A scientific approach for Mt. Whitney hiking (1) ~ A better strategy to hike 14,00 feet class mountains

Mt. Whitney from the visitor center in Lone Pine

In the other blog in Japanese, I keep positing a topics about Mt. Whitney hiking with some data analysis for my past tracking data for Mt. Whitney hiking.  It seems that many people are interested in the topic even I am writing in Japanese.   Because Mt. Whitney is a mountain in California, I guess more people might be interested in this topics if I write in English.   So I decided to write a similar thing in English here.   The contents won't be exactly the same as what I wrote in Japanese.  But I will try to summarize some points here.

Here is the basic idea and direction for this series of positing here:

1.  To analyze the past GPS tracking data for hiking in Mt. Whitney Trail
2. Summarize my analysis result
3. Looking into a relationship between the altitude (elevation) and a heart rate
4. Considering to apply a similar methodology of heart rate based training for running to a hiking

Regarding item #4, it might not be a good option for a short hiking, but it might be a useful option for a long hiking around 14,000 feet class mountains.  The type of activity for such hiking could be very similar as running very long distance like full-marathon.

Prologue!

I am also a runner other than hiker.  I usually do some training for running regular basis after age forty.  I used to do running when I was young.   After I resumed running, I found out there is a big innovation for running gears especially, running watches.   When I was young, digital watches were getting popular and it has a feature for "stop watch".  Then people can wear a watch and look at the time when they run.   Nowadays, there is many "watch" with GPS function.  It can track / log the location information while people are running.   Based on the moving distance, it can easily calculate running pace or speed.   After running the tracking date can be shown with visualized format with an application and / or a web based service by the device vendors / manufactures.   It is very convenient for runners to understand their performance and progress of their training.   I think many runners using such device for their daily training and races.  It is getting very popular for runners nowadays.   Some of advance feature for those devices / gears are "monitoring heart rate", "running cadence" and so on.  So that we can capture many different data during running activity.

In hiking / climbing world, GPS devices are also getting very popular as well.   Especially a device with a small display which shows map information.  It can track the location information where people went through.   It is very useful gear for the navigation in a field.  Also, it can keep all records for each hiking / climbing.   People does not have to write down their record on paper any more.

Originally, I bought a GPS device just collecting records for my hiking.  It works very well and I can accumulate data on a web site.   One time, I tried to use the heart rate monitor function during a hiking.  Since then, it becomes my habit to collect the heart rate information for each hiking.  Now I have many cases for different hiking and I tried to look into more detail for those data.  That is the starting point for this idea.

(To be continue)