Learned Traveller

Everyone keeps asking me about what training I'm doing.  It's certainly true that you want to be fit to undertake something like this, and maybe you should be very fit. But on reviewing what's published on the Internet, I certainly don't get the feeling that superhuman levels of fitness are required.  Fitness will help you when you are high up, because it means that you can use what oxygen is there more efficiently. But factors that are more important are how well you cope with the altitude, and your mental stamina to cope with the wind and cold for long periods. Those come partly from experience and partly I think they are innate.  Some people seem to embark on huge fitness campaigns, of three hours exercise a day for six months in advance, and some people appear to do very little, and I'm not entirely convinced that it makes all that much difference. Bear in mind that there is at least a one month period from the start of the expedition to any summit attempt and any exceptional fitness will probably be lost over that period, because there is a lot of sitting around, and any substantial lack of fitness will be made up for to some extent by the acclimatisation hikes you are doing.  So I suspect that people's levels of fitness do not actually differ all that much when summit day arrives regardless of how much training they did before leaving home.

Nonetheless, I am getting exercise most days now - swimming, cycling, hockey, for an hour or more, and I think that's worthwhile. It's a definite improvement on my training for Elbrus, where I think I only managed to fit in a walk across Regent's Park in preparation.  And I found that that didn't matter, because I developed the fitness I needed in the early stages of the trip.