Been focused on using elevation gain as a training metric so far this year (even though most of it is “virtual” on zwift with a tacx neo 2t trainer or the treadmill at the gym). I got the idea after seeing Sepp Kuss totaling something like 650,000 meters of elevation gain in 2023 on Strava (still can’t wrap my head around that figure, someone might need to fact check me on that). Also, after a couple years of being a Big Kahuna points accumulator, it seemed like I wasn’t getting enough quality doing too much “easy” z2 stuff just to get the points. SO its been a lot of uphill “work” this winter thus far, which led me to discovering the Vertical Kilometer (VK).
Studs like Kilian Jornet and Remi Bonnet have some wildly impressive videos on the youtubes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrR5AP32OZ8) traversing 1K vertical ascents in like 30 mins! So far this year, I’ve been testing myself every 2 weeks or so to see how many vertical meters I can ascend in an hour on a treadmill and did 583m the other day. It will be damn hard for me to break 600 meters in an hour, but probably doable. Crazy to realize these guys are basically doing 2000 VAM for 30 mins on foot! Has anyone here ever done an official VK challenge event? If so, how fast did you do 1000m of climbing?