[Scott Johnston]

Adam:

Welcome to the Evoke community. We are glad you found us.  That is a pile of good questions and I will do my best to provide answers but most of the answers will of necessity be general in nature.

1) Variation in aerobic assessment results:  

As you have grasped temperature affects HR drastically and there is no way I know of to account for the variation with varying temperatures when assigning intensity, especially with swings of 20C.

By ‘indoors’ I assume you mean on a treadmill.  While some of the variation in HR to Pace could be due to convective cooling outside, it is also very likely that your treadmill’s speed readings are not accurate and so you are not comparing apple to apples.  Only laboratory grade treadmills like the Woodway will provide accuracy and repeatability.  This article shows the fix I use https://evokeendurance.com/treadmill-season/

Your “feels like Z3 to me” comment:If it feels like Z3, feels fast and feels relatively hard then it is very likely Z3 (unless fatigue is the cause).  Do not become too data driven.  You have a very sophisticate built in feedback system in your nervous system.  Pay attention to the sensations in your training and try to correlate those to HR in a GENERAL way. We are not machines and so complex that to expect 100% repeatability is unrealistically.  From what you say it is possible that your AeT and AnT are quite close together and that is why on some days Zone 2 feels harder than others.  Fatigue and recovery status play a big role day to day.

2) Training Methodology

1) Your outline of the plan looks very solid.  Best not to get too detailed with this plan, like locking yourself into a weekly schedule 6 weeks out.  It is a waste of time to try to get too detailed that far in advance.  I like the way you have laid out the areas of focus.  The ME work is going to be the vital component that will really pay off in the mountains so before you have at least 8 weeks of a solid ME progression using steep weighted uphills carries.  A star machine is ideal for this.

2) Upper body ME should be done in as climbing specific modality as possible.  Cranking out hundreds of pull ups is great upper body ME work but doing something like weighted climbing on lower grade routes will probably pay off better.  Something like laps in a gym with a weight vest on a grade you can do 10minutes continuous climbing (climb up, climb down) will be a good session for alpine climbing.  Rest and repeat.  This can be done in conjunction with lower body ME work.

3) ME:  If you had a longer time frame then starting with the Gym ME and moving to the weighted steep hikes would be ideal.  Give the time you have I would stick with the most specific training which is weighted hikes.

4) You will see gains in ME in the first couple of workouts but getting in at least 8 week will be very helpful, 12 weeks even better.

I hope this helps.

Scott