Why the app didn't work for me
We've spent a lot of lessons on water and storms. Today's a shorter one, and it's about getting your body ready for the trail before you're on it.
Here's the thing about fitness apps. I tried one. I gave it about a week.
It had me doing intervals on a treadmill, tracking my heart rate zones, telling me I'd "crushed" a workout that had nothing to do with what I actually needed. I'm not against apps in general. I just found that training for hiking on a flat treadmill was like practicing to drive a stick shift on an automatic. Wrong muscles, wrong motion, wrong incline.
What I needed was hills. So I started walking my own neighborhood before work, up the streets that climb toward the bench, with my pack loaded the way it'd be loaded on a real hike. Water bottles, the ten essentials, the whole thing. That's what told me the truth about my fitness. Not a screen telling me my heart rate zone.
What "training on hills" actually looks like
You don't need a gym membership or a trail nearby to start this. You need:
- A hill. Any hill. If you're in American Fork or Highland or Lehi, you've got streets that climb toward the mountains on one side. Pick one with a decent grade, even a short one.
- Your actual pack, loaded. Not empty. Put in the water weight you'd really carry, plus whatever else goes in the bag. Training with an empty pack tells you nothing about carrying a full one.
- A schedule you'll keep. Two or three mornings a week, before work, before it gets hot. Fifteen or twenty minutes up and down is plenty to start.
- Attention, not data. Notice what leaves you winded. Notice which muscles complain the next day. That's your information. You don't need a chart to tell you your calves are toast, you already know.
I'd rather you spend six weeks doing this than six weeks reading about VO2 max. Walking your own hills with a loaded pack will tell you more about your readiness than any app will. That's just my opinion on it, but it's one I hold pretty firmly at this point.
Why the incline matters more than the mileage
We talked earlier in this course about reading elevation gain instead of just mileage. Same idea applies here. A flat three miles on a treadmill does not prepare your legs, your lungs, or your knees for three miles that climb 1,200 feet. Your body needs to practice the specific work of going uphill and, maybe even more important, going downhill with weight on your back. Downhill is where knees complain. Train for both directions if you can.
A word about knees
If you've got a knee that bothers you already, pay attention to how it feels on the downhill portion of your training walks, not just the uphill. Uphill is cardio. Downhill is impact. If a hill walk leaves your knee sore for two days after, that's information to bring to your doctor, not something to push through and hope it goes away on its own.
The part where an 11-year-old taught a stranger about weather
I want to tell you about something that happened on a hike, because it's stuck with me and it's got nothing to do with fitness apps and everything to do with paying attention to what's actually happening around you instead of trusting a device to tell you.
My 11-year-old asked me once why we always turn around before the summit on cloudy days, even when it doesn't look that bad yet. I explained the timing of it, how the storms build through the morning and tend to hit by early afternoon, how it's better to be walking down a ridge under a gray sky than caught on top of one under a black one.
A few weeks later we were on a trail and some other family's dad was going back and forth with his kids about whether to keep going. My kid piped up and explained the whole thing to him, matter-of-fact, like it was just common knowledge. The way you'd explain that water boils at a lower temperature up here because of the elevation. Not a big speech. Just, here's how it works.
That's the goal with all of this training and planning, honestly. Not to memorize a rule because I said so, but to actually understand the mechanics well enough that you could explain it to somebody else on the trail. An app can hand you a number. It can't teach you why the number matters.
Before next time
Find a hill near your house this week and walk it once with your loaded pack, just to get a baseline. Next time we'll talk about what a good "training plan" looks like leading up to a specific hike you've got your eye on.