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Today was officially a rest day. Our team had different definitions of what that means but all in all we are going to bed content.

If you haven’t already guessed we had breakfast at 7:30 am, drank tea and coffee until 9 then prepared to go on a short walk.  Being a lazy day, three out of the five departed by 10:15 while two others stayed back to enjoy some down time in the lodge. The weather started cloudy but improved by late morning offering new views of Makalu, the world’s fifth highest mountain and the north side of Ama Dablam which we have been viewing from its more popular side on the west.  

Two members of the team hiked to a small summit at 16,600' for some extra acclimatizing while the others went back to the lodge for lunch.  

Overall it was a pleasant day here in Pheriche which should set us up for our next stretch to Lobuche tomorrow.   

We hope all is well back home.  

--RMI Guide Adam Knoff 

The Expedition Skills Seminar - Muir September 16 - 21 led by RMI Guides Matias Francis and Seth Burns have wrapped up an excellent week of training at Camp Muir.  The team enjoyed stellar weather and were able to complete their seminar training, ice climbing up to AI6+, alpine bouldering and candy bar snow protection tests (you will have to ask them) and more.  The team will descend from Camp Muir today and return to Rainier BaseCamp for a final celebration.  Nice work everyone!

Photo: Matias Francis

After some long days of walking and training, the Emmon's seminar led by RMI guide Jack Delaney reached the summit of Mt. Rainier. The team will enjoy their descent to Camp Schurman and a nice dinner before resting up for their walk out of the backcountry and drive back to Ashford tomorrow afternoon. Nice work team!

High Intensity Interval Training, often referred to popularly as HIIT training, have been featured in a few recent studies that concluded that a short HIIT workout was as or more effective at promoting cardiovascular health than steady state activity. The first paragraph of a recent New York Times article reads:

Think you’re too busy to work out? We have the workout for you. In minutes, high-intensity interval training (HIIT) will have you sweating, breathing hard and maximizing the health benefits of exercise without the time commitment. Best of all, it’s scientifically proven to work.

Despite the recent attention, interval training is not anything new to seasoned athletes and coaches who have understood the benefits of repetitive high intensity workouts for a long time. Many of the recent studies have focused on previously sedentary people trying to improve basic cardiovascular health, rather than on elite athletes striving towards a performance goal. With that said, we have and continue to encourage climbers to utilize interval training (by it’s nature high intensity) as part of a well-designed training program.

Interval training can accomplish a wide array of tasks and works best when the focus of a workout is clear:

Longer intervals, from 5 to 8 minutes, at 70 – 85% of max heart rate work to improve the lactate threshold, the body’s ability to metabolize and clear lactate build up from muscle cells, increasing the amount of work that the body can perform sustainably. A good example is an elite level marathon runner, who is able to sub six-minute miles for over two hours during a race. The intensity that they are working at is very high, yet the body is able to sustain it over a very prolonged period of time.

Shorter intervals, from 20 seconds to a few minutes, performed at 85 – 95% of max heart rate (very intense!) increase the body’s anaerobic threshold, it’s ability to perform work while in oxygen deficit. Think Olympic swimmer in the 50-meter butterfly: the intensity that they race at surpasses the body’s ability to clear lactic acid and to provide enough oxygen to the muscle cells for them to continue that pace for a long period of time. The race is very short, however, and for that 20-something seconds, their muscles are able to put out an immense amount of power in oxygen deficit.

It may seem as though interval training isn’t as applicable to our sport of mountaineering. We tend not to sustain the very high levels of output, but instead operate for far longer periods at moderate intensity. It is the very definition of an endurance sport. Interval training provides other physiological adaptations however that go beyond the abilities of the skeletal muscles. Interval training is shown to increase cardiac output, by increasing the size of the left ventricle, the stroke volume and the overall contractility of the heart. Increased cardiac output supplies more blood to muscle cells, delivering more oxygen and removing more waste. Additionally, interval training has been shown to increase the size and density of mitochondria in the muscle cells. Mitochondria use oxygen to convert glucose to ATP (the cells’ energy source). Both of these adaptations help endurance athletes go longer, faster and with less effort, and ultimately help us in the mountains.

Interval training is harder on your body than traditional steady state workouts and requires longer to recover from as well. Therefore, too heavy of a focus on interval training can lead to overtraining and injury. More of a good thing isn’t necessarily better. It’s important to realize that a good training plan maintains a balance of high intensity workouts and lower intensity steady state workouts.

As part of the recent HIIT hype, people have championed the fact that HIIT gets more done in less time, even as little as 10 minutes. This may be true for an average person whose goal is to improve overall cardiac health, but for athletes working towards goals in the mountains, remember that there are no short cuts. Time invested in your training will lead to a more enjoyable and successful climb.

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Questions? Comments? Share your thoughts here!

Climbing is a long and demanding endeavor, with a typical summit day on Rainier or Denali stretching for twelve to fifteen hours. Every time you take a step, your muscles require energy in the form of ATP to be able to fire. ATP is created within the muscle cells by mitochondria from two main nutrients: carbohydrates and fat.

