I had already been exercising (walking on the treadmill) before plans were set for my EBC trip. Now that I was looking at a 32 mile hike from 9000 feet to 17,600 feet and back, I needed to come up with a plan to get ready.

For November, I decided to get comfortable with walking 4 miles at a good pace. I hit that goal, and started bringing up the incline on the treadmill before the end of the month. My December goal was to finish the month doing 4 miles at full incline (10%), which I made. Of course, my pace was a little slower than November with the incline, but calories burned went up significantly.

For January, I added another challenge, a training mask that restricts your breathing to strengthen your lungs. It had 4 different settings selectable by a lever on the front: 4,000, 8,000, 12,000 and 16,000 feet. I kicked off the new year by hitting the treadmill with the mask set to 4,000. I was getting accustomed to reduced airflow, and then one day I hit a real wall, the mask was kicking my butt! It turned out the lever had been set to 8,000 feet accidentally. By the end of third week of January, I was only using the 16,000 foot selection.

February, I decided to get a gym membership, so I could have access to some additional equipment beyond my tread mill that tops out at 10% incline. I found a gym that had locations in Rockwall and Kaufman, so I could workout wherever I wanted. So I started hitting the stair master to condition my legs for all the upwards hiking. The stair master looks a bit mean. I started at 15 minutes, and that was enough! I tried to get in an hour by mixing between the stair machine, summit machine (similar to an elliptical), and stationary bike. I grew to like using the climbing machine and elliptical cross trainer.

By mid March, I was able to go a whole hour on both the stair master and climbing machine (but not on the same day!). While I know I could have trained harder, I feel pretty good about what I’ve accomplished since October of 2017. I also started hitting the treadmill at 10%, with the training mask and my backpack with a load.

Here’s some charts from my exercise journaling:
I’m not done with March, but you can definitely see a downtrend from January. I wish I would have peaked a little later.