Dad and I just did our last Dandenongs training session before Everest! The Dandenongs are a very very small mountain (hill) range about an hour’s drive from Melbourne. We go to the Glasgow fire track which is a very steep trail with 400m of vertical ascent.
Throughout this Everest training (about 10 months), we have been coming to the Dandenongs 1x a week for about 5 hours. In the last 4 months, we have been coming 2x/week which gets me 10 hours of training. This is alongside the 5 other days of training I do per week. Over the last 4 months or so, I have been aiming to keep my weekly total at about 20 hours of training.
I have been doing 4-6 fire trail laps per session which is about 1600-2400m of vertical climbing.
This is crucial for mountain training because it gets you used to hiking up steep terrain (steeper than the stairmaster) that is also uneven. Downhill training is also key when preparing your knees for a heavy load and also the quads.
In the last 4 months of training I have been wearing a 12kg weighted vest to our Dandenongs’ hikes. It was very hard at the start but just the other day I completely forgot I had it on!
Dad and I have been training relatively consistently in the Dandenongs for the past 4 years or so. Thanks to the many many endless, hot, dark, rainy, exhausting days I have been able to summit Aconcagua (highest outside Himalayas), Manaslu, Ama Dablam, some sick peaks in the Alps, and have a comfortable Everest expedition (fitness wise) last time.
