One Stone at a Time

I – Object Permanence

Naively, when I come upon a mountain I tend to think I’m viewing it in it’s full, final form. Like all it’s plate tectonic shifting, bowing and creaking had wrapped up ages ago. So as I knew a mountain, it stood no chance to change. I seldom, if ever, considered a mountain wasn’t formed all at once.

I guess they likely don’t do much changing in any of our lifetimes, and I think that’s for the better. In reality, each mountain we see is the result of millions and millions of years worth of pressures and releases. 

These are forces we’re all very familiar with in our own lives. But I’ve always failed to see the true shaping power of those forces in anything other than the natural world around me.

Time and pressure colliding can force behemoths from the ground to unreal heights, can turn coal to precious diamonds, can even carve canyons deeper than a skyscraper into the earth’s surface. It’d be foolish for me to think these forces couldn’t shape me, too.

Elbert and Massive at Dawn

Mounts Elbert (left) and Massive (right) in dawn light

II – One Stone at a Time

Hypothetically, if I told you I was going to “move a mountain,” how do you think I’d do it? 

Once you laughed at the idea, you’d likely say “one stone at a time, Kev, probably from the top down,” and you’d be right. It’d have to be a slow, painstaking process, bit by bit, over a wild amount of time before any progress was visible.

When I began training seriously for this challenge, in the summer of 2023, I hadn’t been on a run in almost ten years. Physical demands at work kept me “in shape,” but there’s a big difference between looking alright without a t-shirt on, and actually being physically fit. 

Growing up, I loved sports and physical activities. I ran a lot, mostly encouraged by my dad, but was never running for the fun of it. It was a chore to complete so I could be in my best shape for whatever sport came next season. 

I was a scrawny, lanky kid, so even though I used to spend a lot of time in the weight room starting around age 12, nobody could tell. By 2023, I couldn’t remember the last time I hit the weights, and aching joints made it sound just short of torture. 

Fast forward to my 30’s, and I was a part-time smoker, loved my cheap beer, and subsisted off of beef jerky and blocks of cheese for most job-site meals. I called it Construction Charcuterie, and would sometimes serve it on the lid of a 5 gallon bucket to co-workers.

I had a grasp on what “in shape” would mean in the context of my challenge. While I hadn’t decided the exact mountains yet, I knew I was training for a hike north of 25 miles in length, with altitude gain of over 12,000ft and would need as close to 24 hours worth of stamina as possible. For reference, the elevation gain to climb Mt. Washington in New Hampshire is 4,240 feet over 7.5 miles. So I was aiming to do a bit more than 3 of those, at a much higher elevation. 

What I didn’t have was a clearcut path on how to get my physical shape from where I was then, to the trail-running marathoner type form I was feeling like I needed to be in for the attempt the following summer. 

There’s loads of materials out there on training for all sorts of things: mountaineering, marathoning, backpacking, how to get six-pack abs in just 5 minutes a day, uphill sports, downhill sports, just about anything you could imagine. And wouldn’t ya know it? Most of them contradict each other to some degree. 

If you’re training for a mountaineering pursuit, running is usually discouraged or expected to take up minimal amounts of your training. 

Instead, according to most, you should be simulating pack weight and blasting staircases out nonstop, at your normal trekking pace, and tracking daily steps. High effort cardio yields minimal impactful results versus the stress running puts on your body. “Zone 2” heart rate targets are the predominant targets. Google Zone 2, even the pros have a hard time defining it.

If you’re training for a marathon, you are avoiding every possible hill you can, because the most efficient runners are exercising their posture and form every step, and hills cause you to break from that. You’re focused on breathing routines and metering your body at intervals along the way, knowing when to push and when to conserve.

If you’re backpacking, you’re carrying your home, wardrobe, kitchen, and creature comforts on your back. Speed isn’t usually part of the equation, short of maintaining a timely itinerary. You’re moving multiple miles with that weight in your pack, day in and day out.

Since none of those materials spoke closely enough to what I was attempting for me to consider them a suitable guide, or factored in something like my arthritis, I decided that I’d be borrowing bits and pieces from a lot of them, and sort of making my own rules as I went. It’d take listening a lot closer to my body’s signals than what I was used to for this method to work.

No matter how I cut it, the fact remained that in order to move my mountain, I’d need to take a steady, patient approach – one stone at a time, taking no lazy steps. 

III – One More…

My late father, and my first/lifetime coach used to tell me that the days you don’t want to go for a workout would, very often, turn out to be the best workouts on the days you needed it the most. He was full of proverbs and thoughtful lines like that, words carried a different weight for him than they do to most.

