I leave for Everest in about a month. I’ve made changes in my diet and fueling strategy over the last year. First, after working with a functional medicine doctor in Boulder, I began eating meat again at his recommendation after reviewing my blood work. Additionally, I have focused on eating a low carb high fat (LCHF) diet. While I believe that people can be healthy and succeed athletically on a plant based diet, returning to eating meat and eating LCHF, has worked well for me in my last few months of training. Second, I have changed my fueling strategy. My two primary fuel sources are two products developed by SFuels — Train and Race+ — and ketones from DeltaG.
To understand the rationale for my changes in fueling, some context will be helpful. Growing up as a less natural athlete, I realized early that if I wanted to succeed in sports, I needed to train smarter and harder and I needed to fuel my body as effectively as possible. Fortunately, I grew to love the gym and I enjoyed learning about the most effective ways to eat and supplement in order to become stronger and more fit. Being focused on training and fueling worked for me. I was able to become an effective high school offensive lineman and earn a scholarship to a Division I school.
After football ended and I began practicing law, I continued to lift weights, but I eventually gravitated to mountaineering after hearing an opposing lawyer in a deposition in San Antonio, Texas talk about going to climb Mt. Rainier the next summer. In 2002, I climbed to the summit of Mt. Rainier and I was hooked, but I also realized that, if I wanted to get better at climbing for many hours and on higher peaks, it would be important, as it was in high school, to learn how to train and fuel my body as effectively as possible.
About the time I started preparing to climb my first serious mountain – Denali, the highest peak in North America – I learned about a book that had just come out called Training for the New Alpinism: A Manual for the Climber as Athlete. Prior to reading this book, my training had been random, which likely caused my first ascent of Mt. Rainier to be such as suffer fest.
When I read this book, I was immediately taken back to the approaches to strength that had been so important to developing my body to be an effective offensive lineman. But, I was also introduced to the new concept, for me, of becoming “fat adapted”. Put simply, one trains the body to burn fat as fuel by doing “fasted” workouts in zone 2 (there are very scientific ways to measure where a person’s zone 2 is, but the easy method is that you are probably in zone 2 if you can you nose breathe and carry on a conversation comfortably). Becoming fat adapted is preferable for endurance athletes because it allows the body to effectively utilize fat and carbohydrates. As Sfuels, the leader in supporting fat adapted athletes to perform at their peak, explains:
For the past 30 years of carbohydrate-led fueling guidance, athletes have been asked to start taking carbs, the night before, the morning of, at the start of the race, and through the race. As underlined above, any intake of carbohydrate, particularly the refined types pre-training, or pre-race, will instruct the fat-oxidation machinery to switch off. This effectively blunts your physiology, making the athlete far more dependent on carbohydrate stores and intakes to perform best in their training, or racing goals.
Furthermore, research papers have highlighted that fructose and maltodextrin consumption (in many energy drinks, gels, and bars) suppresses Glut-4, the very muscle transporter you need to bring glucose into the muscle cell. So stay way clear of those two ingredients in your fueling, and diet.
At least two famous climbers have experienced first hand what SFuels describes above. In Rethinking Your Energy Supply, Dr. Chris explained how Cory Richards summited Mt. Everest without supplemental oxygen in 2016 due, in part, to being coached by Uphill Athlete to become fat adapted while his climbing partner, Adrian Ballinger, who had not become fat adapted, but, rather, relied on carbohydrates for his fuel, was unsuccessful. In 2017, however, Ballinger adopted the fat adapted approach and was successful.
When I began training to climb Denali in 2017, I worked with Uphill Athlete, which opened a whole new world for me. By the time I left for Denali, I was in the best shape of my life and I was fat adapted from doing fasted zone 2 work and being committed to a low carb high fat (LCHF) diet. While I was grateful for the training and guidance on becoming fat adapted, I didn’t feel like I knew how to fuel for longer training hikes (more than an hour) or during a climb.
While eating the standard fuel – candy bars, gels, etc. – worked for me on Denali, I knew there was a likely a better way. And, it didn’t make sense to me that one would train to become fat adapted only to seemingly discard that effort during a long training session or climb by reverting to consuming simple sugars.
Being a committed researcher and not being afraid to follow the research wherever it takes me, I found a new company, SFuels, that focuses on what was lacking in my approach. The SFuels Optimization Guide
highlights what to do pre-race (or HIIT session), and then the need to shift from a NO-Carb Fat+Electrolyte fuel, to a Carb+Fat+Electrolyte fuel – as you move through the 30-60mins, and then into the 2nd hour of your session or Race. By doing this, you’re training the body to switch on simultaneous carb-fat substrate oxidation for fueling.
This approach has been the missing link for me. I have recently started following SFuels’ approach and have noticed I can do more work at a lower heart rate without gut issues from consuming large amounts of simple sugars and carbohydrate drink mixes.
I’m currently heading to Ecuador to “test drive” my new approach on some of the volcanos there before heading to Everest in late March. Consistent with the approach outlined by SFuels above, my fueling/nutrition coach, Aaron Geiser, has helped my come up with a strategy that keep my body “metabolically flexible” and allow me to access fat stores and glycogen and not shut off the GLUT4 pathway by taking in carbs before my event or too early. The approach involves taking Train — a no sugar added sports drink — for the first two hours of a training or climbing session and Race+, a sports drink that contains some carbohydrates, but maximizes carbohydrate and fat oxidation. In addition to these two SFuels products, Aaron also recommended I take a bottle of DeltaG every two hours. I’ll follow up during and after my climbs in Ecuador.
