Uphill Athlete Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Voice of the Mountains: Shift Your Understanding with Lydia Bradey (Replay) Jul 07, 2026

Show notes

Voice of the Mountains revisits one of its most memorable conversations (originally recorded in 2024, with a new intro from Steve House): Lydia Bradey, the New Zealand alpinist who in 1988 became the first woman to climb Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen and who would go on to guide six successful Everest summits, more than any other woman in history. We're re-releasing this episode because the conversation was simply too good not to share again. Their discussion centers on a single, deceptively simple distinction: the difference between doing what people say you cannot do and doing what people say you should not do. Bradey traces her path from a self-described "wild child" raised by a single mother in New Zealand, through formative big-wall climbs in Yosemite and a near-fatal, avalanche-riddled epic in the Indian Himalaya, to the slopes of Everest itself, where she describes climbing "super altitude" not with dread but with pure curiosity. She and House dig into the bitter aftermath of her ascent — when senior male climbers on her own expedition publicly called her a liar, and half her teammates died descending the mountain — and how she navigated the threat of a ten-year climbing ban while quietly building a new life and career. Throughout, Bradey returns to themes of curiosity over fear, rejecting blame culture in favor of personal agency, and the idea that mastery of small, unglamorous tasks — sharp crampons, melted snow, a well-organized tent — is what earns a climber the right to take real risks. Asked how she wants to be remembered, her answer is unexpectedly modest: not for the summits, but simply as good company.

The Evolution of Testing: Continuous AeT Jun 23, 2026

Show notes

Steve House and Will Zittlau pull back the curtain on Continuous Aerobic Threshold, a new feature inside Uphill Athlete's Training Groups dashboard that automatically calculates an athlete's AeT each week using a four-week moving average of their training data — no field test required. Steve explains the core problem: athletes can do the work consistently and still be uncertain whether they trained at the right intensity, because a missed AeT quietly shifts aerobic sessions into glycolytic territory and derails the adaptation they were after. To validate the algorithm, Steve blind-scored 65 athlete files by hand and found the tool lands within an average of 0.1 beats of his coaching judgment — though that average masks a wider spread, with 62% of athletes falling within five beats and outliers as far as 17 beats off, a gap the team attributes largely to data quality. The episode is candid about where the tool still falls short and what they're doing to close it: improving filtering (wrist-based HR and mountain bike data are particularly noisy), building data-hygiene habits in the community, and targeting 99% of athletes within five beats of coach-level accuracy by year's end.
And join us Tuesday, June 30th
YouTube Livestream: Continuous Aerobic Threshold Monitoring and Training Zones
Join Steve House and Will Zittlau for a live walkthrough of the Uphill Athlete Training Dashboard that is available to our Training Groups Athletes. Learn about continuous heart rate monitoring and how you can set your training zones with confidence. If you've ever wondered whether your training zones are right, this is a discussion you won't want to miss. REGISTER >>

Building the Aerobic Engine with Dr. Øyvind Sandbakk Jun 09, 2026

Show notes

Steve House welcomes Dr. Øivind Sandbakk, professor at the Norwegian School of Sports Sciences and director of the School for Elite Sports, for a deep dive into the science underlying Norwegian endurance dominance. Sandbakk traces his path from competitive cross-country skier to national-team coach to researcher, explaining that Norway's success stems less from any single training method and more from three decades of shared terminology, systematic data collection, and cross-sport knowledge exchange. He walks through how training intensity distribution is not universal but must be derived from each sport's specific demands — the metabolic fluctuations of skiing, the mechanical load constraints of running, the discipline-specific quirks of swimming and speed skating — and why blindly exporting any one "Norwegian model" misses the point entirely.

The conversation then turns to the practical architecture of elite endurance development: high volumes of low-intensity work as the aerobic foundation, two to three quality sessions per week, and careful load-recovery management where the goal is optimizing adaptation signals rather than executing a plan for its own sake. Sandbakk and House find common ground on the art of coaching — the calibrated gut feeling built from lab data, training diary patterns, and honest athlete communication — and explore muscular endurance, aerobic threshold identification, and the long arc of athletic development, noting that most athletes haven't reached their aerobic ceiling until their early thirties. Sandbakk closes by previewing his current focus on young athlete development, arguing that building complete humans — psychologically resilient, multi-sport, injury-resistant — is the prerequisite for producing world champions.