Dad and a young me after a game

“Don’t start the race unless you’re gonna finish strong!”

“One more. Always got enough in the tank for one more.”

“Tell me I can’t…”

“What are you, tired?”

“First mile’s always the hardest,” at the beginning of a race or “last mile’s always the hardest,” at the end.

Plenty of friends growing up had my dad as a coach at one point or another, and they, no doubt, would have a few of his lines to add to the above list from their own memories.

I used to think that there was a lot of b.s. in a lot of his sayings, especially since I was a kid and knew everything, and he was just my dad so he probably didn’t know much. But sure as shit, he’s wound up being right most of the time, and is still collecting those wins.

At one point, he was an instructor at the Police Academy, and even taught a physical activity based prep course at a local college in the Criminal Justice Department, with the goal of educating police recruit hopefuls of what the physical demands of the academy may look like.

One of my favorite lessons came from middle school basketball practice while I was on the team. We’d run plenty, and go through plenty of drills, and certain mistakes or missed shots would result in the player running laps or something similar. His favorite was 10 push-ups for every missed lay-up.

When the season started in November, he and his Co-Coach always wound up with nearly 30 kids on the team. Ridiculous, especially considering the size of the school. But their belief was that their job as coaches to athletes that young was to help foster a love of that sport, not try break records or pump out individual stars.

Every year, without fail, there would be a few kids on the team who couldn’t do 10 consecutive push-ups at the start of the year. By practice number 11 that was no longer the case. On day one, my dad would get us all lined up on the baseline and out of breath after sprints, and tell us that if we couldn’t do 10 push-ups, our homework that night was to do 1 push-up before bed. Then 2 the next night. Then three, and so on.

It was the simplest approach, such a basic concept, that nobody could argue, not that any of us would’ve. No one could argue the impact it had, either, because it worked. And it didn’t work in the sense that it made kids ripped and jacked over night. It worked in proving to each kid who needed to learn it, that the mind will tap out far before the body, so if you go into attempting 10 push-ups saying to yourself you’re only capable of 3, it’s no guess how many get done. But if you go into attempting 10 push-ups telling yourself “one more, one more, one more…”

Like I said, simple, but effective. A few years later, when I tried my own hand at coaching, I tried to teach the same lessons.

IV – No Lazy Steps

I stepped on the treadmill in our basement in July of 2023, and posted my slowest mile time in memory, north of 12 minutes per. I was never lightning fast, but I recalled my 5k time being around 25:00, and for some reason, I had expected the years of inhaling smoke, fiberglass dust and asbestos to have zero effect on my lungs.

I expected the marching around with a tool belt all day every day to have kept my leg strength up. At least a little hopeful some muscle memory would kick in. I expected to be humbled, just not so thoroughly, or so quickly. Felt like I tasted blood in my mouth, my lungs hadn’t felt that short of air since I’d had COVID the prior winter. I could visually watch the muscles in my calves cramp. Long ways to go.

I managed about 60 miles that month, and was averaging about 10 minutes a mile. My primary goal with the running was distance, not so much speed, so I focused on adding that proverbial “one more” to my runs: at first adding a quarter mile here, or there, then full miles. Then I began to double my distance on one or two runs a week, meaning if I was averaging 3 mile runs, at least two days a week I’d shoot for 6 miles. 

By October, I reached a new high of 100 miles in a month, and my average run distance was up to 5 miles. My mile time dropped down to about 8 minutes, and I was finding that my body was handling this exercise very well. I’d only experience swelling or pain on my “push it” days or on my rest days. The pain and stiffness was good enough motivation to keep at it steadily, but what felt like drastic improvement helped a lot, too.

Then came the inclines. Most mountain climbs I know of require a lot of uphill motion, and as I’d established my base cardio level, I started to introduce inclines into a few runs per week, or intentionally select brutally hill-filled routes for outdoor runs. I ran my first two half marathons in October, too, a new personal record for distance.

Reaching a half marathon felt like a great milestone, and that triggered a lot of optimism about my ability to maybe actually do this thing. The times were awful, I think the world record for a full marathon was less time than my halves then. I’ll be honest in saying that I had to exercise a lot of self-restraint to keep myself from trying to run further. At that distance of a little over 13 miles, my body started to disagree with the running, from joint pain to blisters to headaches, and I wasn’t training for a run, after all. I was training for a climb.

So, I decided that half-marathons would be the farthest I’d run during training, out of desire to, well, not hurt my body too badly in training for the actual attempt. Back in September, I began my body strength conditioning.

