The One Million Foot Club

Numbers and statistics in sports are meaningless, I keep telling myself. Focusing on quality is the key to happiness and success-worrying about numbers just leads to stress, distraction and feelings of inadequacy. On the other hand, I like to climb up things and that kind of activity lends itself to keeping track of how much you’ve climbed- or maybe it’s just me that needs to keep track.

I like ski mountaineering, though I do hardly any of it, and the basic idea there is to climb up mountains and ski back down- hence counting vertical feet lends itself readily to understanding the difficulty involved in various adventures. A while ago I climbed and skied Shastina in Northern California, a 5,400-odd foot effort that left me pretty much wrecked the next day.

I really like climbing mountains on my bike too. I rode all 17,000 or so feet of the Death Ride two years ago and I was pretty wiped out on the last long climbing stretch.

All of which lets me appreciate the amazing achievements of Greg Hill and Mark Weir that much more.

Greg (short bio by Andrew McLean here) lives in Revelstoke, BC and last year (05-06) skinned (and hiked, presumably) 1,000,000 vertical feet. That’s really a lot of climbing, and a whole lot of skiing. Best guess is he put in 150 or so days on skins. This year he is trying to up the ante by putting in one hundred 10,000+ foot days. Competing at the 24 Hours of Sunlight probably helped his total- I checked the results and he skied 32 laps of 1,502 feet each for a total of 48,064 official vertical feet. Wow.

The one thing I find amusing about it is that Hill is Canadian, hence metric-oriented, so using vertical feet is really a gimmick. Climbing 304,000 vertical meters doesn’t sound nearly as exciting.

Mark Weir has been described as one of the most well-rounded cyclists out there- a downhiller who discovered he likes to ride up just as much as down. Last year (2006) he climbed 1,000,000 vertical feet- technically he did it in 11 months. Like Hill, doing it once only seems to increase his desire to do it again better/differently (you see? this is the problem with being numbers-obsessed!). He says that in 2006 about 220,000 feet of the gain happened on his road bike and he thinks he can do it all on the mountain bike this year.

My accumulated vertical on skins is pretty easy to calculate most years – zero. <sigh> In an effort to be (more) like Mark, I have started keeping track of my cycling vertical much more closely. For the year to date I am at 17,800 feet in six weeks- I only have to put in 20,462.5 feet every week for the rest of the year to match him. Hmm . . . tracking numbers is definitely overrated.

Rudi Altig as a Model for a Yoga-Cycling Practice

As someone whose interests combine cycling and yoga in near-equal measure, I am naturally interested in people with similar inclinations. One such guy in my backyard is Dario Fredrick. One of these days I will sign up for a coaching program with him.

The other name that comes up all the time is Rudi Altig. Rudi was a professional cyclist in the 1950s and ’60s and reportedly Germany’s only standout cyclist during the period. Stories about him often mention that he practiced yoga. An Intimate Portrait of the Tour de France has a great photo of him in the scorpion pose that I wish I could link to.

Altig’s nickname was the “Mannheim Colossus” and looking at his physique makes me think that he would never make it into the peleton today. He had a giant barrel of a torso and looked immensely powerful, but perhaps too heavy by today’s standard for anything but track racing.

The Cyclingnews profile linked above also refers to him walking on his hands out of a restaurant and doing other “yoga tricks”. I wish I could find some more information about him, because the overall impression I get seems to be that he had a very strong upper body and greater flexibility than the average cyclist, but nothing definitive about his yoga practice.

One of my teachers likes to say that the real measure of a yogi is not the extent of one’s flexibility or depth of asanas, but the quality of one’s breath. Anyone can develop flexibility given time and practice, but proper breathing doesn’t happen without focus and internal calmness.

That said, I am curious as to how advanced an asana practice can get in combination with cycling. Cycling definitely leads to tighter hips and open hips are pretty much the keystone of an advanced asana, so I’d love find some pictures of Altig in hip-opening postures like Warrior 1, full lotus or even monkey pose. Maybe Dario has some information. I’ll have to ask him when I sign up for his coaching.