Training for mountains and big elevation gain when you don’t live near any mountains has always been a challenge. Some people resort to inclined treadmills, some to step-ups or weighted step-ups, others to hill repeats on whatever small hill is readily available, or if you live in a tall apartment block, going up and down the stairs is a reasonable but not perfect proxy. I’ve done the latter, when I lived in Calgary almost forty years ago. It was boring, a bit smelly and slightly creepy in a 1970’s horror flick kind of way. There’s nothing really scary happening but you always feel it could. Calgary, of course, has access to real mountains if you can drive an hour or more each way, but, when you are trying to find elevation in the middle of the work week, Calgary is dispiritingly flat.
Treadmills are a poor proxy. Most can only be jacked to about 15 degrees which isn’t steep at all, the belt moves under you which makes the movement easier, and mountains do not have handily smooth and even surfaces. Step ups suffer from the same problems – the height is uniform, the platform smooth and instead of stepping down forwards you step down backwards and yet no-one walks down a mountain backwards. I should say, almost no-one because on a trip to the New Denver Glacier to climb three peaks (Mount Denver, Iron and English Peaks) in 2011 a young woman with rheumatoid arthritis who had joined us walked down the trail backwards at the end of the trip because her knees were so painful.
Small hills do not replicate long hills because if you only have to gain and lose 150, 200 or even 300 metres of elevation gain at a time, the legs get a rest from either the up or the down every half to one hour. That also does not replicate long mountain days where you gain and lose 1,500 metres or more of elevation all in one go. The best we flat-landers can do is make do with what we have close by.
Last time I was training for elevation gain was 2018 before we went back to Canada for five months in 2019. I had a spreadsheet where I calculated the elevation gain against the drive time so I could identify the best local (within about an hour) hills to gain elevation. All of them were on fire trails as we don’t have any trails within an hour that have decent elevation gain. Fire trails are dull to walk up and down but so are trails once you’ve done them a time or two. But, as Mike Tysen said “discipline is doing what you hate to do, but none the less doing it like you love it.”
A bit over an hour of driving for me, is the Didthul (Pigeon House) Mountain trail which gains about 500 metres in around 5 or 6 kilometres. That’s still not that steep, and the trail, because it is so popular, is over-engineered so it’s not good training for rough surfaces but it is a trail and not a fire road and there is a good view at the top. I’ve been up Didthul four times now. Once was a long, long time ago with my Mum, once was in 2016 before the trail had been upgraded to its current highway status, and once, in 2021, we walked up from north on a very old trail which was heavily overgrown after the bushfires.
In 2016, we walked up and down Didthul in two hours – 1:15 up and 45 minutes down – on the old and perfectly good trail. This time we got to the lookout at the top in 1:25 which is not bad given a decade has passed and the trail is longer now as it is has such an easy gradient on the lower part. If you’ve been up Didthul before, you know that there is a couple of hundred metres of elevation gain and then about a kilometre of flat plateau before the final 300 metres to the top – all of which is very sturdy steps now. We did the top part twice so our elevation gain for the day was close to 800 metres. My legs were getting sore from the eccentric loading on the last set of stairs – which is the reason I search out elevation gain – but it was my feet which were most sore. I made the mistake of wearing a pair of Keen hiking boots someone had given me and the soles were thin and soft.
That is the first week of my base period done. Garmin – which gets many things wrong (my elevation gain on my surf day at Cullendulla was 762 metres!) had my kilometres at 78 (0.49) for the week over 13 hours (but that doesn’t include strength or climbing wall training).
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