Voice of the Mountains: My Axe May Be Your Paintbrush with Jimmy Chin (Replay) Jun 02, 2026

Show notes

(Originally published November 2024, now with new intro from Steve House) Most of us will never reach the pinnacle of our most passionate pursuit, no matter how driven we are. Through dedication, creativity and ingenuity, our guest today has reached the pinnacle of three of his passions. Beginning with a unique journey to discover climbing and skiing, then the discovery of an interest in photography, which finally led to becoming a premiere feature and documentary filmmaker, Jimmy Chin has forged his path with resilience, empathy, and a desire to tell important stories. Jimmy’s accolades and accomplishments speak volumes about a climber and artist who has pushed boundaries and silenced doubters. But it has always been the manner with which Jimmy has achieved that is most impressive. Steve and Jimmy discuss the evolution of his career and the catalyst for picking up a camera in the pursuit of climbing. They dive into the moral qualms Jimmy had shooting Free Solo and how and why he decided to create the award-winning documentary.

Special Offer to Listeners: Receive free four week samples of our most popular training plans, visit uphillathlete.com/letsgo

Write to us at coach@uphillathlete.com

The Four Inputs that Determine Your Progress May 26, 2026

Show notes

Uphill Athlete founder Steve House sits down with athlete dashboard lead Will Zittlau and Coach Alexa Hasman to introduce the newly launched Uphill Athlete Training Groups dashboard — a purpose-built tool designed to cut through data overload and give athletes a clear, intuitive read on their progress. The conversation walks through the four core training pillars tracked by the dashboard — consistency, training load, work/rest balance, and strength — each rooted in the foundational principles of Training for the New Alpinism and surfaced as simple stoplight scores that tell athletes at a glance whether they're on track.

The episode also dives into one of the dashboard's most anticipated features: automated aerobic threshold tracking. Rather than requiring periodic field tests, the system analyzes ongoing training data to surface a rolling AeT trend — making a metric that's long been central to the Uphill Athlete methodology accessible without extra effort. Steve shares the story behind "Maria," the AI intelligence layer being built into the platform, named in honor of alpinist Maria Frantar. The team closes with a look at what's ahead, including automated training zone suggestions, TSS adjustments for conditions like pack weight and snow, and an in-platform coaching assistant.

Muscular Endurance Training with Uphill Athlete Coaches May 12, 2026

Show notes

Steve House is joined by coaches Martin Zhor and Ben Morley for a deep dive into muscular endurance — what it is, why it matters, and how to train it. The conversation covers the critical distinction between local muscular fatigue and global cardiovascular fatigue, explaining why legs failing before lungs is the defining sign of a muscular endurance deficit. Drawing on examples from ultra running, mountaineering, ski touring, and cross-country skiing, the coaches walk through the physiological mechanisms at work: muscle fiber adaptation, capillarization, metabolic efficiency, and the role of stabilizer muscles in maintaining movement quality under load.

The episode then turns practical, covering how to sequence muscular endurance training within a broader periodization plan — including the importance of building a strength and aerobic base first, how to use the 10% aerobic-to-anaerobic threshold rule as a readiness gauge, and what both gym-based and outdoor heavy-pack sessions should look and feel like. Martin and Ben also address common mistakes athletes make, from loading up on easy long hikes to skipping the downhill component entirely, and explain why this type of training is essential for anyone taking on objectives like Denali, UTMB, or long days in the mountains.

Special Offer to Listeners: Receive free four week samples of our most popular training plans, visit uphillathlete.com/letsgo

