How to get in shape for alpine ascents whilst having 2 kids, a full time job, commitments, birthdays, holidays, and other bullshit to suck your time and money away?

Luckily, most pathways for alpine fitness are not as hard and fast as Mr House’s book calls for. I have been able to take time off circuit to focus on my kids, my wife, my personal objectives, and my career goals that have so far financed this life on the outer edges of the climbing lifestyle.

Now, unfortunately for many of you coastal, tide dependent, zero elevation, optimists… I live a whopping 1100ft above sea level. The physiological advantage imbued to me by training at these altitudes can not be properly imbued to hopeful athletes striving to use my programs at an elevation that makes sense to them.. its just too high and too steep an ascent from those coastal elevations to have any meaning to the aspiring mountaineer.

Now the obvious choice for training to climb mountains is to climb mountains. Hike big hills with steep ascents. For those of us who don’t have the appropriate mountains nearby, or the time to add 3 hours of round trip driving on top of a 4-5 hour workout twice a week; creativity is required to make your legs believe they’re climbing mountains. Luckily legs are dumb dumbs and building leg muscle and a strong aerobic base can be done at home as it turns out. For my training I used a treadmill with a 10% max incline at home and occasionally made it to the treadmill at my gym with a 15% incline. The bigger the incline the more it’s going to build up those legs and more closely resemble mountain climbing. The other tool I used consistently during training is the good old box step, which comes in handy for heavy lifting to build strength and aerobic endurance workouts. Every Sunday turned into a slog of box steps to hit simulated elevation gains using napkin math and one of those clicker counter things.

So to train like a pro when you have no nearby mountains; grab yourself a box, stuff 50 pounds into your favorite backpack, aim yourself at the TV with a show that has at least 6 or 7 seasons, and start stepping. It is tough, it is mind numbing, and it is damn good exercise. Again, if you have any other option outdoors… do that. Steep mountainous trails, short difficult hills you can repeat, interesting stair wells; whatever you can do to go up and keep going up with a good amount of weight strapped to you. That’s about 75% of the training required to physically prepare for mountain terrain.