Getting Serious: 100 Miles Per Month in January and February

January 1 – February 28, 2025 – GA, USA (elevation: 380 ft)

Y’know those click-baity headlines that get you asking questions like, “If I do 50 pushups every day for a month, will I get shredded?” This isn’t that. Rather, this was my experience as a middle-aged guy working extremely hard to get fit on a timeline.

Motivation

Back in June of 2023, I e-mailed Northwest Alpine Guides to ask whether my gym climbing was adequate preparation to sign up with them for a guided climb of Mount Baker in Washington State. In short, the answer was no. One of their guides, Seth, explained:

This course, and climbing Mt Baker in general, will have very little overlap with your experience gym climbing and bouldering, indoor or outdoor in terms of technique…. The main challenge with Baker is cardiovascular fitness, especially while hiking with a weighted pack. While no glacier mountaineering experience is expected or required, excellent physical conditioning is necessary.

Of course, I ought to have started serious conditioning back then, but unlike normal people (whose lives were derailed in 2020), my nightmare year began in Fall 2023. In any case, it wasn’t until this past December that I began to formulate the training plan described in this blog post. I want to climb a beautiful, glaciated mountain; ergo I must get fit.

Rucking

Rucking was my primary means of improving cardiovascular fitness. The goal was to walk a minimum of 100 miles per month with a weighted backpack. This translated to roughly a two hour time commitment, 4-6 days per week. Every week I took at least one rest day. According to my notes, I eased into the habit with a 15.8 lb pack, increasing it to 32.6 lbs on January 13, and then 42.4 lbs for the entire month of February.

My neighborhood loop is conveniently about 1 mile around. (According to my car’s odometer it’s 1.1 miles, so my total mileage could be up to 10% higher than what I recorded.) The road has some gentle hills, though one end has a substantial dip that makes the uphill portion challenging.

Diet

I didn’t adopt a restrictive diet. I ate what I wanted and drank alcohol. These were my two guidelines:

1. Drink three Nalgene bottles (32 oz to 1 liter) of water per day.
2. Eat vegetables with two meals per day. Three might be better, but I don’t want to dunk broccoli or carrot sticks in my oatmeal, cold cereal, or eggs & bacon.

If you have a good idea for breakfast that includes a serving of vegetables, please leave a suggestion in the comments below!

There was no rule telling me not to pig out; however, I found that after your Fitness app congratulates you for walking 15,000 steps, you’ll less likely want to attenuate the health benefits with ice cream.

Calisthenics

My choice of calisthenics was arbitrary. I have one of those chin up bars that mounts on a door frame, so I did (1) three sets of dead hangs daily, increasing hang time by five seconds each week. In the garage, I have a dip station/punching bag combo where I did (2) one daily set of dips until muscle failure. Wanting (but unwilling) to neglect my legs, I just did (3) one daily set of squats and (4) one daily set of lunges, also for the same duration as the current week’s dead hangs. Finally, a buddy encouraged me to do burpees, so I completed (5) one set of those daily until I was fatigued.

The Grind and Obstacles

The hardest thing, by far, was just getting the miles in. Some days I was exhausted from work, but choosing rest over walking 4-5 miles would risk failing to hit my monthly goal. Yes, the goal was arbitrary, but it held a lot of psychological weight.

Early on, I got a huge blister that I don’ t think moleskin could have fixed. This was less of a problem rucking–just ignore the mild burning sensation on the ball of your foot–but made burpees afterward really painful. It wasn’t until five or six weeks in that chafing around my waist (from carrying a heavier pack) became a problem. That too was an unfixable problem that I mostly chose to ignore.

There was a huge difficulty jump when I swapped out a 10 lb cast iron weight in my backpack for a 25 pounder. Initially, it felt so, so slow and triggered shoulder pain, neck pain, even little jolts in the bones in my toes. With time, I grew stronger and the discomfort mostly went away.

The Southern United States experienced cold snaps in January and February. This gave me the opportunity to test out my cold weather gear! On one of the coldest days with rain and sleet, my softshell jacket kept me dry for about two miles. Water formed beads that sat on the surface of the fabric initially, but by the end of that day’s training both the softshell and down puffy jacket beneath it were wet and I was uncomfortable. Another miscellaneous clothing-related lesson was that temperatures above 40^o F are too warm to wear gloves.

Outcomes

I stuck to the plan and exceeded the minimum target of 100 miles per month. Below are three tables to help quantify my efforts, gains, and losses:

To be blunt, I thought that my ridiculous effort in rucking 214 miles over the course of two months would shave off more than 5.6 lbs. My expectation of dropping ~20 lbs was, sadly, way off the mark. Oh well, they say muscle weighs more than fat.

There were meaningful strength improvements with the dips and dead hangs. I could only do 2 dips at first, but now on a good day I’m up to 12. My ability to hang from a chin up bar increased by 40 seconds, though I wasn’t actually reaching muscle failure and slipping off the bar until that last week with the 85 second target. The bad day of only 2 burpees was an anomaly; I must have been extra tired (or willfully lazy) since it’s more typical for me to do 8-10.

Although I feel a bit salty about the lack of weight loss, my body looks and feels better. Pardon the narcissism, but I really like flexing in the bathroom mirror now.

Lessons Learned

Chafing: jogging pants aren’t as bad as jeans. More importantly, absolutely no car keys in your pocket! Find a pouch in your backpack.

Hard exercise is unsustainable: I hope it’s easier to stay in shape than it is to get there. If I had a family to take care of, this amount of exercise would be impossible while working full-time.

Fringe benefit: presumably due to the dead hangs, my back never hurts. I haven’t been to the chiropractor since. That harsh reality of back pain just because you’re in your 40’s may be reversible!

Coming up next: Putting my improved fitness to the test in the mountains of North Georgia.

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