For many years, athletes have focused on their carbohydrate intake as the key to performance. Carbohydrates provide a readily accessible and easily digestible energy source for your body, which is the reason that they are the main content in most sports foods; just look at the labels of shot blocks, Gu’s, bars, energy drinks, and the like, and you will see a heavy focus on sugar. There is a good reason for this: your body has a limited ability to digest food while exercising (digestion requires energy of its own), and carbohydrates and sugars are the easiest to digest, requiring little to be done to the glucose components before they enter the bloodstream and are carried to the cells.

The main issue with a reliance on carbohydrates is that your body has the ability to store a finite supply of glucose in the muscle cells and the liver in the form of glycogen. For trained athletes that are efficient with their energy usage, that store still only lasts for about 2 hours of sustained hard effort. If you aren’t familiar with the term “bonking,” it’s that feeling when your performance drops off a cliff; you don’t feel like you are working that hard aerobically, but you can’t possibly go any faster or harder. You’ve run through those glycogen stores and your muscles are out of fuel. Eating while you exercise can help to delay bonking, but your body can only process about 250 Kcal of sugar per hour, far less than you expend over the same period. Even though we are replenishing our sugar fuel, we dip further and further into those reserves as summit day goes on. At the same time, even the leanest among us carries over 24 hours of energy in the form of fat stores. Wouldn’t it be nice to recruit those stores while you are climbing?

Fatty acids are the most energy dense nutrients in our diet and our body stores them readily. They create more ATP per unit than sugars, and our body’s ability to store them can leave us with a huge reserve energy supply. The problem is that when fatty acids and sugars are both present, our metabolisms preference burning the sugars for energy. Julia Goedecke is a sports scientist who has been examining the influence of fat oxidation (metabolism) in endurance athletes. In examining rates of fat oxidation in athletes at different intensity levels, she found a vast difference in overall rates of fat oxidation. Some burned nearly no fat at rest, while others metabolized nearly 100% fat at rest, but while there were differences in overall rates of fat metabolism, those who metabolized more fat at rest derived more of their energy from fat at all intensity levels too. This would suggest that if we can train our metabolism to derive a greater percentage of our energy from fat, it will continue to do that as we up our intensity climbing, and we will use our sugar reserves more slowly, and hopefully avoid the dreaded “bonk!”

Now that we’ve introduced the idea of developing your fat metabolism, stay tuned next week as we get into the details about how to accomplish it.

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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.

Questions? Comments? Do you have experience applying LCHF nutrition to endurance sports? Share your thoughts here on the RMI Blog!

Today's Mt. Rainier Summit Climb teams, led by RMI Guides Pete Van Deventer and Walter Hailes, turned due to hazardous route conditions.  The teams ascended to Ingraham Flats to watch the sunrise before descending back to Camp Muir where they had breakfast.  They left Camp Muir around 9:45 a.m. and are working their way back to Paradise.

This morning came as both a blessing and a curse.  Most of our previous evenings have transitioned nicely from our enjoyable group dinner into bed time which we naturally gravitate towards around 8:30 or 9.  On paper this trip offers yak loads of down time and should, if played right, give each of us a solid 9 hours of shuteye.   

But we all know plans, as perfect as they may seem, play out far differently than the spreadsheet says they should.  Just ask Vladimir Putin about that.   

But thankfully none of us are crazy, demented humans and simply get a bit sidetracked with issues such as stomach funkiness, altitude weirdness and in the case of last night, a pack barking dogs.  There were only four of them, I know because I chased them around the village of Lobuche at 2 am with rocks and a ski pole, but nothing would make them stop.  We were sleeping at an altitude of 16,000 feet so it wasn’t the easiest anyway but never had I heard nonstop dog shouting for 8 hours straight.   So this morning was a blessing because they finally shut up when the sun hit but a curse because I was tired and cold and just wanted to stay in bed.  But we had miles to cover!

After our standard breakfast, complete with dog stories, admissions of no sleep and an eagerness to get on the trail, we slung our packs and followed our Sherpa leader Dawa.  The path started easy but soon steepened and became a lot more rugged when we began to cross a small glacier.   Our objective was the last village of Gorak Shep, before getting to Everest Base Camp tomorrow.   A steady three hour stroll landed us on target with views of Nuptse and Everest dominating the views up ahead.   The day was perfect and we knew our hike up a ridge line to a small summit called Kala Patar was going to be stunning.   

We powered down some lunch and headed out.  The trail head was conveniently located two minutes from our lodge so before we could say yak cheese we were head up.  The summit sits at 18,500 feet which we achieved an hour and a half after leaving.  The vistas were as good as advertised and no matter how man times you see it, one can’t help but to be blown away by the size and power of the Everest cirque.  We could also see Base Camp far below and got excited to go there tomorrow.   

By 3 the clouds began to move up the valley, like they do every day at that time so it motivated us to descend and go get some tea.  

Now we are resting before dinner and our schedule horizontal time.  This isn’t planned, it’s a product of challenging days and a demanding environment.   Plus it keeps us healthy.   

Stay tuned for our journey to EBC tomorrow.   

RMI Guide Adam Knoff

The Mt. Rainier Summit Climb team reached the summit this morning just after 7 am.  The team, led by RMI Guide Jake Beren, experienced beautiful weather with sun above the cloud deck that was settled around 7,500'.

Congratulations to the team!