• The next BCA Council meeting will be held on the 29th October at 7pm via Zoom.

    For details on how to join and for the Agenda, please click the link

    This link

Expedition training

Winnat's Caver

Active member
Hi hungry,
Last year I was among a generation of SUSS embarking for their first expedition to Tresviso, and we all had similar worries about not being fit enough. I am aware that this may be considered foolish advice to some on the thread, and that the difficulty of expeditions varies, but we found that the baseline physical fitness found in young cavers such as ourselves was already mostly good enough to serve on exped. Instead it was the time we spent practicing SRT, rigging, and rescue that was most useful.
Before going to Spain, 'exped training' became a bit of a meme in SUSS, and lots of us would go on day-long hikes with heavy bags, go on runs, and the like. Many of us were also fairly anxiety ridden about the whole thing, and worried an unnecessary amount. Once we got there it was fine. Apparently we would need to carry all our caving and camping things up a mountain to begin the expedition (Not sure what it will be like in Austria) but when we got there we managed to fit everyone in the landy and just drove the stuff up. I did end up walking up and down the mountain three times with gear, but it really wasn't too bad. As for the caves, I guess the best practice for long caving is to do long caving trips! Being Derbyshire-based, we practiced down Titan and JH whilst carrying bags. Essentially for the few months pre-exped, just try to get underground as much as you can. You're a caver and will probably find it quite fun. I found myself quickly getting far more comfortable with SRT and long pitches just by blitzing caving for a bit, whilst the time I spent exercising outside the cave wasn't as useful in a noticeable way. If you can, offer to carry dive bottles for divers.

Perhaps our perspective was a bit jaded as we were all outdoorsy 19-20 year olds anyway, but I gather by the amount you post in the caving memes chat that you are probably in a similar boat to us ;) . If you work till 5, try getting a couple of evening trips in each week. You can learn surveying on exped.
 

andrewmcleod

Well-known member
Almost by definition, the majority of 19-20 year olds haven't done much SRT in the great scheme of things (except for the excessively keen ones), while are often still fit enough, so I guess this is a good point :p

I'd guess people who've done 50-100 decent SRT trips have usually got a pretty good handle on it? (not sure how many thehungrytroglobite has done but was guessing something in or towards that ballpark). If you've only done 20 SRT trips in then doing 20 more will make a massive difference; if you've already done 100 SRT trips then getting those extra 20 in will make less of a difference (unless there's something 'new' about it).

As an aside, the range of trips that students get in massively varies. Some (due to transport issues etc. in smaller clubs) only get maybe half a dozen trips a year in and then end up on committees, while in other clubs people get super keen and go caving every other weekend or whatever and on expeds and are doing 50+ trips a year. Consequently the range of ability varies a lot...
 

thehungrytroglobite

Well-known member
Walk up a lot of hills, ideally carrying some weight (e.g. water bottles you can empty at the top to save your knees), and off paths (limestone pavement probably good but *be careful*). You can probably do the caving bit already (possibly minus technical skills) so it's 'the same but bigger and more' basically. It's hard to practice SRT other than doing it, and while it is important to minimise faff when doing rebelays (when you have 50 or more to do in a trip) it won't help if you are knackered before you've even started. Walking poles are very useful with a big bag; worth giving them a decent go.

Probably good fun training would indeed be to do all the caves on the Allotment, but don't walk up in your caving gear. Carry all your caving gear in a rubble sack in a monster rucksack. This may be how you do it in Austria (it's usually how we do it in the Dachstein) due to the surface being 25 °C in sunshine and the caves being 2 °C. Your rigging ropes will (partly) substitute for the drills/batteries/hammer etc. you'd have on exped. Working out a system for this may help you.

Plus from what I understand of the Cambridge exped the most common cause of injuries is the plateau itself. We are lucky on our side that we get good use out of the marked paths (which are still pretty wild in places!) but it's still horrible ground. So getting your legs/ankles/support muscles trained up for walking on rough broken ground might save you from the plateau monster...

I really need to get myself in shape at some point (otherwise I spend the first week of the exped recovering from the drive there and walk up the hill and generally feeling knackered) - much easier when you are closer to 20 than 40! I can also recommend not being involved in the organization of an expedition if you want to have enough time to actually prepare _yourself_ for it...

When you do get to Austria, just remember it is _not_ the relatively pleasant and sanitized experience of most UK caves, so ease yourself into it. Loose rock loose rock loose rock. Did I mention loose rock? And 'expedition rigging' is nonsense as far as I'm concerned - I want my rigging to be _better_ when I'm on exped where the caves are more serious and have more objective dangers (unknown reactions to water, deeper, further from rescue etc...)

And *most* importantly - remember it's supposed to be fun! (which doesn't exclude that it's also miserable, after all that's part of the fun)
Thanks, this is all super helpful. Indeed the plateau gets people with its tough, uneven walking and knife edge ridges and has led to deep wounds & broken bones in the past. Last year I walked up to top camp once (visiting friends, didn't get underground) and found balancing on sharp ridges with a 65l pack quite difficult... so I do need to practice walking on uneven surfaces more. The limestone pavements of the dales seem very easy in comparison.

