How To Train Mental Endurance For Mountaineering

​Inside, I share some strategies a mountaineer can use to build and sustain mental endurance for the mountains. Fair warning, these ideas are SIMPLE - but if applied, they can make a genuine difference in the mental battle when things get tough. 

Episode Chapers:
​
0:09 
Introduction to Mental Endurance
1:15 
The Importance of Mental Strength
3:57 
Layer One: Building a Strong Foundation
8:37 
Layer Two: Grind Sessions for Endurance
26:55 
Layer Three: Consult a Sports Psychologist
30:02 
Conclusion and Key Takeaways

Episode Transcript:

[0:00] All right, hello, hello, ladies and gentlemen. So in today's episode,

[0:03] we are talking about how to train mental endurance for mountaineers. Now, the whole concept about mental strength and mental endurance and mental grit, it's very, very, very big in the world of mountaineering. Because obviously, mountaineering is an endurance sport in the truest sense of the word. We've got long periods, low duration, and more often than not, we are in some very tricky conditions. We've got a load on our back. We're going on tough terrain. We've got bad weather. We've been going day after day. We've got minimal creature comforts. And the mental game of mountaineering is obviously very important. And you'll often hear people sort of saying, ah, mountaineering's 80% mental and 20% physical. And as much as I very much disagree with that type of statement, there's no doubt that mental endurance, mental strength, mental grit is very, very important. So this often comes to question when we're looking at people with their preparations. They're like, well, I'm training, I'm doing the right things, I'm improving myself, but what can I do on the mental side of things? What can I actively do to help improve my mental strength?

[1:12] What can I actively do to help improve my mental endurance? So I want to cover this today.

[1:19] Now, to be very, very, very clear from the outset, What we are talking about today, it is not going to be complicated.

[1:30] I personally believe when we talk about the mental side of things, there are so many benefits a mountaineer can get from doing some really, really basic and simple stuff. And I personally believe that when people go into this topic, so many people just get overly complicated before even just nailing the basics.

[1:53] Number two, this particular advice, it's not going to be very out there. It's not going to be very different. It's not going to be a case of me saying, all right, go out and just have cold showers every day or start doing cold plunges or train with an elevation mask, which cuts off your breathing or anything like that. All of these things, yeah, you can understand putting yourself in uncomfortable situations and having to deal with it and push through it and all of that may be beneficial for mental strength and mental endurance. I don't know. The relevance, practicality for a mountaineer i don't know bit of a question mark there.

[2:30] Instead what we are going to be focusing on today is simple practical suggestions which can make a pretty big difference on the mental side of things and on top of that these simple and practical, practical examples are designed to be very very easy to incorporate into your mountaineering training plan. In the sense, it's not extra things you need to throw in there too much. It's not all this extra time, this whole extra consideration, but you can kind of just slide it in or it can just be part of your normal training. Now, the way I'm going to present this is in kind of a three-layer system. Now, the first layer is something I recommend every single mountaineer should do. I think everyone should be doing this regardless of whether you're worried about mental endurance or not, this is what everyone should be doing. The second layer is the next step up in the sense that if you're doing this layer one, if you're working through this, if you're confident you're nailing this and you're still a little bit worried around the mental side of things, this is kind of the next step up. And then the third layer is that next step up again. If you're doing layer one, if you're doing layer two, and you're like, ah, you know what? This kind of isn't enough for me. I need a little bit more. Well, that's when you move into. So you have a really, really, really simple step-by-step system and emphasis on simple, which you can work through when you're considering this whole mental side of things.

[3:58] Now, let's start on layer number one on how to build mental endurance for your mountaineering. Now, the first layer isn't anything crazy. This particular layer, it isn't so much trying to actively build up your mental endurance, but it is very, very important. Instead, what we are trying to do here is instead of actively building up our mental endurance, we're kind of trying to cover your weak spots. We're trying to make sure things that will pull away from your mental side of things, that will concern you, that will worry you, that will cause mental anguish, that will cause mental issues, that these things are minimized, that you're prepared, that you're feeling good. Because this is important. Because before we even talk about improving things, we want to make sure that you're reducing the negative. Similar to like when we're talking about improving speed on the mountain.

