A gorgeous day here hinting at the coming of Spring and we spent most of it indoors fighting with “monster bags” rather than climbing Signal Hill as I originally thought we might. But at the moment of choose this morning, our stress level was higher about whether we could make our uber strict weight limit for the flight to Lukla than it was for our physical conditioning. The good news is that the monster bags are now packed and they are close enough to the weight limit for now.

Awhile back I read an interesting article that made a connection between a practice in medicine to exercise. The article’s premise was that, like in prescribing medications, that we should aim for minimum effective dose with exercise as well. Ideally, because of the possibilities of harmful side effects and/or lethal overdose, a physician aims to have her/his patient on the minimum effective dose of any medication and in some cases, this takes some trial and error to find the right dose.

The article I read made the parallel to exercise and training that ideally, we’d be doing the minimum effective dose to minimize the chance of overuse injury and other issues that crop up with overtraining. Of course, how does one know what the minimum effective dose is? Hard telling, not knowing. Likely with trial and error as above and through experience…I do wonder in terms of training if there is an “ideal dose”? One that puts enough reserve in the bank and gives the required fitness but doesn’t tax a person too much…

As we are on the doorstep of another Nepal adventure, I think I’ve been experimenting with trying out the “minimum effective dose” end of the continuum. This is very different than when I first began training hard almost nine years ago when my philosophy was always “if some is good, more must be better, and even more must be even better than that.” I got some painful lessons through overtraining early on but it was so fun and so empowering to train hard that it was hard to stop. Now, almost a decade in, I don’t much like training much any more. I still love being out and hiking and climbing and paddling but I find having a training schedule very limiting to life and spontaneity. I still enjoy the discipline of having a schedule and checking off boxes and recording progress but overall, I might it much harder to get my self to “train”. Thus the experimentation with minimum effective dose…

And I won’t know if it was enough until I get there…and walk uphill for days at a time…so ask me to report back…ask me later, if I did enough physical training for this trip…and then I’ll remember to reflect and make a note and use that info for finding the right dose for the next adventure…because there are so many, many things I want to do and learn and share in this world that I need to balance all of those things with making sure I’ve done enough so I am ready for the challenges of the trail, mountain, river or canyon.

Three hockey games, four sleeps, 27 more papers to grade and counting…