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Friday, February 16, 2023 | 5:38 PT

This morning everyone reported having slept soundly. As it turns out, even climbing half of Antisana is still hard. We're recovering and now looking forward to Chimborazo, which has been giving us quite the show this evening. We're staying at the Chimborazo Lodge, an historic mountain lodge run by Marco Cruz, a climbing legend in Ecuador. It sits at about 13000' right at the base of the southwest flank of the mountain. There is no cell reception and no wifi, giving us a chance to unplug and hone our focus towards the task at hand, climbing another massive volcano. With any luck and a lot of trying hard we may have a chance to visit a truly majestic summit. Stay tuned!

-- RMI Guide Dustin Wittmier

The All-Women’s Climb led by RMI Guide Kirra Antenucci reached the summit of Mt. Rainier on a clear and beautiful day. The team took on all the challenges the Disappointment Cleaver route has to offer in the late summer and stood on the summit at 7:15 am.

Congratulations Team!

The much celebrated 3G phone service is not so robust down here in the Rhododendron forest at 12,400 ft above sea level, so please pardon the slight lapse in trip coverage as we pass through these benighted zones. All is well with Bill, Sara, Dave and Lam Babu Sherpa. We moved easily up from Namche yesterday, enjoying very light traffic on the trails. We seem to be a few days ahead of most of the big Everest teams and we conveniently flew into Lukla during a brief weather-window that few trekking groups were able to take advantage of, so the end result is that we have this part of the gorgeous Khumbu Valley to ourselves. Conditions have mostly been cool and cloudy, although we've been granted grand views of Everest and Lhotse and Ama Dablam. The temps have been perfect for walking and we took advantage yesterday by cruising up the 1,700 ft Thyangboche Hill in one continuous push. A couple of cool and fizzy drinks out in front of the palatial Thyangboche Monastery and then we completed the day by descending a few hundred feet to Deboche. Last night was an easy one as we enjoyed a fine dinner in a comfy wood-stove heated dining room. The McGahan clan showed each other how to beat the stuffing out of their climbing guide at Yahtzee and then we each turned in for the night... beginning to delight in the loft of our expedition sleeping bags. We'll spend tonight here as well, letting our bodies catch up to the altitude and enjoying a last day (for the next eight weeks) among trees. Best, RMI Guide Dave Hahn

On The Map

Fit to Climb: Week 11 Schedule

DAY	WORKOUT	TOTAL TIME	DIFFICULTY
1	Rainier Dozen / Easy Hiking ( 30 min)	42 min.	Medium
2	1-2-3 Stair Workout x 4	72 min.	Very Hard
3	Rainier Dozen / Rest	12 min.	Recovery
4	Rainier Dozen / High Intensity Stair Interval Training (50 min)	62 min.	Very Hard
5	Rainier Dozen / Rest	12 min.	Recovery
6	Rainier Dozen / Cross Training	60 min.	Medium
7	Rainier Dozen / Hike (6 hrs, 15 pounds of pack weight)	372 min.	Medium
	Total	10 hrs 32 mins