[4:53] A lot of people think, okay, how can I improve my pace? How can I improve my movement speed? How can I push things a little bit more? And that can be valuable. But the first place you always want to start with your speed is reducing your downtime, reducing the fatigue you get that slows you down, that pulls you back. And this is what we're talking about here. Layer number one is reducing the things that can affect our mental endurance negatively. Now, there's two very, very simple things here. One thing physically you're going to be doing with your training and one thing that's more of a mental exercise or mental preparations or whatever. So the first thing you want to look at is you want to make sure that you are crystal clear.

[5:35] That you are going to hit your training metrics and you want to be crystal clear that you are building up to this over time. Now, what I mean by this is one of the biggest things that can affect mountaineers mentally are all the physical unknowns leading up onto the mountain. You know, when we're climbing, we're dealing with so many different things. We're dealing with long hours of movement, five, six, seven, eight, up to almost 24 hours in some situations.

[6:04] We're dealing with large amount of elevation gain and elevation loss. We're dealing with pack weight or sled weight. We're dealing with multiple days or weeks of movement. We're dealing with high altitude in some situations. Maybe we have other things like speed requirements or whatever may be. And all of these things, when we're looking like, oh my gosh, I need to be ready for all of this, it can make us very uncertain. We can think about this. How am I going to handle all of those hours of climbing? How am I going to handle this pack weight or whatever it may be? And this type of thought, all this uncertainty around how you're physically going to handle these things, it can cause a lot of stress, a lot of worry, a lot of concern. And for a lot of people, this can end up being what I call a chink in their armor of mental endurance. As I was saying before, we want to minimize the detriments to mental endurance. And this can be a major thing because if we spend a lot of time worrying and stressing about how we're going to handle all of these things in our preparations, in our training. And it's built up over and over and over in our head. It's been festering. And then we get on the mountain. We can be so mentally kind of wound up and worried and anxious that the first sign of challenge or adversity, everything just kind of falls apart. Maybe you're up at high attitude, you have a bad night's sleep, and the next day everything feels hard, and then mentally you just spiral and just don't recover.

[7:32] Or maybe you wake up one day and your legs haven't recovered. You're feeling so hard and strong. You're like, how am I feeling hard and sore? And you're like, how am I supposed to do all this elevation today? And you mentally spiral or whatever may be. And we do not want this. We don't want this chink in our armor of all of these things that have vested in our mind for so long. We want to minimize it. So to combat this, the most simple thing you can do is in our training, we want to create a plan where we can expose our body and our mind to as many of these challenges as possible so we can practice it feel it and be confident with it now here obviously we are not going to be able to exactly replicate everything together you're not going to replicate 7 14 20 days of movement day after day we're not going to replicate being up at that high attitude we're not going to be able to replicate everything but we want to tick off as much as we can expose our body and our mind to these types of things so we can feel a bit more comfortable and confident with it all.

[8:37] Now, the way I like to do this, very, very simply, and in all honesty, this should be part of everyone's training plan anyway, but the way I like to do this is for everyone, we have an end goal in our training to hit a certain amount of hiking we're going to do before our climb. And no matter if someone's doing the majority of their longer cardio as trail running or cycling or whatever it may be, pack hiking is the most relevant thing. So there is always going to be some element of this in someone's training. And what I like here is having a nice end goal about two to three weeks before you head off where we can hit a few nice equivalent metrics. And what I typically like to do is say, hey, two weeks before you fly out, what we're going to do is a nice long day hike, which is the equivalent of the longest day on the mountain in hours that you're expected to be moving and the equivalent of your max pack weight on any stage in the trip.

[9:40] So if you think your longest day is going to be roughly about eight hours, obviously you never know what's going to happen in the mountain, but that's kind of expected. And on another day you're expected to carry about 20 kilos. Well, then in this situation, on this day hike, we're going to try to get a hike, which is eight hours with a 20 kilo pack. Now, the reason why I'm using hours, as opposed to adding elevation into that equation, using distance and elevation, yada, yada, is this is just flexible. So if someone has easy access to mountains, if you live in Colorado, you have the mountains around and you can hit a bunch of elevation with this, cool, this works out. Alternatively, if you live in the middle of nowhere and you're in the outback in Australia, or if you're in Texas or something like that, or in the Netherlands, and you just have complete flat, you can still hit these hours, hit this.