This was a battle of continuously finding the line, crossing it, paying the price, suffering for it, and then redefining the line, and then moving it again. It took a ton of guess work, research, and persistence to put together workouts that would push me closer to my goal without making my body suffer (any more than necessary) for it.

Can’t imagine reading about workouts is exceptionally fun, so for the sake of brevity, my daily routine consisted of: running 30 staircases, 100 push-ups, 100 reverse crunches, a 3 minute plank, pull-ups, calf raises, squats, lunges, wall-sits, box-jumps, exercise band workouts, and even a custom hybrid between a push-up and mountain climber, with a pike, that I couldn’t do more than 30 of at any point in my training.

I couldn’t hit the weights without swelling and guaranteed pain, but through trial and error, I found I could complete the above daily workout just about anywhere, without much equipment (save for a band and staircases) and move closer to being physically prepared to move my mountain. As this push-up or that band workout grew too easy, I’d increase accordingly. As that joint swelled, I did my best to find the cause, and augment accordingly.

This worked, and helped form a routine that helped my mental health considerably through a year of wrestling with and learning about my new health issue. Paired with the running, I was moving steadily towards my peak athletic shape from a decade ago. I just had to hope that’d be enough to establish a base level of fitness that I could confidently bring with me up to the mountains for the 2024 season.

V – Breathe Deep

Over the next year, my numbers steadily increased in distance. My times decreased gradually, my muscles growing from present, to tone, to defined to hardened. I wound up running something like 20 half marathons between October of 2023 and July of 2024, setting a personal record of 76 minutes by treadmill and 94 minutes on trail. All said and done, I ran over 1,300 miles in training for this endeavor, and I swear I could hear my old man chirping me, asking me if that was all I had, any time I started to rest on those laurels.

On days I felt like I didn’t have it in me, when I was absolutely zapped of energy between the training and the arthritis, or days burnout looked like it was winning, or on rest days where my knees looked like grapefruits and my ankles looked like they belonged to a much larger man, I’d hear a familiar voice from the faint, cobwebby, distance of my memories “…one more…”

Somehow, it was looking like he was right, again. By showing up, every day, with the same goal, and moving what little stone I could from the top of that mountain, I’d exploded past my previous high mark for physical fitness. I was in the unequivocal best shape of my life, and my body was at a point where it was familiar with multiple 20 mile days per week. But the question remained, would it be enough?

In the early 14er season of 2024, I took all that prep with me to the mountains to test it out. I felt like I flew up the mountain. My lungs felt like they never had before at that high an altitude, like all that time spent above heart rate zone 2 might have paid off. My legs, albeit difficult to fit into pants at the thighs by then, were like tree-trunks and were well equipped to rip off a couple hundred staircases at a moment’s notice. My Vo2 Max was hovering at 59, my resting heart rate was in the low 40s, and my year full of uphill efforts clearly did me well.

Through a smartwatch I was able to gain some amazingly encouraging insights from that first 14er of this year. One clear chart highlighted my heart rate over my elevation. Another held the heart rate over my pace. The evidence was right in front of me. Every mile ran was proving to have been of incredible value. By over-exercising my lungs all year, I was able to see on these charts that elevation, as high as I could go in Colorado at least, was having absolutely zero effect on my heart rate. That meant if I left myself enough time to acclimate properly before this challenge, and maintained my fitness til then, I will have successfully removed the altitude from the equation as a factor against me.

Effort, not elevation, effecting the heart rate

While I promised myself I wouldn’t pursue a marathon until after this mountain challenge, I went into a run one Sunday in July of 2024 with an open mind. I’d decided I was going to run farther than the half marathon marker, just to see how it felt. I was sick of feeling tired at the 13 mile mark, because I knew I had more in me, but that was the number I had in mind at the start of those prior runs.

15 miles sounded nice and round. And I felt great at 15. And still great at mile 18. I cruised right into the 20s. I found my zen, found my breathing, and banged out my first full marathon. No one should want to spend that much time on a treadmill, but I wound up under 3 hours and was absolutely ecstatic. Cold, hungry, but more confident than ever that I’d be able to achieve my goal in a few short months.

Accidental PBs after a year of training

 

With the physical fitness in check, it was time to turn my attention to the logistics of the matter. By January of 2024, I still had not solidified which mountains I’d be attempting the upcoming September. I thought I had the range nailed down, but that was about it. Whatever early success I was feeling about physical readiness was put to bed quickly, and sights trained at the next stone…

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