BRIEFING This week’s weekend hike is 6 hours and your Day 2 stair workout will bump up to 4 sets of the 1-2-3 Stair Workout. Be sure to stay focused on your sleep and food intake this week, you’ll be burning a lot of energy and you want to give your body the rest and fuel it needs to recover from these workouts! DESCRIPTIONS OF WORKOUTS Day 1: Rainier Dozen + Easy Hiking (30 Minutes) Today’s hike is a recovery workout and you can always substitute it with a different activity, such as running, biking or swimming. The important thing is to move at a moderate pace for 30 to 45 minutes. The pace can be conversational and you do not need to be dripping with sweat at the end of the workout. Day 2: Stair Interval Training: The 1-2-3 Workout Warm up with some moderate paced stair climbing. Then, make three efforts: one moderately hard, one very hard, and one close to maximal effort, with rest periods in between. This may look like: • 2 minutes at 50-65% intensity, followed by 3 minutes of rest (1 minute standing, 2 minutes descending) • 2 minutes at 65-80% intensity, followed by 3 minutes of rest • 2 minutes at 85-90% intensity, followed by 3 minutes of rest Repeat this sequence four times. Day 3: Rainier Dozen / Rest Begin your day with the Rainier Dozen. Feel free to take another 30 to 60 minutes of light exercise if you feel like it (a brisk walk is a great option). If you feel tired, today is a good opportunity be good to take a complete rest day instead. Listen to your body. Day 4: Rainier Dozen + Stair Interval Training (50 Minutes) After the Rainier Dozen, warm up for about 10 minutes, and then climb up and down a set of stairs, at a consistent pace, for about 40 to 50 minutes. Cool down with some stretching. You don’t need to carry a pack on your stair interval training, the focus in this workout is on speed and intensity. Day 5: Rainier Dozen / Rest Begin your day with the Rainier Dozen. Feel free to take another 30 to 60 minutes of light exercise if you feel like it (a brisk walk is a great option). If you feel tired, today is a good opportunity be good to take a complete rest day instead. Listen to your body. Day 6: Rainier Dozen / Cross Training (60 mins) Warm up with the Rainier Dozen and then spend an hour in some moderately vigorous activity as cross training (find out more about cross training here). Listen to your body, and have fun with it. Day 7: 6 Hour Hike (15 pounds of weight) Warm up with the Rainier Dozen, and then hike for 6 hours, or about 10 - 12 miles. Be sure to hike at an even pace. Be sure to prepare yourself for this hike. It may require extra food and water and ensure that your socks are comfortable and your feet are well taken care of. Consider taking an extra pair of socks to change later in the day if your feet are tired or wet. SUMMARY It’s normal to feel that you are pushing the limits with this week’s workouts. You are ... and you’ll do well to let friends and family know that this is an important time for you. Remember that during this phase you are intentionally going to the edge which means that you are taking risks. Peak training requires meticulous attention to restoration and recovery. This is not a time to be burning the candle at both ends. Ample sleep, quality food and good relaxation are your allies when you challenge your body like this. But, the benefits are worth it! - John Colver Have a question? See the Fit To Climb FAQ for explanations of specific exercises and general pointers to help you through the Fit To Climb Program. John Colver is a longtime climber, former mountain guide, and certified personal trainer with the American Council of Exercise. Colver introduced outdoor fitness classes to athletic clubs throughout the greater Puget Sound region before creating his adventX brand. Currently, adventX leads training programs in Seattle and Colver presents clinics on outdoor fitness at companies such as Microsoft, Boeing, the American Lung Association, and REI. Colver lives in Seattle, and is working on his second book, Fit to Climb - a 16 week Mount Rainier Fitness Program.

Day 16-17

Waking into Namche this round through was much different than the first time.  Despite our sizable group, we were by no means the largest on the trail.  

This place is now in full swing with Everest climbers, international trekking teams and yak trains going up the valley towards Everest Base Camp.  

Even though the traffic resembled more of a US interstate than a single-track trail, we were pleased to land back at camp de base where we were welcomed with hot showers, Nepal Ice “extra strong beer” and the comforts of nice rooms with personal bathrooms. The hike was roughly 8 miles from Pangboche consisting of many ups and downs but nothing the seasoned team couldn’t handle.    

After a normal 7:30 breakfast the following morning, we set our sights on Lukla, home of the infamous dead-end runway and gateway to Everest.   Eleven miles and 6 hours after leaving Namche we strolled in with time to spare before dinner so naps all around became the team activity.   The clouds were thick as pea soup by 7 pm so our flight status was a bit unknown.   With fingers crossed we went to bed. When our alarms ripped us awake at 5 am the disheartening presence of this fog was still lingering out the window.  

We made our way anyhow, walking to the airport to check in and hope for the best. After waiting for ten hours to fly on the way in, we were not hoping for a repeat.   Two hours in we were beginning to get a bit worried and then the first plane landed.   Ten minutes later we were loaded up and, in our way, back to Kathmandu!   

