Training for the New Alpinism: A Manual for the Climber as Athlete
by Steve House
15 popular highlights from this book
Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from Training for the New Alpinism: A Manual for the Climber as Athlete:
You can’t coach desire, and no matter how fancy your training plan or how high your stated goals are, it comes down to getting out the door and doing the work day after day.
You have to be honest with yourself that in the end no one really cares—you do it for yourself. Everyone must decide for him or herself how much risk he or she wants to take. Risk is not measurable and is always dependent on the individual. You need to know that it is impossible to indefinitely push your limits: higher, faster, better. Eventually you reach a peak and then it goes back down. I believe it’s important that you don’t lose your passion and that you enjoy the outdoors and challenging yourself, no matter what your level is.
My approach to training echoed how I climbed. The romance of climbing didn’t interest me. I didn’t seek harps and wings. I heard no opera up there. Instead, my mountains had teeth. The jagged edge we walked up there dragged itself across my throat, and the throats of my friends and peers. I took the mountains’ indifference to life as aggression, and fought back. I armored myself against that indifference; with training, with thinking, with attitude. I trained with friends who shared a similar approach. Our mantra was dark, but it motivated us. When we ran we breathed in rhythm—no matter the speed—and that beat had words: “They all died.” We inhaled and exhaled the great alpine epics—like the tragedy that befell Walter Bonatti’s party on the Freney Pillar—to push ourselves to a place where we would never come up short, physically. The consequences of falling short made training important. I realized early that controlling the things that I could control gave me greater freedom to address the things that I could not control. And the mountains offered those in spades.
greater fitness leads to more opportunity. This holds true for knowledge as well. When we acquire new skills, when we develop ourselves as human beings, we uncover new potential.
There’s a time to run and a time to walk. But don’t get me wrong: I’m not telling anyone to slow down. I’ve long viewed with suspicion the armchair directives barked at the young and driven, usually with the faux self-assuredness of someone who’s never been there, about how they shouldn’t push so hard, how they should go easy. I find beauty in charging into the unknown, armed with little more than a sharpened stick and unwavering self-belief. Beauty in dropping the excuses and trying, in making things happen rather than waiting for some imaginary time when you’re good enough, wise enough, have a job that pays enough—a time that will
The new alpinism comes full circle as small teams of fit, trained athletes emulate Mummery, aspire to Preuss, climb like the young Messner. Because those pioneers knew that alpinism—indeed all mindful pursuits—is at its most simple level the sum of your daily choices and daily practices. Progress is entirely personal. The spirit of climbing does not lie in outcomes—lists, times, your conquests. You do keep those; you will always know which mountains you have climbed, which you have not. What you can climb is a manifestation of the current, temporary, state of your whole self. You can’t fake a sub-four-minute mile just as you can’t pretend to do an asana.
Talent can make you lazy. Innovation will be left to the hardest workers, training intelligently.
When you are training, you are not just training your body, but you are also, maybe even primarily, training your mind.
movements done, and at a similar speed and intensity of climbing. To a very large extent, elite-level swimmers principally swim for training, champion cyclists ride, top runners run, and world-class skiers ski. A general sport like alpinism can include more nonspecific modalities than these traditional sports, especially in the early base-building period and for less athletically mature individuals. But the biggest benefits will come from preparing for and modeling the demands of alpine climbing as closely as possible. This is the reason top climbers spend so much time climbing. As an alpinist seeking to improve your endurance
legged exercises like box step-ups, which will pay huge dividends in how your legs will feel churning uphill for hour after hour.
where we increase the available pool of muscle fibers for the brain to choose from. Increasing Max Strength lays the groundwork for the conversion to Muscular Endurance. Following these prescriptions will produce large gains in strength, with no gains in body weight (often you will lose weight due to the resulting boost to your metabolism).
As an example, for a climber aspiring to climb a long technical alpine route it could be wise to choose box step-ups, a pull-up variation (like Frenchies or typewriters), overhead squat, and one-arm isometric ice ax hangs.
sets of one up to a maximum of four repetitions. Use four to six sets of each exercise per session. Allow three to five minutes of rest between sets. Do not go to muscular failure on any set. That will cause you to gain muscle mass. Do this twice a week.
Hill Sprint Training To execute this workout outdoors, first you need to find a steep hill with decent footing so you are not dodging roots and rocks and can sprint flat-out. The steeper, the better for our purposes. It should be at least 10 percent or a one-in-ten slope with 20–50 percent (two- to five-in-ten slope) being even better. A steep stadium can provide the needed steepness. If your movements are slow and cautious due to poor footing, you will not get the desired effect. The steep hill allows those who can’t run fast to impose very high loads on their legs and
Typical Progression for Hill Sprints We have noticed that athletes who are unaccustomed to such high power training have difficulty even getting tired in the early weeks of doing this workout. That is because they move slowly due to their inability to engage enough of the fast twitch fibers needed to produce truly powerful movements. For
