Training for the ‘Big Day’

25 May Training for the ‘Big Day’

This article is part of a series of articles I have written on the physical prep and training for adventures that I specialise in. Reproduced in full from WILD magazine, Australia’s longest running outdoor and adventure based mag, where you can see my column on line or subscribe and get delivered to your door.
Here, I describe for WILD magazine how anyone can prepare for those really tough days that push you towards breaking point.
Back in issue 154 you might remember the following table:

You’ll notice that the specific, or as we call it ‘peak’, phase is much shorter than your base. Especially when you’re short on lead-in time for your trip, it’s important to build your base fitness, not your peak. As a simple analogy to follow, your base fitness training can be thought of as a foundation. There’s no point to building anything without a strong foundation, right?

But today we’re assuming you’ve all been keeping up with your base fitness and instead we’ll take a closer look at building specificity into your adventure training routine for trek, trail, mountaineering or whatever it is you love doing.

For this element of the training schedule, the adventurer tries to emulate the stresses and strains of the objective activity as much as possible.  The intensity ramps up, but there are also longer recovery periods to compensate.
In the case of multiday bushwalkers and mountaineers looking forward to that next big trip, it’s this phase of fitness preparation where you would consider loading up your pack and getting in some big days of walking. Trail runners would be looking to top out their training volume (kilometres covered), while also increasing their hill and stair repeats (see issue 155 for notes on training for trailrunning).
Looking specifically at the mountaineers and bushwalkers, this type of activity-specific training may be referred to as ‘pack work’, while some use the military term ‘rucking’. For mountaineers, the focus is likely to lean more towards…
…continue reading this article in full at WILD magazine here.