Now we are clean, fed and content, celebrating a fun and successful trip. I can’t thank this team enough for a great few weeks in Nepal.   

This wraps up the Everest Base Camp and Lobuche expedition. Thanks for following!  

RMI Guides Adam Knoff and Hannah Smith and Team

Due to overhead hazards, the Mt. Rainier Summit Climb, led by RMI Guides Mike King and Taylor Bickford, turned at Ingraham Flats.  They reported smoky skies and a busy route.  After packing up at Camp Muir, the team began their descent to Paradise at 9:00 a.m.

The Four Day Climb August 27 - 30 led by RMI Guides Joe Hoch and Henry Coppolillo reached the summit of Mt. Rainier around 6:15 am today.  It's a beautiful and clear day on the mountain.  The teams enjoyed an hour in the summit crater before starting their descent.  They will return to Camp Muir for a short break before continuing down to Paradise. Their program will conclude this afternoon at Rainier BaseCamp.

Congratulations to today's climbers!

The Five-Day teams led by Steve Gately and Matias Francis enjoyed a beautiful walk to the Ingraham Flats this morning. The team decided not to climb due to unfavorable route conditions but enjoyed two days of great weather and lots of hands-on training. The teams will pack up camp and head downhill this morning. We expect the teams back at Basecamp in the early afternoon.

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!

