Before we thought of climbing Rainier, I had been a relatively active person. I ran anywhere from 6-8 miles a few days of the week, even running a half-marathon. I strength trained weekly, and did a lot of work on the elliptical machine at the gym. I take the stairs, park far, and carry a weighty backpack to school. I’m no slouch, but I’m definitely not an elite athlete, either. Did I have a good base for beginning training?
What I’m Doing Now
So we signed up with Alpine Ascents to climb Mt. Rainier over three days in July. We really needed (and wanted) to ramp up our training, especially on hearing survival stories from people we knew had climbed. This is going to be a tough climb, and we want to be prepared. Neither of us are interested in being dead weight up there. We are going to the gym about 5 days a week. I do the elliptical for an hour on the cross-country program, or get on the StairMaster for 45 minutes, ramping up the resistance from 8-14 or 15 every 5 minutes. I also do some abdominal and back work. On weekends, we have climbed Stone Mountain (GA) with packs weighted with 45 (me) or 55 (Steven) pounds of sand. It’s 1.4 miles each way. We did three round trips in one day, for a total of 8.4 miles. Tomorrow, we are going to hike Rabun Bald the same way, maybe just climbing it twice for a 12 mile hike- it’s 2.9 miles each way. Georgia is not the most mountainous area, so we’re trying to work with what we’ve got.
Where I Hope To Get
Where do we go from here? I plan on doing a lot more strength work, since I’ve been neglecting it, especially in my arms. I also want to start adding weight on the elliptical and StairMaster by wearing a pack. I’d rather look silly at the gym than on the mountain, right? With that, I want to get to where I can do the StairMaster for an hour with as much weight as I can. We also need to extend our hiking expeditions to 8+ hours, just to get our bodies used to the rigor.
To anyone who has already climbed Mt. Rainier- what are accurate “earth” goals to have to be able to successfully summit? Hiking Kennesaw Mountain 4 times in x hours? Running 10 miles at an 8 minute-mile pace? It’s this part where we haven’t found a lot of information. “Training hard” isn’t very specific, and maxing out our heart rate for 1 hour seems to be inconsistent across different people. Since we haven’t climbed any comparable mountains, it’s hard for us to gauge.
Any info would be great, and keep your fingers crossed as we try to summit the 4th of July!!
What I’ve Done to get ready for Rainier
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