What does it take to climb a 19,000 foot mountain?

[Originally Posted: 5/8/2007]

What does it take to train for 19,000 plus feet?

Well, I'm not really sure. The highest I've been is 14,505 and the toughest climb I've done was Mount Rainier at 14,411.

My best guess is I'll need to be about 25% more fit than when I did Rainier. How how do you quantify that? Hard to say. I know that I was reasonably comfortable on Rainier. And I further know that I suffered mightily during the decent.

So where was I when I did Rainier? I was running 6 to 7 miles 3 times a week, and was doing the Stair Mill at my gym 3 times a week for 40 to 60 minutes at between level 10 and 12.

What I did not do, and my climbing partner Kurtiss did do, was to hike real mountains or do any kind of hiking in my plastic boots. I've read repeatedly that plastics don't need break in. Well that may be, but your feet and legs certainly do. Plastics hurt! You need to learn how to walk in them, uphill, downhill and on flats.

Given Kurtiss' impressive strength in the later portion of the climb and decent it would seem that hiking Mount Baldy several times in his plastics really paid off.

So this time around I plan on repeating my efforts in the cardio training, and even stepping it up some, and I plan on augmenting this with hikes on trails in plastic and leather boots.

Further I plan on specific training for decending.

And finally I plan on training my neck muscles since I suffered much pain in my neck, I can only assume due to the added weight of helmet and headlamp. I'm not totally clear on the the cause but I plan on strengthening my neck muscles just the same.

So that's it in a nut shell. I hope to do training hikes on Mt San Jacinto and Mt Baldy in Riverside, as well as training hikes on local mountains like Woodson and Iron Mountain.

This all begins right after my impending wedding over memorial weekend. After that Ray will be hitting hard. :D