainier Basecamp this afternoon to celebrate! 

Congratulations to today's team!  

Wednesday, June 27, 2019 - 9:55 PM PT Mission successful! We cached gear up at 17k high camp. The morning started out pretty warm (for 14,000 ft in AK). We made our way up to the fixed lines. For our first time up the fixed lines, the group did exceptionally well. We made our way up to the ridge at 16,000 ft and caught some wind. We decided to keep going up since everyone was staying warm and relatively comfortable. Although we never lost the wind, we made our way all the way up to high camp. I think our climbers were too distracted by the incredible climbing along the ridge to care about a bit of a breeze. We said hi to Mike Walter's team at 17k, cached our stuff, and then headed back down to our camp. After a 10 hour day, our climbers (and maybe guides) have earned a well deserved rest day tomorrow. We have been saving a breakfast burrito meal for such an occasion. Goodnight! RMI Team Siete

This is the second of a two part series looking at the benefits of improving rates of fat metabolism to prevent or delay bonking in endurance sports. For week one of the series, click here.

Last week, we introduced the idea of training or developing fat metabolism to preserve glycogen stores, utilize our body’s largest energy store, and ultimately prevent “bonking” while climbing. This week we’ll look at how to accomplish it!

There are two main components that we can alter to affect our body’s use of fat: diet and training. The two work hand in hand – a change in diet without a focus on aerobic training volume is of little use, as anaerobic workouts require glycogen by definition, and aerobic training volume while continuing to eat a high carbohydrate diet will cause little change in your body’s metabolic pathways.

Diet

The key to training fat metabolism is to adjust your diet to take in more calories from fat than carbohydrates. This doesn’t mean you need to take in more calories overall, but instead, shift the nutritional balance of your diet. These diets have taken on the moniker LCHF or low carb high fat in studies and the media. There are a number of specific diets out there that align with this description (the paleo diet, the Atkins diet) but the specific diet is less important for the purposes of an athlete than the nutritional balance. Some articles suggest about 15% of your daily calories coming from carbohydrates, which is a significant shift for those of us that have trained under the paradigm of carbohydrate loading!

Changing our diet to make carbohydrates more scarce, and fats more plentiful accomplishes several things that will ultimately help our fat oxidation rates. The first is that when sugar is present in the bloodstream at high levels, insulin is released to control rates of blood sugar—extremely high rates of blood sugar are treated as a toxin by the body—and consequently insulin is a fat oxidation inhibitor, as the body wants to burn off the excess sugar and uses the opportunity. If we keep our levels of blood sugar lower with diet, our body releases less insulin, and fat oxidation rates are not suppressed.

Second, while sugar is easily transported across cell membranes and into cells, fats require transport by specific enzymes. Reducing our blood sugar and allowing fat oxidation to take place stimulates the production of these fat transport enzymes, so that fat can be brought into the cells at higher rates and utilized.

Finally, mitochondria are responsible for oxidizing fat and producing the ATP that fuel our cells. By reducing our carbohydrate fuel and relying more on fat, we stimulate the growth of mitochondria in the cells. Studies of athletes that are efficient fat oxidizers vs. sugar burners show a significant increase in mitochondrial density in the muscle cells.

Training Type

Our body is able to burn fat as fuel during aerobic exercise – those workouts and efforts that stay at level 3 or below. Once we cross the anaerobic threshold into lactate production, glycogen is the only fuel source that the body uses for energy production, so the stimulus to oxidize fat is gone. Thus fat oxidation is best trained during an aerobic base or volume phase, when the preponderance of workouts focus on relatively lower intensity, higher volume (hours or miles).

This isn’t a process that can be changed overnight. The cellular development that is required to shift your metabolic pathways takes time and sustained stimulation to change. With dedication to diet and training, studies show marked improvement in rates of fat oxidation after 8 to 12 weeks, so stick with it!

It’s often tempting as athletes to take things too far: if more of something is better, even more of it must be better still. Fat oxidation alone isn’t enough to keep up with our energy demands when we are training heavily for a climb. Therefore, maintaining some carbohydrates in your diet is important. Think of it as replenishing the fuel you spend: a workout of harder intensity will deplete your glycogen stores more; a 4 hour workout will require some carbohydrate fuel intake during the workout to prevent depleting glycogen stores as well. For those who want to really dig into the numbers, Alan Couzens has a calculator for balancing your nutritional intake depending on the phase of your training plan, hours, etc. It is designed for ironman triathletes, but can provide some interesting numbers for us as climbers as well!

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For more reading Alan Couzens has a number of interesting blogs on the subject. A good one to start with is Improving Fat Oxidation. Also see Deborah Schulman's Fuel on Fat for the Long Run.

Questions? Comments? Share your thoughts here on the RMI Blog!

Aconcagua 2022! Yes, it’s happening. Covid delayed this trip by a full year but we are all in Argentina, healthy, happy and ready to climb.
I must thank the hard work of Jeff, Autumn, Jack and Luke for working out all the logistics of my covid related delays and making sure that this trip didn’t stop before it ever got started. The whole team is now together in the town of Uspallata, spending tonight in a beautiful hotel a few miles outside Aconcagua National Park. If the weather report holds, we will fly to Base Camp mid-day tomorrow. But until then, we are enjoying more of the friendly people, tasty food and great wine of Argentina.
Our 3 Guardsman, Alden, Brett and Chip are raising money during our climb. We welcome everyone following along with our adventure and thanks for your support and generosity.

RMI Guides Walter Hailes & Jack Delaney