Neighborhood hills with a loaded pack
We've spent a lesson on why the app didn't work for me. Today we're doing something about it.
Here's the thing about training for a hike. You don't need a gym membership and you don't need a plan with a name. You need the hills that are already in your neighborhood and a pack with some weight in it. That's most of it.
Why I stopped trusting the app
I told you last time I tried a fitness app to get ready for a longer route. I gave up on it in about a week. It had me doing squats and intervals on a mat in my living room, and none of it told me anything about whether I could carry a pack uphill for six miles without my lungs giving out.
What actually worked was dumber than any app. I started walking the hills in my own neighborhood before work, with a loaded pack, and paying attention to what left me winded. That's it. That's the whole system. I didn't design it so much as notice it was working.
The reason it works is that hiking isn't really cardio in the treadmill sense. It's cardio plus load plus incline plus your feet doing something other than a flat, even stride. A neighborhood hill with a pack on gives you all four of those at once. A gym doesn't.
How to set this up at home
You'll want three things: a hill, a pack, and something to put in the pack.
The hill. Look at your own streets. Utah County's got no shortage of them, especially if you're anywhere near the bench or up toward the point of the mountain. You don't need anything dramatic. A street with a steady grade you can walk for ten or fifteen minutes without hitting a light is plenty. If you're not sure how steep something is, walk it once without a pack and just notice how your breathing changes. That's your baseline.
The pack. Use the actual pack you're taking on the trail. This matters more than people think. A gym bag or a school backpack sits differently on your shoulders and hips than a real hiking pack does, and you want your body learning the pack you'll actually wear, not a stand-in.
The weight. Start with what you'd actually carry for a day hike: water, snacks, the extra layer, the first aid kit. If you want to add a little more for training purposes, canned goods work fine, or a couple of water bottles you're not planning to drink from yet. I wouldn't go overboard here. You're training your legs and your lungs, not proving something.
A simple way to build it up
Here's roughly how I'd do it, and your mileage may vary depending on what you're already used to.
- Week 1–2: Walk your hill two or three times a week with a light pack, maybe ten pounds. Just get used to the incline.
- Week 3–4: Add weight, closer to what you'll actually carry on the trail. Increase how long you're walking, not just how steep.
- Week 5 and on: Try to string together enough hill walking that it adds up to something close to the elevation gain of your target hike. If your trail has 2,000 feet of gain, you want your legs to have felt something like that before you show up at the trailhead.
You can do this before work, like I do, or after dinner, whatever fits. The time of day doesn't matter. The repetition does.
One caution worth saying plainly
If you've got a bad knee or a hip that talks to you, loaded downhill walking is often harder on the joints than loaded uphill walking. Pay attention to how you feel going down your hill, not just going up it. If something's aching on the way down, that's worth mentioning to a doctor before you load up for a real trail, not after.
Read the gain per mile, not just the app's mileage number
This connects to something I've said before and I'll say it again here because it matters for training too: mileage lies. A four-mile hike with 2,500 feet of gain is a completely different animal than four flat miles, and if you only train on flat ground because that's what's near you, you'll show up at the trailhead undertrained no matter how many miles you logged. Match your training hill's steepness to your trail's steepness as best you can. If your neighborhood is flatter than your target trail, walk longer and add more weight to make up the difference.
Before next time
Find your hill this week. Walk it once with your actual pack, even half-loaded, and see how it feels. Bring what you notice to class and we'll figure out where you're starting from.