Write to us at coach@uphillathlete.com

Voice of the Mountains: Season Two Recap May 05, 2026

Show notes

Longtime friend Kyle Lefkoff — alpinist and venture capitalist — turns the tables on host Steve House in a wide-ranging reflective conversation facilitated by producer Jamie Lyko. We are deeply grateful to Kyle for joining us: his rare combination of elite climbing experience and high-stakes business acumen made him the ideal interlocutor to draw out the season's most resonant themes. The conversation moves fluidly between the episodes of Season 2, distilling through-lines that span risk tolerance, the explorer's mindset, delayed gratification, childhood intensity, and what it means to successfully "make the turn" from elite athletic performance to a life of purpose and contribution. Steve reflects candidly on his own transition: the accident on Mount Temple in 2010 that forced a reckoning, the decision during COVID to cut the safety net of professional climbing income and go all-in on Uphill Athlete, and the parallel between committing on a big alpine route and committing to a business. Kyle offers a venture capitalist's lens on these same themes — examining how mountain guides develop a risk management fluency that translates directly to high-stakes decision-making in business, and how figures like Greg Penner embody the qualities of deep listening, disciplined time management, and talent recognition that define elite leaders in any arena. The episode closes on an intimate note — three fathers of six boys between them — reflecting on how the intensity that set them apart in the mountains is something they now seek to pass on, not as a liability, but as the seed of something extraordinary.

Special Offer to Listeners: Receive free four week samples of our most popular training plans, visit uphillathlete.com/letsgo

Write to us at coach@uphillathlete.com

Making Sense of the Data with Dr. Marco Altini Apr 15, 2026

Show notes

Steve House sits down with Dr. Marco Altini — data scientist, physiologist, and founder of HRV4Training — for a deep-dive into one of the most misunderstood tools in endurance athletics: heart rate variability. With over 50 peer-reviewed papers to his name, Dr. Altini brings rare scientific rigor to a space crowded with oversimplified wearable metrics. The conversation opens by challenging the industry's obsession with single-number readiness scores, which Dr. Altini argues dilute nuanced physiological signals into deterministic assumptions that don't reflect the complexity of the human body.

The episode unpacks the fundamentals of HRV — what it actually measures, why morning is the optimal measurement window for endurance athletes, and how to interpret it as a marker of stress response rather than performance capacity. Steve and Marco also cover hardware accuracy across chest straps, optical sensors, and phone cameras; HRV research at altitude; and the broader question of how biometric data should support — not replace — the athlete's own sense of feel.

Special Offer to Listeners: Receive free four week samples of our most popular training plans, visit uphillathlete.com/letsgo

Write to us at coach@uphillathlete.com

Voice of the Mountains: Success is Not the Summit with Peter Metcalf (Director's Cut) Apr 07, 2026

Show notes

This is the full, unedited version of Steve House's conversation with Peter Metcalf — extended and running longer than the standard episode release.

Before Black Diamond Equipment became the most trusted name in mountain sports, there was Peter Metcalf: a teenager from Long Island hitchhiking to the Gunks every weekend, a dogeared copy of Mountaineering: Freedom of the Hills on his nightstand, and a conviction that the mountains were where he belonged.

In this conversation, Steve and Peter trace the full arc of that conviction — from his early apprenticeship years through a harrowing 13-day first ascent on Mount Hunter, where hallucinations, extreme cold, and frostbite tested everything he had. That experience forged a lesson Peter would call on again in 1989, when he organized a team of fellow climbers to buy bankrupt Chouinard Equipment out of collapse — using retirement savings, high-interest loans, and a shared sense of purpose — and rebuild it into Black Diamond.

What emerges is a portrait of someone who applied the logic of alpinism to every domain of his life: patient apprenticeship, commitment without a visible outcome, and the willingness to keep moving when the only way to live is forward. This is a story about climbing — and about becoming.

Special Offer to Listeners: Receive free four week samples of our most popular training plans, visit uphillathlete.com/letsgo

Write to us at coach@uphillathlete.com

Understanding the Female Athlete Mar 24, 2026

Show notes

In this special International Women's Month episode, host Chantelle Robitaille sits down with coach Alexa Hasman to explore what it truly means to train as a female mountain athlete. Together they walk through the physiological realities of each major life phase — from the menstrual cycle and pregnancy to postpartum recovery and menopause — not as limitations, but as distinct training phases requiring smart adaptation. Anchored by the guiding principle that "ability is the measure of permission," they challenge women to reject the noise of external opinion and cultivate a deep, data-informed understanding of their own bodies.

The conversation covers practical strategies at every stage: cycle-tracking tools and red flags to watch for; trimester-by-trimester training modifications during pregnancy; the often-overlooked realities of diastasis recti and pelvic floor recovery postpartum; and why strength training becomes non-negotiable during perimenopause and beyond. Alexa and Chantelle make a compelling case that women's athletic identity is not fixed to any single phase — it evolves — and that with the right coaching, community, and self-advocacy, female athletes can pursue big mountain goals at every age.

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