All of you are familiar by now with my general philosophy on training: focus on the long-game, and don’t get caught up chasing short-term performance at the expense of your body’s long-term capability and health. TLDR: don’t fuck yourself up trying to get faster/better/stronger. If you’re under 40, please don’t bother reading this, it won’t speak to you. For the rest of us – I hope to use my last weekend’s adventure as an example: how to keep your body resilient enough to keep having fun as you age. Hint: the answer is never to “train more”.
Yes, Safety Is Boring…
I’ve already written at length about how important it is to manage impact and joint stress as we age, so this latest adventure posed quite a challenge. My first priority is always to keep my client from getting injured. All my programming reflects that one benchmark, and it supersedes all other goals (increasing V02, lowering body fat, building muscle). It’s actually pretty easy to do…if you keep your client in a protective bubble. But what if your client isn’t a feckless GenZ’er that lives in the basement and never goes outside? What do you do when your client comes to you and says “I’m thrilled with the results of my training, and now I want to put my body to the ultimate test. I think climbing Mt. Hyndman up to 12,000 feet will be a good measure of whether I’ve still got it.”? Oh ya, forgot to mention, my client is 59 years old.
…And Danger Will Always Be Sexier
Not to my wife, of course, but certainly to the old grizzlies that my client and I met in Ketchum when we told them about our crazy idea to climb this thing. We got some solid street cred’, and that just egged us on. We actually started to think this was a good idea, ignoring the fact that most of the guys we spoke with had done this climb in their teens and 20’s (admittedly, a couple of people just laughed at me when I told them our plan). And the more research we did, the stupider this idea seemed.
We had a finite window (late July-early August) to summit without snow everywhere. Even then, we’d be in the “monsoon” season (no idea that Sun Valley had such a thing) and would have to be off the mountain by mid-day so that we didn’t get stuck in a lightning storm…side note – go watch an expert video on surviving a lightning strike on a barren mountain: you are supposed to spread out 100 ft. from your partner (so hopefully only one of you dies and the other can speak nobly about his friend’s limitless good judgement at the eulogy), toe-squat on your backpack so that you reduce conductivity, and cover your ears (I assume this to prevent you from hearing your buddy explode). I watched videos on how to apply a CAT tourniquet to myself with one arm before I passed out (Marci was particularly thrilled with that one). On and on. The closer we came, the more formidable it seemed…and of course the more turned on we got.
Marci here: for some reason Sam thought he could convince me it was no big deal by sending me videos of cute families doing the hike, just the first part of the hike mind you, to the lovely lake while he was watching videos on tourniquets and wilderness survival. Needless to say, it did not make me feel warm and fuzzy!
So How The Hell Do We Train For This?
I knew exactly how I would train my client for this event when I was 23 (and he was 34): run his ass uphill with a weighted pack carrying at least 25% more weight and going 15% higher than he would on climb day, and load his legs with heavy eccentric lifts, even plyometrics, so his knees got used to the impact. If he could pass that test in training, then he could certainly perform on climb day. I would have him sleep in a hyperbaric chamber (great for your sex life) and stuff his face with Diamox for 3 days beforehand to prevent altitude sickness. The rest we could just figure out on the mountain. Ah, how much simpler life was when we were young…
Our 2026 edition looked radically different. At 48 (me) and 59 (him), our bodies reflected an active life of many prior stupid endeavors. As Indian Jones would say, “It’s not the years, honey, it’s the mileage”. Back surgeries, intestinal surgery, knee arthritis, shoulder repair, fascial nerve impingement, frozen ankle…our composite of injuries looked like the addendum you put on your application for hospice care. Was it even possible to “train up” for an event like this, let alone finish it?
It was, but since we were going big, we had to train small.
You can see that he had multiple hikes leading up to the main event, but he never went over ~50% of the requited 5,000 ft. ascent during training. I wanted his body to be prepared, not over-trained. I see too many people make this mistake: overtrain, over-prepare, over-load, and end up missing the event due to injury (or competing in pain and causing further damage). Yes, I needed him to have the endurance and strength to accomplish this climb (and descent), but the bigger priority was insuring that he wasn’t injured or fatigued by the time we started. Overtraining, when you are 45+, is a much greater concern than “not doing enough”. (Marci note: this is really more a factor for men since women are way more mature and capable of operating within healthy limits.) Even if you don’t have an event to train for, you don’t want to be injured and sidelined from life, so training properly (i.e. small) is what matters long-term.
Over 45, Recovery is Your Limiting Factor
Anybody can train hard. That’s the fun part. It’s far more difficult to make yourself stop, be smart, and listen to your body (not your ego). If you exercise 2+ hours per day you can easily fit in everything you need (strength, aerobics, mobility, stability, fascial therapy, etc.). How do you do all that in 20 minutes a day so that you don’t over-do it and have plenty of rest time?…that takes way more planning.
Want to perform in middle age and beyond? Recover. I spent just as much time planning his taper as I did the 6-month buildup:
Don’t worry about the numbers at the top (they represent total “weekly impact” on my client’s body), just notice how the overall “impact load” of weekly activity slowly scales up and then has a couple of significant drops as we tapered toward the final week of the climb. Since climb week was his highest “impact load” all year, his body had to be rested and resilient.
Bottom Line: Don’t Do This 🙂
This adventure was in no way accretive to our longevity. It was dumb. It was dangerous. (Marci here: I was exhausted just listening to them strategize for 2 weeks straight!)
It was also amazing. Seeing things that only a few hundred people in the world get to see is hard to get across in photos. Even better, the bond you build when you share something like this with someone is irreplaceable. And that’s the point of training small and appropriately through the course of your life. No, safe and boring exercise will not give you the exhilaration of climbing a mountain, but it is precisely what allows you to push for big things if you so desire. If you train to avoid injury and take good care of your body, then every now and then you get to do stupid, fun shit. It doesn’t have to be grueling up a mountain; it can be whatever you love: traveling, golf, chasing grandkids around, or even just staying out of the hospital. The point is to continue doing what you love for the rest of your life. Who cares how many years you have left if you don’t get to participate. Make them count.
Live Long. Live Well.