[10:29] That exposure, that time spent moving. It'll kind of even out. And you're just going to do lots and lots of distance. Now, obviously, this isn't perfect. Obviously, this doesn't replicate day after day after day. And for some people who may have like a 15 plus hour summit day coming up, it may not be super practical for you to be able to do that much. And in that case, you just want to say, how much can I realistically do? And then maybe just do a bit of extra pack weight. So you may end up doing a 10-hour hike with a 23-kilo pack or something like that. But either way, just hitting these metrics, as simple as it sounds, can be a really, really powerful on the mental side of things. So at this end peak of the training, you can say, you know what? I did this. The body felt good or whatever. At least I know how the body feels after this amount of hours of moving with this amount of load. And you can enter the trip saying, you know what? I brought my training to a peak. I felt good. I'm kind of ready to roll.

[11:28] Now, another thing that we may want to pair with this is then you may want to expose ourselves to elevation because that hike may not have a huge amount of elevation. So a way to do this is you can look at, okay, what is my biggest elevation gain day on the mountain? What is the pack weight I'm expected to carry? And what are the speed requirements, if any? And then you may try to replicate this in your training. This may be the same week as the hike, so two or three weeks before. You may do it a week before or whatever it may be. and then you can either do like a hill session or get on the stairmaster and just make sure you're hitting that metric for however long it takes or whatever speed whatever pack weight now this type of stuff in all honesty as i said before this probably should be a part of a lot of people's training program anyway at the very least that day hike if you're worried about elevation that elevation um but on the mental side of things when we're talking about mental endurance just making sure this is doable even if you kind of like got a vibe like yeah i'm pretty sure i could do that just physically making sure you can do it and confidently saying and feeling comfortable being able to do this it can be really really powerful and it can really really really cover up that kind of chink in your armor.

[12:39] And for the people who are like, I don't really love long endurance training, even if you're doing mountaineering, I know there are a lot of people out there that just don't love endurance and long, low intensity training. The pure fact of just building up to this and learning how to do this and how it feels, it can do wonders for your mental endurance in itself for that type of people. Now, to complement this, because this is kind of like, all right, two to three weeks before you go away, that can help. But as I said, this type of thing can be just professed during your mind for a long time and it can just be really, really, really uncertain, really, really, really worry you or whatever it may be. So to combine this, what we want to do is we want to make sure this is combined with long-term planning. Because to be effective, we want to make sure that, number one, we get to the point where we do this final metrics, we do this final elevation, we do this final loaded hike. We want to make sure that feels easy because it's only a day hike. It's not at altitude. It doesn't have that accumulated days of fatigue. This needs to be pretty easy for the mental side of things. So we want to make sure that long-term planning, by the time we get to this, it feels easy.

[13:48] And on top of this, not only do we want to make sure this feels easy, but we also want to make sure that we are confident from start to finish in our training that we have a long-term plan that we can reference and say, am I on track? Am I doing the right things? Am I moving forward? Am I where I need to be moving forward? So again, we can battle this kind of festering thing that goes in our head.

[14:12] So really, really simple way of going about this is just basically sitting down and drafting out this longer cardio that you're going to be doing. Typically, what I recommend is when you first start your training journey, sit down and do a bit of rough planning. Look at your hiking. Realistically, how often do you think you're going to be hiking in the lead up from now up until your trip. What time commitments are realistic for your life, for your climate, for everything like that. And just use that to put together a bit of a plan. Are you going to hike once a month? Are you going to hike once every three weeks? Are you going to hike every two weeks? Are you going to hike once a week, whatever it may be? And what time commitments are going to be good for you? And then sit down and chart out a plan from today, day one, all the way up to that final hike. Aiming for the slowest, steadiest build in regards to time and pack weight to make sure it feels easy. Now, this will likely change a bunch of times during your training journey. This is a draft plan, like things always come up or whatever it may be, but just having this laid out, a really rough plan, which you can reference, which you can build up, it's so valuable. It's so valuable to ensure you have that steady control build. It's so valuable to ensure you get where you need to be. It's so valuable for you to be able to reference and saying, you know what, I'm a little bit wired, am I on track? You look at your plan for eight weeks and you're like, yeah, okay, some of my training has been hit and miss, but I'm still doing my hikes and I feel good on it.

