Average Pace: Hiking vs Touring

[ltlFish99]

I hike comfortably in the summer at 800-1000 feet per hour and 1.5 -1.75 miles per hour. This includes any breaks I take and it is quite consistent. For me it is a relaxed pace that still gives me a decent piece of exercise and I am fine with it.
I will hopefully be able to maintain this pace throughout my sixties as I truly enjoy hiking,etc.

I have no bc ski times to offer as I need to replace/upgrade my very old AT gear.

[Jorts]

how the hell are you people achieving these speeds? Like are you actually running the entire way up instead of hiking?

Consistency is king. At a comfortable pace where you can talk. You'll build an aerobic base with that. And using short but hard intervals 2x/week to increase speed/power/stroke volume. Perfect your technique. Kick and glide. Efficient stride. No fwigging (fussing with gear).

There's a tendency to categorize backcountry skiers as either in the dorky spandex camp (skimo) or in the heavy slow endurance camp (everyone who doesn't wear spandex). That's not real life. I race on lightweight flimsy stuff but ski on heavier skis and boots in the backcountry. It's enjoyable to move efficiently through the mountains. You can cover more ground in less time and link objectives. I have a family and a job so moving quickly suits my needs.

[Scott P]

My average hiking or climbing pace:

[SchralpTheGnar]

My average hiking or climbing pace:

That'd be pretty good above 8000 meters.

[martinleroux]

I can go a little over 5000ft/hr skinning for about an hour in ideal groomer conditions and slope angle. Plenty of guys are faster than me.

Is that a typo? If I'm doing the conversion correctly, 5000 ft/hr is 25.4 meters/min. That's faster than a world championship pace! Kilean Jornet's vertical speed in skimo races is a bit less than 23.5 meters/minute. See http://www.skintrack.com/skimo-racing/v ... lope-angle.

As an old and mediocre skimo race participant, I can manage about 12 meters/minute under ideal conditions. In local races the winners are doing about 18 meters/minute.

[Conor]

I can go a little over 5000ft/hr skinning for about an hour in ideal groomer conditions and slope angle. Plenty of guys are faster than me.

Is that a typo? If I'm doing the conversion correctly, 5000 ft/hr is 25.4 meters/min. That's faster than a world championship pace! Kilean Jornet's vertical speed in skimo races is a bit less than 23.5 meters/minute. See http://www.skintrack.com/skimo-racing/v ... lope-angle.

As an old and mediocre skimo race participant, I can manage about 12 meters/minute under ideal conditions. In local races the winners are doing about 18 meters/minute.

What if someone did 12.7m in 30 seconds? They could say they "average" 5000ft/hr.

[Jorts]

I can go a little over 5000ft/hr skinning for about an hour in ideal groomer conditions and slope angle. Plenty of guys are faster than me.

Is that a typo? If I'm doing the conversion correctly, 5000 ft/hr is 25.4 meters/min. That's faster than a world championship pace! Kilean Jornet's vertical speed in skimo races is a bit less than 23.5 meters/minute. See http://www.skintrack.com/skimo-racing/v ... lope-angle.

As an old and mediocre skimo race participant, I can manage about 12 meters/minute under ideal conditions. In local races the winners are doing about 18 meters/minute.

Not a typo. But it was an ideal planar groomer. 1554.5 VAM is a little over 5000ft/hr.

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[Jorts]

What if someone did 12.7m in 30 seconds? They could say they "average" 5000ft/hr.

Cute. But that was not the case.

[Conor]

What if someone did 12.7m in 30 seconds? They could say they "average" 5000ft/hr.

Cute. But that was not the case.

my bad, it was 524 ft in 7 something mins.

[martinleroux]

Not a typo. But it was an ideal planar groomer. 1554.5 VAM is a little over 5000ft/hr.

Thanks for posting the details. Sorry to be a nit-picker, but have you cross-checked the segment elevation gain as reported on Strava against a topo map? From the contour lines it looks like a gain of about 150m (2860m to 3010m), which works out as 19.5 m/min or 3,840 ft/hour. That's very impressive, but not quite a Kilian Jornet pace.

[madbuck]

What if someone did 12.7m in 30 seconds? They could say they "average" 5000ft/hr.

Cute. But that was not the case.

my bad, it was 524 ft in 7 something mins.

I also was quite curious about this, as I was wondering which CO ski area runs would support this magic number, and was trying to figure out if a 2-lapper with transitions somewhere would get the job done (I'm awful at transitions).

I've found most of your posts to be informative. In a recent skinning thread, you were straight and honest about some 14ers/mtn ski approaches being relatively easy (on a good day), being humble about the difficulty, as a distinction from skiing all the 14ers, which is a significantly different question. I dug that. So this thread is ironic.
For actual performance, claiming a specific pace of anything for a period of time without actually doing it for that amount of time is never acceptable*, and the egregiousness of the offense is the pace denominator divided by the actual time. In this case, the actual duration is nearly 8x smaller than the claimed pace duration. Something like 4k feet in 50 minutes, for example, would be a much more representative datapoint (actually slightly lower VAM, but much closer to a sustained hourly effort).

Exuberant noob hikers, runners, etc. do this all the time, but more dedicate folks like yourself are usually more straight and explicit about it.

(*Source: All athletes)

[Jorts]

Thanks for posting the details. Sorry to be a nit-picker, but have you cross-checked the segment elevation gain as reported on Strava against a topo map? From the contour lines it looks like a gain of about 150m (2860m to 3010m), which works out as 19.5 m/min or 3,840 ft/hour. That's very impressive, but not quite a Kilian Jornet pace.

I have not cross-checked it. I was going strictly off the segment. Could be considerably less as you stated. Sorry if I mislead anyone because the strava data on the segment is garbage. My original point was just that you can get in the ballpark of hiking pace with skinning. And I believe the question was asked ft/hr so I looked at what I considered to be the optimal slope angle for skinning cleanly.

my bad, it was 524 ft in 7 something mins.

Haha. Why the passive-aggressive animosity?