Training Tips from Denali Veterans Nick and Adrian

Hello Future Colleagues,

My pal Nick Bunch and I are looking forward to meeting you in Anchorage in less than two weeks time for our shared assault on Denali. We studied the Mountain Trip guidelines on training for Denali and have taken them most seriously. We thought we should share with you the strenuous programme that we have been undertaking here in Devon in the far South West of England.

In terms of altitude training we have managed to summit on no less than four occasions. Yes Tor the highest point on Dartmoor (our equivalent of the Denali National Park) – a height of just over 2,000 feet. On one occasion we even had to deal with 3 cms of snow (we applied crampons but they kept getting clogged up with mud). I attach a photograph of Nick and I overnighting in our tent half way to the summit and clearly showing the ravages of altitude at 1000 feet.

At first we struggled a little with the oxygen deprivation but decided to instigate a separate training programme to compensate for this. To improve our ability to cope with reduced oxygen intake and respiratory difficulties we committed to taking up smoking big time and have really come on in leaps and bounds. At first we found inhaling all that smoke really difficult and our lungs felt very raw and painful for the first few weeks in January. But we’ve persevered and built up our capacity and two weeks ago we’d got up to 27 cigarettes a day. Our aim is to peak at 30 early next week in time for our flight out to Alaska.

The other area we had initial trouble with was hydration. We’d find trying to gulp back more than a pint or so of water a real problem so took advice from a Sports specialist and tried various powder ‘energy’ additives. Despite trying a range of types (Gatorade, Lucozade etc) and flavours (lemon, orange, strawberry etc) we found that these didn’t agree with us and just made us gag or vomit. Thankfully, quite by accident, we stumbled on the ideal solution….beer. We could happily rehydrate with a few pints of this stuff but, once again, found that our tolerance levels were not good and balance and verbal communication skills certainly seemed to be impeded. We were worried by Mountain Trip’s guidance that on the mountain we would need to consume 8 or more pints a day as, back in January, this would have been impossible for us.

However we’re a determined lot here in the sunny South West so embarked upon the third strand of our training aimed at increasing our hydration capacity by a progressive upping of our daily beer intake. This has been really hard work and we have suffered long and hard to improve performance but last weekend we both cracked the nine pint in a session barrier. It was tough but we’re determined to push on further in these last two weeks to achieve our target of ten pints. A useful side effect of this training has been that we have both ‘bulked up’ enormously (especially around the waist) so don’t really feel the need to ‘carbo load’ in the lead up to the expedition.

We intend to have our final ten pint training session in Humpy’s bar in Anchorage (Alaskan Summer Ale) and, if we sit outside in the back yard, we may be able to do some final lung capacity work with a pack or two of high tar cigarettes. We hope that you will be able to join us and share in our final training session on Saturday 29th in Humpy’s.

In Anticipation,

Adrian and Nick