[15:38] The same thing for elevation. Sit down, come up with a rough plan. Now, this may not involve you just doing these types of like the stair master or hill sessions from day one to day final, but they just have a plan in broad strokes, how are you going to do it? For example, you know, in a six month plan, you may say, you know what, I'm going to do four weeks of pack walking. Then I'll do four weeks of stair work. Then I'll do four weeks of box step work. And then I'll do eight weeks on a nice big strong hill building up to this final metric or something like that. You know, just have a really, really broad strokes. So that's the kind of first point. It's really, really basic. But if you're worried about mental insurance, that's the first place you should start just to make sure those are covered. Now, to complement this, as I said, you should be doing this in your training anyway. It's pretty like stock standard for mountaineers. But to complement this, beyond those training metrics we can replicate, there are obviously so many other things that can lead to a bit of mental stress leading into an expedition. There's so many other things that can just go over and over and over in your head, which can fester, which can cause issues, which can, again, be that chink in your armor.

[16:47] So what you want to do here is do a bit of action planning. You want to sit down and outside of those physical metrics we're going to hit, you want to sit down with pen and paper and list down every single thing that you ever think about as an even a slight worry in this trip. And this is going to be an ongoing list. You may not get it all at once, but you want to have a running list of this. For example, are you worried about food? Are you worried about getting up there and just having limited options? Or are you worried about getting up there and losing your appetite due to altitude? Are you worried about getting up there and just getting sick of the same food? Whatever it is, write it down. Are you worried about sleep? Are you worried about getting sick? Are you worried about specific skills that you may not know right now or may need to practice or maybe you're learning in the mountain or whatever it may be? Are you worried about group dynamics? Are you rather worried about weather? Whatever. Write down every single little thing that has a slight concern for you. Keep a running list of it. And then what we want to do is we want to use this list, and we want to take some specific actions to action plan around it.

[17:55] Once you have a good list, write it all down with pen and paper. And then next to every single thing that you've listed down as a concern, you want to write down why it is worrying you. Just write down, okay, what could go wrong, and what are the consequences of that? So for example, food. I could go up there, I could lose my appetite, and I might not have enough energy to do my climb, or whatever it may be. Whatever's going through your head, everyone's going to be different, but write it all down. And then the third step to this, for every single action point you've come up with, you want to write down a simple action plan of what you are going to do if you find yourself in this worst case scenario. So to give you the full example, let's talk about that food thing. I am worried about food.

[18:46] Why am I worried? I'm worried that if I get up to higher attitude, I'm going to lose my appetite and I won't be able to eat. What could be the consequences of that? I'm worried that I'm not going to have enough energy and I'm not going to reach the summit.

[18:59] What is my action plan? Well, I'm going to force myself to eat at every meal. I'm going to make sure I nail a snacking strategy and go in with a strategy on how I'm going to approach my snacks. And I'm going to bring back up, high calorie, liquid options. So if I have no appetite, I can fall back on that and still get something into me. For every single point you come up with, write it down, write down why it's worrying you and write down an action plan. Now, this is a really, really, really basic process for mental preparation, but it can take a lot of mental load off you, both in your preparations. And also if you get up on the mountain and something goes wrong, and one of these situations come up, the fact that you have action planned around it, you've thought about it, it helps so, so, so, so much. And when we're specifically talking about the mental endurance side of things, this can be just really, really, really be useful. Identifying and action planning because it can reduce that stress, anxiety, and worry of these things in your preparations and reduce that likelihood of you having that chink in your armor. And then it can also just save that mental space and bandwidth on the mountain if things do come up. And if you're tired and fatigued and high attitude, where decision-making sometimes is not the best, this can actually be a really good safety measure as well because you've thought through this already.

[20:21] So that's layer number one. Gradually hit those metrics, have a plan, identify all those other concerns. Now, as you can see, that's pretty basic. Really, really, really simple stuff. And as I said, we're kind of just covering our bases here and covering our simple stuff to make sure these things don't negatively affect us on the mountains.

