Climbing Everest & Life As A Mountaineer - Adri Brownlee

The Progress Theory

Hello and welcome to The Progress Theory where we discuss how to implement scientific principles to optimise human performance. On this episode, we have Adventure athlete and mountaineer, Adri Brownlee.

Adri has just returned to the UK after successfully summiting Mt Everest, and she has now set her sights on summiting all 14 8000m mountains in the world. If she completes this in her predicted time frame, she will be the youngest person to ever achieve this by 7 years. In this episode, Adri and Dr Phil Price chat about her experiences on Mt Everest, the dangers of mountaineering, and how to start your own mountaineering journey.

In this episode, we discuss:

• 1:55 - Adri’s most recent expedition
• 4:50 - Adri’s Mountaineering challenge - Climb all 14 8000m mountain peaks
• 7:20 - The dangers of climbing K2 and Annapurna
• 10:33 - K2 winter training for Everest summit bid
• 11:02 - How the 4 8000m mountain peaks challenge is currently going
• 11:48 - The Lhotse face
• 12:41 - The Khumbu Icefall
• 14:17 - What factors make a mountain dangerous?
• 15:57 - Mindset on the mountain
• 18:36 - Adri’s work with Nimsdai Purja
• 22:50 - Mountaineering without oxygen
• 26:04 - Training for mountaineering
• 30:50 - How to get into mountaineering
• 32:14 - Sponsorship for mountaineering
• 36:48 - How you can help Adri with her challenge
• 37:40 - Listener questions
• (37:45-38:45) - Is mountaineering more mentally or physically challenging?
• (39:00-40:28) - How has being young helped or hindered your mountaineering aspirations?
• (40:40-42:04) - Is all your equipment/clothing synthetic?

Final Thoughts

Thank you to Adri Brownlee for coming onto The Progress Theory and talking about her mountaineering experiences and her upcoming world record-breaking challenge. Even though she has just started the challenge you can clearly tell she’s gained a lot of experience, especially during her time with the group led by Nimsdai Purga, who climbed K2 in winter. If someone, as experienced as Nimsdai, thinks you have the potential to break mountaineering world records you clearly have some talent.

I just wanted to provide some final thoughts on key areas which really stood out to me.

Firstly, as this is a sports science show, was Adri’s training for mountaineering. I loved the simplicity of it. The majority of the training focused on aerobic conditioning, usually running, hill work, or even running up and downstairs, which makes sense as the body needs to be efficient in utilizing oxygen. With less O2 available up high in the mountains, the body needs to be effective in utilising the O2 it can get. While there is no direct link between a high VO2 max and your ability to handle the high altitude, a high functioning respiratory system is still needed to tolerate submaximal exercise over very long periods.

And secondly, Adri appears to have a really strong mindset. 5 top climbers died during her time on K2 during winter. She witnessed this first hand as a relative novice, yet it has not deterred her at all, and it led to a very comfortable Mt Everest ascent only months later. It must take such a strong mindset to ignore past negative experiences when you’re tired, still climbing after 9 hours. Yet this seems to come easy to her. Clearly, she is both mentally and physically well equipped for a career in mountaineering.

Anyways I hope you enjoyed this episode and it gave you enough information on how to start your own mountaineering journey if it is something that has been on your bucket list for years. It would be awesome if you could also leave us a review and share this episode on your insta story to help the show grow. Also, head to our website theprogresstheory.com and listen to our other episodes. We’ll see you in the next one.

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Explore these Resources or Items Mentioned in the Show

Mount Everest

K2

Cho Oyu

Annapurna

Lhotse

K2 winter attempt

The khumbu Icefall

Kathmandu

Nimsdai Purja

North Face

North face Female empowerment

Save the duck

Altitude mask

Cause of a kind interview

Mentioned in this episode:

The Science of Hybrid Training

It was originally thought that you could not effectively train for both strength and endurance at the same time because they required different adaptations which were not compatible with each other. It was claimed that ‘an interference effect’, blunted the adaptations for strength if you simultaneously trained for endurance. However, recent developments in sports which require both strength and endurance have really challenged this idea, with hybrid athletes producing impressive performances in both strength and endurance sports together. This had led scientists, coaches, and athletes to rethink what is humanly possible and suggests the interference effect is not as influential as originally thought. But what is a hybrid athlete? What is the ‘interference effect’? And how can we maximize our training to improve at the same time our strength and endurance performance? In this book, Dr Phil Price provides insight into the misconceptions surrounding strength and endurance training by distilling the past 50 years of research and drawing on the conversations he had with great scientists, coaches, and athletes on The Progress Theory podcast. This book is essential reading for hybrid athletes and coaches who are looking to understand the key training variables and their effect on the simultaneous development of strength and endurance performance.

Book