Before sunup on the 24th of May, the RMI Everest climbing team left Camp III at 24,000 ft on the Lhotse Face, bound for a shot at the top of Mount Everest. The only trouble was that everybody else on the mountain had the same idea at the very same time. We were shocked to see how many climbers were already on the fixed lines. Estimates ran to as many as two hundred, although it was later figured that a fair proportion were simply doing carries to the upper camps and weren't intent on staying at Camp IV or climbing for the summit. Suffice to say that we couldn't set our own pace for climbing, but eventually, by keeping going when other teams elected to take breaks, we made it into the open above the difficult Yellow Band at 25,000 ft. The Geneva Spur didn't present a significant barrier to our reaching 26,000 ft by late morning. There we found a steady wind and our Sherpa team building tents on the South Col. It was easy enough for our team to get in and start re-hydrating and resting for a summit climb, but it was tougher trying to get a read on the conditions that climb would be undertaken in. A quick count revealed about fifty other tents pitched on the Col, and a few impromptu meetings with other climb leaders decided us that perhaps in excess of a hundred climbers would be going for the summit that night. The winds continued and the latest forecasts confirmed that a ribbon of 50 mile-per-hour air would still be menacing the mountain for a further 24 hours. We looked at the steep triangular face and saw that its middle third would entail loose rock with a good chance for some of that getting kicked loose onto teams below. So there were three things that didn't work well for us… rock, crowds and wind. We made preparations for a climb, but we also began to explore the possibility of delaying 24 hours and shooting for May 26th as a summit day. We each knew that we'd be putting all our eggs in one final basket by doing such a thing. We had resources for such a delay, but we didn't have unlimited resources. If we skipped the 25th, with its known problems, we'd have to take the 26th with its unknown problems… or go home without a summit. We tried to hedge our bets, telling our Sherpa team that we'd still prepare to get up in the night unless the winds were still blowing. At 10 PM, long after the other teams had left for the top and were to be seen as a Christmas parade all up and down the Triangular Face, the winds were still strong. We committed to the next night. It was a slightly surreal day, as always, hanging out at 8000 meters on May 25th. We wondered whether we'd missed our shot as the neighboring teams came down with a summit under their belts and not too many bad stories to tell, after all. Yes it had been windy and cold and crowded, but most seemed to have done ok and there certainly weren't new tragedies to report. Finally, in the late afternoon of the 25th, the winds began to die down. That was encouraging, but our headcount for the coming summit day was less encouraging. We'd assumed we'd be up the hill with perhaps fifty climbers, but as we prepared dinner and turned in, we'd become aware of about 80 or 90. And nearly all of these climbers were leaving quite early for the top (as in about 7 or 8 PM). There was no way to beat them out the door without simply aiming to summit in the middle of the night (a bitterly cold and slightly unrewarding proposition). We'd set out afterward and take our chances on being able to pass people when we needed to. Our alarms rang at 10 PM and we ate, drank and geared up for two hours in delightful stillness. The South Col was dead calm and quiet with the wind absent and the vast majority of the climbers already well up toward the balcony. Lam Babu Sherpa would stay at the South Col, just in case, while Tsherring, Kadji and Passang accompanied the four person climbing team. We set out at midnight and four hours later topped the balcony in perfect conditions. A half hour later we experienced an incredibly colorful sunrise and things got slightly easier, even as we took on the steep slopes below the South Summit. At the South Summit around 7 AM we crested to see an amazing and at first, frightening, phenomenon. There were at least a hundred climbers lined up waiting to descend the summit ridge. At any given point there seemed to be about 8 climbers simultaneously on the Hillary Step and dozens upon dozens on the tricky rock features between us and the step. We decided we had no choice but to sit and wait patiently in the small dip past the South Summit. There was no practical way that we could pass so many climbers on such awkward terrain. The wait turned into an hour-and-a-half, which made each of us quite nervous… since such a thing is very much the definition of not being in control of one's climb… but then we each had to remind ourselves that conditions were benign. There was zero wind, the sun was shining and there was plenty of time left in the day. Also, we salivated at the prospect of having the mountain to ourselves after the long conga line of climbers passed on their way down. Finally we stood up, shouldered our packs and shook off the cold. It didn't take long then to scramble across the ridge, up the Hillary Step and onto the summit. It turned out that three or four climbers were on the summit from the Tibet side, but that didn't stop us from thoroughly enjoying about 55 minutes on top. We had unlimited views and a very happy team as we connected with Lam back at the South Col, Yuberaj at Camp II and Mark Tucker down at Basecamp. The descent took just a matter of hours, since there was virtually no traffic left high on the mountain. We came back into the South Col feeling satisfied, but also knowing that the big work of the day was yet-to-come. We needed to pack up camp and descend a mile to ABC in the Western Cwm. With heavy packs and hot down suits we slid down the ropes for hours and hours. Past the Geneva Spur, past the Yellow Band, past Lhotse Camp IV and Everest Camp III… down to the part of the face that suddenly seemed to be melting under our very crampons. In the space of two days, spring had turned to summer and it seemed the climbing season was supposed to be over. We were greatly relieved to hit the bottom of the wall in safety and to trudge into ABC just after sunset. Morning still held a little anxiety for us as we each knew we'd have to successfully wend our way through the Khumbu Icefall one more time. The word was that it was crumbling and collapsing and heating up. And that turned out to be true, but we saw that the Icefall Doctors were doing a magnificent job keeping a route cobbled together through the mess. We took our time and placed our feet carefully and eventually hit all of the comfort and safety of base camp by mid-afternoon on the 27th of May. The 28th was shower-and-pack-and-keep-fingers-crossed-day for the climbing team. Showering and packing for the obvious reasons, but keeping fingers crossed because the Sherpa team still had a final day of working in the Icefall to get all the gear down. Their strength and skill and our finger-crossing worked because they emerged victorious and unscathed by mid-day. The climb was over. By the morning of the 29th, we'd heard that there were long delays for those attempting to get fixed-wing flights from Lukla. The monsoon had worked its way into the lower valleys already and the weather was sloppy with cloud and rain. Instead we arranged a series of memorable helicopter rides from base camp to Kathmandu. There was plenty of hurry-up and wait… there was awe at the beauty of mountains and gorges seen from the air, there was sheer terror at the power of thunderstorms on small aircraft, there was gratitude for the skill of the pilots we'd watched performing miraculous rescues all season long… and at the end of the day yesterday, there was an easy dinner in a Kathmandu restaurant and a comfy hotel bed. Soon there will be home. Thank You Very Much for keeping track of our expedition. Best Regards, RMI Guide Dave Hahn