[20:44] So that's layer number one. Layer number two, if you're doing those things and you are a little bit worried and you're like, hey, I actively want to improve my mental endurance beyond this. What can you do? Well, if you go online, there's a million different things about building mental grit, cold showers, cold plunges, elevation mask, doing this and doing that and all of this stuff. And that may be relevant in certain situations, but if we are a mountaineer and we are training up for a big mountain, we want to make sure that we are doing something which is relevant in the context of mountaineering. Now, perfect world, if we actively want to improve our mental endurance, perfect world, we could go up a mountain, go up on extra mountaineering expeditions in the lead up, practice our skills, get exposed to these challenges and all of this. But obviously, that's not super practical for a lot of people. So one thing that we can do as this second layer is something called a grind session. And this is a really simple thing that you can incorporate into your training here and there, which can be relevant for mountaineering, can develop relevant aspects of mental endurance, and can help us here. Now, full credit to this, this is not my idea. This particular idea comes from a coach called Joe Bonington, who used to run Joe's Base Camp, or maybe still does run Joe's base cam. He's a strength and conditioning coach, specializes in adventure sports, absolutely amazing.

[22:13] And he lives in my local area, funnily enough. But yeah, this kind of idea comes from him. And the idea behind a grind session, at least in my understanding of it, is what we're going to be doing is we're going to find some type of cardiovascular activity that, which is boring, which is repetitive, which is relevant for mountaineering, and which is kind of annoying. And what we're going to do, not all the time, but every once in a while, we're just going to go out and send it. We're going to set a time frame where we're just going to go and go and go and go.

[22:55] Even when it gets boring, even when we get annoyed, it, even when we get tired, even when we're uncomfortable, we're just going to grind it out. Now, the example Joe has used in the past, which I think was a really, really cool idea, is we live in the northern beaches of Sydney, right on the coast, right next to the beach. And his gym, while it was open, very, very close to the beach as well. So he used to get his mountaineers to go down to a local beach, which was relatively flat, put on a tire sled and go up and down. Up and down, up and down for hours and hours and hours. And the idea behind this is we're on the sand, uncomfortable enough. We've got the sled and we're walking, relevant for mountaineering. And because we're on the sand and it's bumpy, it's not particularly flat, it's a little bit uncomfortable, the sand gets in our shoes and this and that, it's uncomfortable. It's awkward. It's frustrating. And hour after hour, it's not like you get into a nice rhythm, that it just sucks, but you're just walking through and pushing through.

[24:03] That's a really, really simple example. Now, if you're obviously don't have access to a beach, then we want to kind of think, okay, what are other ways we can do this? Where you can choose something that's just mononymous, that's tough, that's a little bit awkward, and you're just going to go and go and go. Now, when we are choosing options, we want to make sure we're choosing things that, number one is relevant to mountaineering. So we're working on things that are leg-based, the continuous or whatever may be. And we also want to make sure these things, as much as we're grinding stuff out, that this is going to have like a low risk of things going wrong. This is going to have a low risk of like high impact on the joints, a low risk of you tripping over or whatever may be. So there's a few kind of like simple examples you can kind of look at here. Now number one the sled pulling you may not be able to do this on a beach but you could do this around the local local oval just whack on a tire sled hike and hike and hike and hike for six seven eight hours just going round and round or back and forth and back and forth boring as anything but that's the idea we're just grinding that out mentally you may do something like well like okay.

