[Andrew Bollard]

@josh No worries, I did a lot of kettlebelling and built up a solid amount of muscle before I got serious about training endurance, so the ME topic really interests me.

You sound like you’re approaching the limit of useful max strength for your bodyweight; TftNA (I think) doesn’t recommend going beyond e.g. deadlifting x2 bodyweight as the law of diminishing returns kicks in and the additional muscle needed to support that strength starts to become a detriment to mountain performance. So you can definitely go for a 6 week block as you’re already strong enough for a mountain athlete. In fact, I wonder if you could get away with a 4 week block just to maintain your gains and focus more on building aerobic capacity. Your tire drag sprints will be excellent here, as you already have a high level of general strength and sprints would be the perfect way to convert that into more sport-specific strength.

It’s probably not advisable to rely on a test you did several years ago, even one as accurate as a gas exchange test. You should do an AeT and AnT test to confirm where you’re currently at; you may be pleasantly surprised and find out that you’re very close to or even within 10%, meaning you can start ME work sooner.