Needs to get over himself wrote:
Anyone who heard him say 140 miles and 50,000 feet of vertical should have been blown away. That wasn’t hindsight. It is easy to criticize later, but 50,000 feet of vertical in a week is huge. With 2 shake out days, that’s 10,000 feet of vert the other 5 days. 140 road miles is a completely different animal. Not even close to the same volume.
And I think it’s pretty obvious his body didn’t perfectly adapt.
I don’t have a right to criticize because he is the gladiator in the arena, not me. But from the outside looking in, it seems like he would benefit from someone reigning him in a little bit. He has the Flatbush long stuff figured out. But the steep hard mountain stuff he doesn’t. Not close.
Where is your hard limit then? Like I said, I did 140+ mpw when young with a lot of climbing. That was about 30 years ago, so I don't know the amount of climbing, but likely more than 20,000 ft (always going up and down canyons) and this was just for the heck of it in college - I wasn't training for anything. You'd probably have to dig into his past training on strava to see what he handled well to really make a good determination rather than pull something out of a hat. But he obviously knows what he's done in the past, and my impression, following him, but not really looking carefully, is he's had a lot of big weeks before where 140 miles/50K ft isn't a huge leap.
Karel Saabe: Past several weeks of 129 miles/35K feet, 333 miles/81.5K feet, 363 miles/89.5K feet, 371 miles/61K feet, 365 miles/97K feet, 276 miles/91K feet. He was supremely fit at the end of his hike, doing an amazing Presidential Traverse and Carter-Moriah Traverse in one day.
I did an 18 mile, 9,000 foot day in the mountains, mostly off trail a couple months ago on crap fitness. I'm pushing near 50, and I did 13,000 ft climb on average and 60 miles per week this summer in the worse shape of my life. From my experiences past and present and some extrapolation, 140 miles/50K ft is impressive, but not a obvious overstep without the benefit of hindsight.