This is the first in a three-part series chronicling David Ebner's quest to use science to improve his fitness level before a gruelling backcountry ski trip.
At the three-minute mark, I start to drool. In the name of science, for fitness.
I'm on a treadmill in a small gym in a Vancouver suburb, a heart monitor strapped around my chest and a plastic tube stuffed in my mouth. The minutes march on, sweat percolates, then pours. Running and drooling.
I arrived here by a circuitous route. In late October, somewhere above the United States flying to a cousin's wedding in New Orleans, mulling the highs and lows of five days of bourbon and beer ahead, a soft panic soaked through me. Come the end of December, two short months away, I had a trip booked with friends to explore the wild and wondrous backcountry around a remote hut in the Selkirk Mountains near Rogers Pass in British Columbia. We were to be led by famed, hard-core Swiss guide Ruedi Beglinger, the proprietor of Selkirk Mountain Experience.
The backcountry is not new to me and I don't find long, self-propelled ascents especially daunting. But Mr. Beglinger's a different type of guide. The joking nickname for his operation is Selkirk Military Experience. A minimum of 1,700 vertical metres are climbed each day, more than the top-to-bottom of towering Whistler Mountain, and over the course of six days, the total will well exceed the elevation of Mount Everest.
The reward: A gorgeous bounty of fresh snow to be devoured by a small group. No time for languid days, which is precisely why we signed up.
I wasn't ready. Fit, kind of, would be a gracious assessment.
And I was going to be less ready after New Orleans.
So here I am, on a treadmill, drooling. Every three minutes, physiologist Paul Hatano of Peak Centre for Human Performance pokes my middle-right finger with a diabetic lancet and draws blood into a tiny, thin vial. And then he jacks the treadmill's pace higher – pushing to my maximum – to find out how to get me fitter, faster.
Between the blood analysis and the assessment of how well the body pumps oxygen to my muscles to power and sustain movement, Peak Centre and others, such as the Endurance Lab in Toronto and Peak Power in Calgary, take the guesswork out of fitness.
Forget about the archaic maximum heart rate calculation of 220 minus your age to determine at what intensity to work out. Peak Centre uses my data to precisely discern several important metrics and plan the most efficient way to train, a science-based fitness regimen that a decade ago was the exclusive arena of elite athletes.
The main mistake? Most people train too hard, Mr. Hatano says. People lust for the burn in the muscles, when it feels like something's being accomplished.
David Ebner has less than two months to prepare for his Selkirk Mountain Experience backcountry ski trip.
Peak Centre, after calculating your VO{-2} max, lactate threshold and aerobic threshold (let me explain in a minute), designs a custom program that hits exact marks on a five-zone scale, zones that train specific attributes, from endurance to bursts of short-term power.
And get this: Mr. Hatano says the secret for endurance – which is my focus – is all about “training slower to get faster.”
“It's weird at first,” he says. “But if you train in the wrong zone, like most people do, you're just plateauing – not improving.”
The first figure calculated is VO{-2} max, the amount of oxygen your body delivers to your muscles when you're going flat out. It's measured in millilitres per kilogram of body weight per minute. The number is useful, mostly as a reference point. Higher is better but not necessarily a game-winner. Mine turned out (embarrassment averted) to be 58.1 – a good chunk above the average for a man my age, 33.
More important are the thresholds, aerobic and lactate, where I have ample room for personal betterment. For long, multihour ascents in the Selkirks, the key is aerobic threshold, the pace a body can maintain for two-hours-plus. My threshold is at 72 per cent of my VO{-2} max – the equivalent of a (not speedy) 57:40 time in a 10-kilometre run. Train at this level, and not more, and I'm told I'll get closer to a much-stronger range of 80-85 per cent.
