The big news is I went down to Shenandoah National Park to get some vert under the belt. I went down early Monday (3/3) morning--was on the road by 4am and at the Panorama parking lot at Thorton's Gap about 8am.
My task for the day was to find out where my baseline vertical ascent fitness was at. To do this, I did what I call a Vertical Ascent Speed Test (VAST). For the first version of this in the current training block, I decided to do 4 ascents of the Panorama to Mary's Rock Trail. This is about 1.85 miles in length with a Vertical Ascent of 1,210 feet. This works out to about 12-13% average grade (vs. 19% for my Snow Basin 29,029 in August). Less steep makes it a bit easier on the body at a given speed but also makes it a bit more difficult to get VAS--this might seem counter-intuitive, but consider this: 3 mph at a 5% grade will yield 792 vertical ft/hour, while 2 mph at a 10% grade will yield 1,056 vertical feet/hour. Based on my experience in the mountains/trails, these are roughly equivalent physical efforts. At the extremes 100mph at a 0% grade yields no vertical ascent and I probably can't walk up something thats steeper than 60% grade so in practice you have to test it out.
One of things that makes the VAST harder than what I will do in the 29,029 is that unlike the latter, I have to down climb the trail each time (no Gondola!). This of course doubles the distance and due to eccentric contraction puts a bunch of stress on the quads that I won't face at Snow Basin. Also, this specific trail is very rocky which puts a lot of stress on your stabilizer muscles in your ankles and hips especially.
The other complicating factor about 3/3/25 was that it was 16 degrees when I started and when I finished the test 6 hours and 28 minutes later, it was still only 26 degrees--this created heat regulation challenges (hot up/cold down). It also meant there was quite a bit of ice on the trail, especially on this one section that had some nasty exposure so caution was required on both the Ups and Downs over about 3/8ths of a mile mid climb.
Be that as it may, here are the results of my 4 runs of the VAST #1:
The key data point I'm looking for on this effort is the VAS--which averaged
1,417 ft hour. That may not immediately mean anything so let's put that into the context of what my 29,029 challenge entails:
The Snow Basin 29,029 involves 13 repeats of a 2.3 mile trail that has 2,310 vertical feet/lap. This works out to 30,030 vertical feet in total. To successfully complete the 29,029 challenge I need to do these 13 laps in 36 hours. Within these 36 hours are my 12 "Transitions", which is the time it takes from completing one climb and then taking the gondola down and doing the other stuff one needs to do before starting the next climb. My research indicates that the gondola rides are about 12-15 minutes. So my guess, is my transition times in practice will range from 20-40 minutes each. Let's take the midpoint of 30 minutes and with 12 transitions, this means 6 hours (12 X 30 minutes) will be consumed in transitions. This basically leaves me 30 hours to climb 30,000 vertical feet or 1,000 feet hour.
We can take this info and devise an equation that describes how long it will take me to do the event given my average VAS/lap and my average transition time (ATT) (this excludes any extended rest periods):
Total Time to complete the 29,029 = (13 X 30,000/(VAS/lap)) + (12 X ATT). How this all works can be visualized with the following chart:
Here, I've displayed 5 isobars that correspond to ATTs of 20 minutes (red) up to 40 minutes (purple). I've also showed the Minimum VAS required to finish in 36 hours for ATTs of 25 minutes-35 minutes (my current best guess of what I will average) and we see we need about 975 ft/hour @ a 25 min ATT and about 1,025 ft/hour @ a ATT of 35 minutes. Again, this assumes no other rest time.
Another way to use the above equation is to see what would happen, at various ATTs if I was able to replicate the 1,417 ft/hour I achieved in my test:
The 1,417 VAS line intersects with the 25 minutes ATT isobar and indicates it would take me 26 hours--leaving 10 hours of cushion for rest and any issues that might develop. For the ATT of 35 minutes this extends to a bit more than 28 hours--leaving 8 hours of cushion.
Now, before we declare victory, I know there is no way I could do 1,417 VAS at this point in time. Here is a plot of my vertical vs time and my HR from one of the four ascents:
Note the nice steady slope of the green line which indicates a fairly constant VAS--which is great, this is what we are aiming to do. However, note that for the last 20-30 minutes, or about half of the climb my HR is in the 140-150bpm range--decidedly Z3. No way I can hold that intensity for 20+ hours of climbing, even with the 30 minutes of rest between climbs. I'll probably more likely average low Z2--say 110-120bpm, so I have a lot of work to do!
When I repeat this test, I'll hope to see a better combination of VAS and average HR. Also, there are a lot of things that are different between climbing 19% grade at 6,000+ altitude for a climb of 2,300 vertical at probably 80+ degrees (and riding a gondola) then what I did on this test. So it's really hard to say how confident I should feel about this test result.
I do now I need to keep training a bunch and I'll repeat the test a few times between now and August and I'll be expecting to see my performance improve.
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After that first day, I then banged out a 12+ mile/2,700+ vertical/6+hour hike the next day on the Appalachian Trail:
After these two days, my ankles and hips were definitely sore--I definitely felt this effort so I took a day off but ended up completing my biggest walk/run/hike week this year. Here are the results of the last two weeks--the one before the above and this past week including these efforts:
Week 9
Swim: 2,000 yards
Bike: 246 miles
Run/Walk: 38 miles
PT/Weights: 5:10
Total Training Time: 31:19
Week 10
Swim: 3,500 yards
Bike: 134 miles
Run/Walk: 48 miles
PT/Weights: 3:05
Total Training Time: 31:12
Onwards and Upwards!
