Irish Michael makes another appearance
13 September 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
This past Friday Irish Michael came up for a fitness day camp and we got it cracking by hitting the deep woods for some high intensity cardio. With the tortured musing of an expert wine steward trying to match the perfect vintage with a gourmet meal, I selected one of the toughest routes from my endless catalog of backwoods trails. Irish Mike is a cardio machine who runs and boxes everyday so I knew this was an opportunity to go long and hard. I knew of a particular horse trail that would intersect one of the innumerable mountain fire trails that crisscrosses the state forest and this killer route would eventually lead to a crest that afforded a panoramic view allowing you to see for twenty miles in every direction. Since Irish Michael is in real good shape, especially for a guy just this side of fifty, I wanted to pick a humdinger fire trail to see how he would hold up. Hes lean and fit, a real fitness freak, so I was curious how the severe grade would impact his flat track cardio capacity. I cant tell you how many fit folks I have had visit, people that have built tremendous aerobic capacity working on flat grades and level terrain are totally destroyed when subjected to cardio done on steep inclines. When I take the flat-track aerobic elite out of their element and hit the steep hills, four out of five have real difficulty. There is a different quality of work involved. When tremendous muscular effort is added to the aerobic exercise equation it presents the body with a different set of physiological problems. Purposeful Primitives always seek to work on weak points and this cardio revelation that hill work shocks a system conditioned only to level terrain comes as a welcome revelation to the serious athlete. Another analogy would be introducing a seasoned weight trainer to a new series of progressive resistance exercises that allow the individual to break through to the next level of strength and muscle acquisition. Complacency is the antithesis of progress. Show me a smug trainee in love with his approach and I show you unconscious stagnation.
Michael is a jogger and a runner; he glides and flows and has a beautiful stride. Once we drove the five miles from my house to the horse trail and parked the jeep, I had him run ahead for the first uphill section that cut under the forest under the canopy. It takes me 15-minutes to reach the break where the woods canopy bisects the fire trail. As is my habit when working with aerobic athletes way faster than myself, I had him jog ahead then run back to me as I make my ponderous way along the route. He is the equivalent of a sports car while I am the diesel truck. I often fall behind in the early going but my pace is steady and relentless and after an hour I still am able to work at my initial pace while many a nimble sports car runs out of gas, particularly at the back end of a 60-75 minute thigh killer hill session. Once we hit the fire trail the real work began. The second section turned to the left and began a steep incline that crested maybe a half mile from our start point. I had strapped him up with a heart rate monitor when we began and since he was extremely fit his walking-around heart rate was around 55. The jog up through the woods canopy barely got him above 130 beats per minute so I was curious how this first super–steep grade would impact him his superior capacity. Im nursing a twisted knee that happened while hauling 100-pound bags of stone dust up flights of stairs for a landscape project; so I watched intently as I turned him lose and he continued his jog. His goal was to make it to the crest jogging all the way. I didnt see that happening as this type of incline was unlike anything hed ever dealt with. I secretly wondered how far hed get before the sheer steepness forced him to stop running and start walking.
He got a good quarter mile before the incredible thigh-and-glute burn and the lung singe finally broke his jog down into a labored walk. The final section of the trail to the crest was damned near vertical and lasted a good two hundred strides. Being the pack mule that I am, I closed the gap considerably by the time he crested the final peak. It took me a good five minutes to crest after Michael. Hed broken 170 beats per minute which for him never happened. I broke my previous best time for this particular route (Once I walk a route I establish a duration record and always seek to walk that route faster) of 30-minutes by cresting in 27:30. I attribute this improvement ghosting him. We soaked in the view and the quietude for ten minutes; the only sound was the wind and our own labored breathing. Spectacular visuals. He loved the rich cleanliness of the purified oxygen and that indescribable wordless beatific state that I crave and only occurs deep in nature after intense exercise appeared. Krishnamurti would have felt right at home. It took us ten minutes to walk/jog to the downside of this mountaintop, the place where you are able to see what lies beyond, what the continuation of the trail appears and next mini-mountain reveals itself. The next crest was awesome and made the one wed just conquered look like chump change. Realizing that I was with a guy who had the capacity and the heart to do it, I said, We have to do that we have to walk the downside of this mountain and up that monsterbut not today. He agreed to both.
How long do you suppose it would take to crest that? He asked. I surmised it would take ten to fifteen minutes to bottom out, to walk down into the gap between the two mini-mountains and an hour to walk up the fire trail to the peak of the next ridge. He thought it could be done in less time but we agreed to try and hit it in the future. The whole journey, from jeep to this crest then onto the next crest then back to the jeep promised to be a four hour endurance challenge. I cant wait. We got back to the jeep and hed burned a cool seven hundred calories in fifty minutes, thats some serious calorie oxidation for a 170-pound guy with a 40-beat resting heart rate in great shape. Back at the gym garage inside fifteen minutes we immediately swung into a bench press session and he was quite miffed that the previous four weeks of 20-rep sets had resulted in a degradation of his absolute maximum in the bench. I pointed out that his absolute maximum was for his current size and weight. I worked him up to a clean, crisp single rep max and it appeared hed lost a good 25-pounds off his previous best bench, this after completing a 6-week 5-rep bench cycle. I tried to console him but he was inconsolable. I had assumed he would lose some absolute strength after working exclusively in a 20-rep rep range and assured Michael that while his absolute strength might have taken a torpedo hit to the bow, his muscular endurance had improved dramatically. He was now positioned beautifully to commence a low rep power cycle.
Man does not live by power training alone and only be creating contrast between within the overall training template, the macro cycle, do we avoid staleness and burnout. All routines, no matter how effective or sophisticated, sooner or later go stale. Only by rotating exercises and rep ranges, only by goosing frequency, duration and volume on a systematic and periodic basis do we keep things, fresh, vibrant, exciting and chock full of that beginner mind enthusiasm that makes us hungry for the next workout. After burning a 1000-calories and being in bench-press funk, the only thing Michael was hungry for was food. I took him to a local restaurant landmark in the shadows of Camp David and he filled his depleted gas tank with plain but delicious agro-American peasant grub. As per his custom he presented me with a case of Guinness Stout which I gratefully accepted. Any cardio heavy hitters up for some hardball mountain goat trekking and interested in participating in what promises to be a four hour mountain march with myself and Irish Mike can contact me at this site. Be prepared to sweat and groan.
Tags:Popularity: 1% [?]
Related Posts:
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
