Five Years of Endurance Data in the Mountain West
1,870 hours of data across 5 sports. Here's what I learned about how to keep showing up and start seeing more.
Before the pandemic, running for me meant lacing up three times a week and hammering a 5k as hard as possible. That was the whole program. I came from high level athletics where the conditioning was pretty clear: if you aren't running as hard as you can, you're failing. When everything shut down, running became the easy, healthy way to get up and out of the house, and the relationship with it started to shift. Less about pace, more about just being outside. For the first time, running felt like something I was choosing to do rather than something I was supposed to suffer through.
Moving to Bozeman accelerated that naturally. There had been plenty of mountains before this, from hiking in the Cairngorms to summits in Colorado to backcountry trips across multiple states. But all of that was at hiking pace, and there's a ceiling to what you can see in a day at 2.5 miles an hour. Running was the obvious way past it. The question wasn't whether the fitness was there, it was whether I could learn to move through the mountains more efficiently, knowing when to run, when to hike, and how to keep moving all day.
I was new to grizzly country at that point, and it felt more intimidating than other places I had recreated. I think ultimately I would've done routes solo, but they wouldn't have been nearly as enjoyable. Finding the local run club in the fall of 2021 changed that, and a small core group of friends came out of it. People who are serious about what they do but low-key about how they do it. That combination is the actual reason the hours stacked up the way they did.
The volume story
Every workout since early 2021 lives in a database now, because it is my data and I should be able to do what I want with it. Five full years, 1,838 activities across running, cycling, skiing, climbing, and strength training.
2021 was 195 hours. Gym bouldering, casual runs, some indoor cycling. Then 2022 happened. Having people to run with, to plan big days with, to show up for on cold mornings, changed everything. Volume more than doubled. During Scummy Summer Slammer, more than 52km through the Gallatin Range in a crazy, totally backcountry adventure with some rad runners was a wild way to decide to do my first ultra.
From 2023 onward, total hours flatten around 400. Volume stopped growing, but the composition changed completely.
The sport mix
The running line tells one story, but the cycling line is the interesting one. What starts as basically nothing becomes an equal share of total training hours by 2025.
The cycling has a backstory though. Lots of riding back in college in State College, PA, all pre-Strava and invisible in this dataset. Dusting off my old bike at the end of 2022 was a reminder of how good it felt. I bought a new gravel bike that showed up in March 2023, and the data speaks for itself from there. (A proper review of that bike is coming, because it deserves one.)
But this wasn't about swapping one sport for another. The reason is more specific.
Old habits
The early years had a lot of recovery-pace running, and that was intentional. Coming from climbing, I had seen what happens when people get muscularly strong fast and start doing things their connective tissues aren't ready for. Six months in and they're hurt. Tendons take months, sometimes years, to acclimate. So the easy volume was the ramp-up, giving the body time to adapt to the impact of running at this kind of volume.
Over time those runs got replaced, not by all-out efforts, but by intentional aerobic work. The kind of running where you're working but could sustain it for hours. That middle zone grew significantly while the recovery zone shrank.
On paper this looked like progress. And it was, to a point. Moving efficiently in the mountains matters a lot.
At the same physiological cost, pace improved about 12% over four years. Over a 50k day in the mountains, that's the difference between setting up camp in the last light and fumbling with tent stakes in the dark. In 2023, holding a threshold effort over 15km in the mountains wasn't a tool in the toolbox. By 2024 the engine had grown and that was comfortably within reach.
But somewhere in 2024, the old conditioning started creeping back in. "Run slow to run fast" is real, but I was increasingly focused on "run fast to run fast" and the optimization was starting to feel familiar in a way that should have been a warning sign. More hard efforts. More intentional sessions. Less of the running-for-joy that got me into this in the first place. The data looks like progress. The reality was that I was quietly falling back into the pattern I thought I'd left behind: if you aren't pushing, you're wasting time.
By October the body was telling me something the data wasn't. Not injured, not burned out, just the kind of accumulated fatigue that you have to take seriously in your mid-30s. Recovery isn't what it was at 22.
So I took my first real off-season. Professional athletes do this every year for good reason, and I probably should have been doing it all along. Cardio dropped off through November and December, strength basically disappeared, and that was fine. Skate skiing season was coming in, which gave the reset a natural transition point. Something physically different, mentally fresh, and completely disconnected from the optimization mindset I'd been stuck in. I've only been skiing a couple of years, so there are no expectations there, no old programming about what I'm supposed to be doing. I can just go out and enjoy it. Take advantage of what the season offers instead of fighting it.
This is the part of the data story that matters most and is hardest to see in charts. The numbers don't show the mornings where the legs just aren't there, or the runs where the pace feels fine but something deeper is off. Learning to read those signals and actually respond to them is as much a skill as building fitness in the first place. Taking a rest day when conditions are perfect outside is genuinely hard. So is choosing an easy spin on the bike over the tempo run you had planned when your body is telling you something. I'm still learning this, but recognizing that I was falling back into old patterns and choosing to break out of them is what made the next phase possible.
The game plan change
January 2025 started with a completely different approach built on a simple insight: the aerobic base doesn't have to come from the same sport as the performance.
Easy aerobic volume cratered in 2024. The recovery happened in 2025, but the source flipped entirely. Easy running hours dropped to a fraction of what they were, replaced almost completely by gravel cycling. Roughly two-thirds of my time on the bike is easy spinning.
There's a practical reason the bike works so well for this. Three hours on a gravel bike to enjoy a beautiful day is something you recover from easily. Stretching a run by even 20 extra minutes because the sunset is too good to turn around carries real risk, the kind that accumulates into the exact fatigue pattern that made 2024 so rough. On the bike, when you've got that feeling of "I don't want to stop today," you can mostly get away with it.
The running that remained was purposeful. But total easy volume was back to healthy levels, just distributed across sports instead of piled onto my legs. Not a flipped pyramid. A strategically distributed load, with cross training as a core driver of fitness rather than an afterthought.
Here's the full picture, cardio zones plus strength:
| Year | Easy (<134) | Aerobic (134-150) | Hard (>150) | Strength | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 167 | 102 | 25 | 75 | 369 |
| 2023 | 139 | 133 | 43 | 38 | 353 |
| 2024 | 78 | 147 | 62 | 59 | 346 |
| 2025 | 119 | 151 | 48 | 47 | 365 |
The total barely moves across four years, but the internals are a completely different athlete. The aerobic zone grew every single year regardless of what else was happening. Easy volume cratered in 2024 then recovered via the bike. Hard effort peaked in 2024 and came back down. Strength went from 75 hours of long gym sessions to shorter, more frequent, purpose-built work. Everything shifted toward supporting the endurance engine rather than competing with it.
Where it goes from here
The goal this year is more volume, using cross training to build it sustainably. The foundation of aerobic capacity is there now, and I think it puts me in a position to do that as long as I can stay focused on the process and not get too caught up in vanity numbers or grinding for the sake of grinding. That's always the trap.
What used to be my tempo pace a couple years ago feels completely conversational now. The ceiling got higher, but more importantly the floor came up with it. The aerobic base is stronger than it's ever been. It's just not built from a single sport anymore, and it's a hell of a lot more fun.