Alpine fitness test
We did the Training For The New Alpinism (Steve House, Scott Johnston — Patagonia) alpine fitness test to get a feel for where we are. Set a baseline, if you will. The baseline is, frankly, depressing.
What is it?
It’s 1000ft of box steps (859 steps on our plyo box) wearing boots and carrying 20% of your body weight in a pack. This is to simulate the gear you'll be hauling up the mountain.
After the box steps, you'll do 60 seconds each of dips, sit-ups, push-ups, pull-ups, box jumps. You get 2 minutes recovery in-between each exercise. You may rest during the exercise, but the timer doesn't stop.
How was it?
It’s painful and a little boring. It gives good insight in what we suck at though. We performed reasonably well on everything except box jumps and the box steps. We are too slow on the box steps. To qualify as "good", we need to be 2 – 3 minutes faster. The box-jumps were the worst, we are far removed from "good" ☹️. Lieke performed a little better than Arie on the 1000ft box steps. That is even though relative to her height the box is higher for her.
So that’s what we’ll train now.