(August 24th – 30th: <10 mins read)
TL;DR:
– 🏃 I make a (small) start to actively ‘hill climb’
– 🥾 A short, heavy hike: >50% body weight in the pack
– 🏃 Ran a nice, easy (slow -> 2:40) 21km trail round
– 🧗 School holidays lead to zero program climbing
Milestones (click to collapse)
| WK45 | Milestone / Significant Event |
|---|---|
| D-1 | 🏃 Gradual intro to ‘hill climbing’: 5k – 32:38 / 6:32min/km / 137 avg. pulse ⚖️ Weight dips under 66kg / 145lbs 🥳 |
| D-2 | 🧗 Mixed results on my side: – bat-hang start is a non-starter 😅 – heel-hooking works perfectly |
| D-3 | 📆 this is 311 days / 44w 3d post-injury |
| D-4 | 🏃 ‘Easy volume’ run: 21k (trail) – 2:38:34 / 7:33min/km / 134 avg. pulse 🧗 Bouldering mit S and J |
| D-5 | 🧗 Bouldering/climbing mit S 🥾 River valley mini-hike |
| D-6 | 🥾 7km hike / 240m ascent / 34kg pack – 2 days of DOMs in my hip flexors 🧗 3rd session in a row: bouldering with T |
| D-7 | 🧗 4th in a row: was gonna be a rest day … – buuut became the start of a climb-athon 👣 45 weeks / approx 16k steps per day |
< Note: For a list of milestones click <here>.
Real-world exercise (& movement)
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< Note: For my physio protocols click <here>.
Walking / Hiking
At some point soon I want to start pushing the envelope of distance combined with elevation for my hiking … I’m REALLY looking forward to proper mountain hikes again 👏 🤩!
In the meantime, doing yet more rounds on my ‘training mini-mountain’ has really become time-consuming … and Chris, the Achilles PT specialist, has said often enough that he’s more a friend of heavy-loading/low reps rather than low-loading/high reps.
Soooo … I decided to load up my rucksack ‘nice and heavy’ and just do a couple of rounds this Saturday: 34 kg, that is, in the meantime, well over half my body weight … here are the scales without and then with rucksack:
With this weight on my back I have to be careful not to topple over backwards … BUT it IS effective: time limited me to two rounds, I _might_ have managed three, but more than that would not have been doable (you can see how things ‘degraded’ on the second round already):
The day before, Friday, offered a way more pleasant experience, though … nothing to do with ‘training’, I just decided to take a short break on the way home and repeat a short mini-hike I’d done with my youngest son a couple of years ago; back then, I had not realised I wouldn’t have a cell phone connection the whole time, didn’t have the map on my mobile, as a consequence we went the wrong way in really wet conditions … was not a particularly harmonious afternoon out 😅.
This time, I was well-prepared … but the weather was sub-optimal. I mean, not bad as such, but rain was ‘a-coming’! Fuck it, I thought … it’s warm enough; if I get wet, not far from home, can change when I get there. And that’s the way it went!
A beautiful end to a work-week. Full-stop.
Running
The start of the week took me to the local mini nature reserve: not even 20m of elevation per 500m, it nevertheless offers a shady (as in, non-sunny, rather than gangster 😜) re-entry into the world of ‘hill climbing’ – a low-impact, strength-building, tree-root mini-trail; do the route clockwise, then anti-clockwise = 1km with 40m of elevation … then repeat 3 times (6 x 500m circuit):
No problems evident after this mini-trial … and, having put 15km behind me last week, 18km (in ‘stages’) the week before, I figured it was time to try to find a good 21km round where I wouldn’t be too far from home (just in case I have to walk home, or, worse still, get picked up). My local ‘training mini-mountain’ is a place where I’d seen enough people trail-running; up until now and at only about 5-6km (as the crow flies) from home, I wanted to get at least a bit of it into the round. Which I did:
Uphill was done walking, as was some of the last 1/3 of the round, hence the almost 2hrs 40min time … but it’s a good round, easily extendable beyond 21km for the next stage ramping up to 42km, and 2 x 21km … yup, you got it, 42km 🤩 😎 ! Oh, and the GPS tracking bombed out for the first almost 10mins … so none of the stats were terribly reliable, but who cares – this is not for social media, this is for me.
Climbing
Tuesday saw repeated efforts at a ‘bat-hang’ boulder start: this involves one hanging from the feet, both hands typically on the same low start boulder (without any kind of alternative start, trust me!), and then folding your body up like a pocket knife to get both hands on that same ‘hold’ where your feet are. I cannot do these … or maybe, let’s say, “I cannot do these … at the moment!” to avoid a negative slant 😅! Too heavy, too weak, too ‘all the wrong things’ … but my weight is going down, my strength up!
Moving on through the week, at some point, I thought: I love climbing, bouldering … why not every day? In general I’d always said: not two days in a row, and IF, then climbing and bouldering and NO WAY ‘hard at the limit’. Sooo … why not just 50-60% max. effort and for that every day … ? I mean, we walk every day … not 100k steps, but maybe 5k or 10k or even 20k steps …
And following on from this thought I ended up at the ‘climbathon’ thought of doing ‘some sort’ of climbing and/or bouldering every day … just not close to the limit. Let’s see where this goes …
