After battling and slogging our way through 7 months of building a fitness base we have officially completed the Base Period! We can now look forward to a solid month of climbing specific training, 2 weeks of tapering and finally our journey to the British Columbia interior to experience the Canadian Rockies first hand.

We are supposedly now in a much better position to conduct our sport specific training (Climbing) than we were in January. I’ll give this merit as our trip to Khatadin showed how much our fitness had improved but onsighting, ropework, and route finding still need work. After over-doing it a bit in terms of not allowing for enough recovery we’ve adjusted the weekly volumes to avoid injury.

To date, this program has been fairly well laid out giving specific instruction on how much and what type of training to do. The prescriptiveness drops off pretty hard at this point – the only real information is total volume for the week and the advice to go climbing in an alpine setting as much as you can. But as Matt suggested to me “What else can they really say?”. There are no campus board routines, finger strength work, or frenchies. Just get outside and climb.

From the start climbing has largely taken a backseat as we put our faith in the program to produce results, so we are both looking forward to spending more time doing the thing we love most (Other than spend time with our ladies of course).

Here is our weekly plan as it stands now:

• One strength session per week (Drop one)
• 1 session at the local bouldering gym (after work)
• 1 session at the local rope gym (after work AMLAP ((as many laps as possible))
• 1 long alpine day  (Saturdays)
• Fill in remainder with zone 1 aerobic training

Our volumes are as follow:

• Week 25: 12.8 hours
• Week 26: 12 hours
• Week 27: 11.2 hours
• Week 28: 11.2 hours

There have been some elating ups and dismal downs. The journey to date has been a rollercoaster of confidence, ability, hope and disillusionment. After taking a couple of weeks to let our bodies and minds recover we are primed for the final stretch. I found the last copy of the Bugaboos Elaho guide (which is apparently out of print now) existed in the hands of the Alpine Club of Canada, now on it’s way to Halifax!

Buy Training for the New Alpinism: A Manual for the Climber as Athlete by Steve House and Scott Johnstone here:
Training for the New Alpinism: A Manual for the Climber as Athlete

Happy training,

James