[25:16] I hate the treadmill. Maybe that's like the worst thing in the world for you. You're like, I just don't want to do this. Maybe you're going to say it yourself and say, you know what? One day I'm going to get in the gym. I'm not going to put on a show. I'm not going to put on music. I'm not going to do any type of distraction. I'm just going to get on the treadmill and walk the half the day, something stupid like that. Or whatever it may be. It's just sort of having to think about something that's uncomfortable, repetitive, or whatever, it is. Now, you wouldn't do this all too often. This isn't something that's going to be a weekly part of your training. But if you're looking at a six-month process, you may sort of say, all right, I'm going to do one of these every six weeks or so. The first time I do it, it might be four hours. The next time I do it, it might be seven hours. The next time I do it, it might be 10 hours or whatever it may be. And you're just kind of building up. There's a million and one things you can do here, but that's really, really simple. And again, if you look at this, as I said, a lot of this stuff is looking at just slipping into your training. This is a pretty simple thing you could do to replace your longer cardio for the week. You could say, you know what, instead of going for a long run, instead of going for a long hike, I'm just going to do this. Or another idea just spring to mind, which I meant to mention before, you may go out and just do a short local trail, but just repeat it like 10, 20 times. Do the same thing over and over and over. Boring. But just deal with it.

[26:45] Whatever it is. So there you go. Lay number two, a grind session. Very, very simple to incorporate, very relevant, very effective just for pushing that mental endurance.

[26:56] Now, level number three, moving up again. You're going to hate me. If you've been listening this whole time and you're like, okay, cool, Rowan, gone through the boring stuff, gone through the simple stuff, give me something advanced, give me something interesting. You're going to hate me now for listening for 27 minutes and getting this because level three, if you're doing that, if If you're doing your basics, if you've done your grind sessions and you're still worried.

[27:19] My recommendation is go and see a sports psychologist who specializes in endurance athletes. I know that's not very interesting or not very practical for this type of thing, but that's the best advice. Because if you're already doing this basic stuff, you've covered your weaknesses, you're doing something relevant and simple to actively build your mental endurance, well, me giving you extra things to do, it's not going to be very relevant because your mental endurance, your mental strength, your mental limitations, it's going to be personal. It's going to be individual. Everyone's going to have different things that are running through their head. And there's no point if you're already doing the basics of just chasing all these different things. You want something that's personalized to you.

[28:06] And actively going and having, even if it's just one consultation with a sports psychologist who specializes in endurance athletes, you can sit down, you can discuss your concerns, and they can actively recommend something that's going to be relevant for you as an individual. A lot of mountaineers out there are warming to the idea of working with a coach or working with someone to help their training. A lot of mountaineers out there are warming to the idea of getting someone working with a dietician or nutritionist to help them with their nutrition. But working with a sports psychologist, not very popular still, but it can be so, so, so powerful. Now, if you're going down this route, you really do want to make sure you find someone who specializes in endurance athletes. Perfect world, you'd find someone who specializes in adventure sports or extreme sports or someone who specializes in mountaineers. Now, unfortunately, I don't have an amazing recommendations of a specialist that specialist. I've never really kind of managed to find someone in my network who things have worked out or whatever it may be. So I don't have a specific recommendation that's that relevant.

[29:15] But you can find out there, sports psychologists who specializes in endurance athletes, they will understand these limitations. They will understand these challenges. They will be able to cater specific action plans for you. And that is the third layer. I know, I know, I know you probably hate me now, but it is honestly the most important or most valuable next step in my opinion.

[29:39] So there we go, guys. That's probably it today. Now, as I said at the start of this episode, these recommendations are simple, intentionally so, but I personally believe that this is probably, I don't know, it's intentionally designed just to be practical. Simple stuff that can slide into your training that can really,

[30:01] really, really make a bit of difference. It's nothing fancy. It's nothing out there or whatever it may be, but I really do think this can make the difference if you're worried about endurance side of things.

[30:12] Layer one, sit down, figure out your metrics, have that long-term plan, make sure you nail that. Number two, sit down, do that action planning. Every single thing that worries you, identify it, think about it, why it's causing you concern, action plan around it. Layer two, if you're worried about things still and you need to actively push things forward. Think about one of these grind sessions, something long, repetitive, relevant, and boring that you can just go and go and go and push through that mental block, push through that discomfort in a way which isn't going to put you at risk of things going wrong. And then number three, if you're still worried about something, talk to a professional, find a specialist, have a chat, get a personalized action plan or personalized recommendations. I personally think that's the way to go. So with that being said, I'm going to wrap things up here. I hope I don't get too much negative emails from this, from people who listened for so long and didn't get a nice layer three, but you know, that's the way it goes. So thank you for listening. I hope you've enjoyed it and we'll talk to you very soon. Bye.

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