The allotment caves are a good idea, since I haven't any of them anyway so will be nice to tick them off too. The loose rock and flooding in Austria does sound pretty scary but hopefully I'll get used to it.

I'm caving almost every weekend until expo (and on the one that I'm not caving, I'm hiking in the lakes), but it's hard to fit things in during the week. I'll try to set up a rope treadmill at least one evening a week. I work in Clapham so maybe if I invest in some trainers (I currently don't own any) I can run part way up Ingleborough on my lunch breaks
 

thehungrytroglobite

Well-known member
Hi hungry,
Last year I was among a generation of SUSS embarking for their first expedition to Tresviso, and we all had similar worries about not being fit enough. I am aware that this may be considered foolish advice to some on the thread, and that the difficulty of expeditions varies, but we found that the baseline physical fitness found in young cavers such as ourselves was already mostly good enough to serve on exped. Instead it was the time we spent practicing SRT, rigging, and rescue that was most useful....
....
Perhaps our perspective was a bit jaded as we were all outdoorsy 19-20 year olds anyway, but I gather by the amount you post in the caving memes chat that you are probably in a similar boat to us ;) . If you work till 5, try getting a couple of evening trips in each week. You can learn surveying on exped.
Thanks, this is super helpful! And yes, I do cave quite regularly and am also in my early 20s :) so maybe I don't need to worry so much! I guess my fitness will increase when I'm on expo anyway. I cave with some very fast & hard cavers so although I'm probably faster than a lot of people, I often view myself as 'the slowest' and am constantly trying to get better.

You make a good point about learning the skills potentially being more beneficial. I'll try to practice my rigging a bit more and learn some rescue stuff - the latter seems like an easy thing to do at the dump training wall during an evening, which is only 10mins down the road.
 

thehungrytroglobite

Well-known member
Set up a rope treadmill today and prusiked up 240m in total (3 x 80m).

Timings:
Up an 80m rope continuous, with 50m rope in tackle sack:
Round 1 = 17min 21seconds

Up an 80m rope continuous, without tackle sack:
Round 2 = 10mins 32seconds
Round 3 = 13mins 35seconds

The harness was quite painful on my legs with just a thin layer of trousers so I dropped the tackle sack after round 1. My legs & neck are now very chafed and I have bubbly fingers on my hand from the rope. It was sweaty & hard but felt like good exercise and good training. Would recommend a rope treadmill for anyone who wants to practice their prusiking and get prusik-fit in a quick, easy way. Hopefully I'll bring those timings down over the next few weeks!
 

andrewmcleod

Well-known member
It takes me 4 to 6 hours to do the 550m of pitches from the bottom of WUG Pot, which is nearly all on ropes with maybe 30 minutes caving off the ropes. If you work that out in metres per minute it's not very impressive :p

Sounds like good training though for fitness, and might make dragging big bags slightly less miserable. Might also be a good way of finding out how heavy a tackle sack you can manage before it suddenly gets really miserable.
 

thehungrytroglobite

Well-known member
Could you describe/illustrate your rope treadmill?
My partner set it up, maybe he'll be able to explain better. We had a rope going through a pulley and he was belaying off (I think) an italian hitch on a fig 8. So he was constantly feeding the rope through the fig 8 & pulley, meaning that no matter how much I prusiked, I never got any higher (kind of what I imagine hell to be like!). This meant that although the room we were in was only about 10metres tall or less (it was the Dump training wall) I could prusik 80m continuously (and more, if we'd had a longer rope).
 

Fulk

Well-known member
Thanks, THT; I've tried that but I wondered it you'd managed to set something up that didn't involve another person.

I remember that several years ago Dave Elliott set up an 'SRT treadmill' that used a continuous length of rope and some sort of clutch system that involved a Shunt, so one was able to prusik on the spot without the need for someone to pay out the rope.
 

Duncan

Member
Thanks, THT; I've tried that but I wondered it you'd managed to set something up that didn't involve another person.

I remember that several years ago Dave Elliott set up an 'SRT treadmill' that used a continuous length of rope and some sort of clutch system that involved a Shunt, so one was able to prusik on the spot without the need for someone to pay out the rope.
There's an article in an old edition of Nylon Highway that describes something similar:

Climbing Treadmill by Pete Sauvigne, NH35 p6

I'm sure I've seen another article somewhere (that I can't immediately locate) which shows a setup using a rack as the friction device and with a different method for splicing the rope into a continuous loop, but the basic idea was the same.
 

thehungrytroglobite

Well-known member
Thanks, THT; I've tried that but I wondered it you'd managed to set something up that didn't involve another person.

I remember that several years ago Dave Elliott set up an 'SRT treadmill' that used a continuous length of rope and some sort of clutch system that involved a Shunt, so one was able to prusik on the spot without the need for someone to pay out the rope.
An automated rope treadmill would be pretty good, I'd be extremely fit if I could prusik whilst watching Netflix every evening!
 

Rachel

Active member
An automated rope treadmill would be pretty good, I'd be extremely fit if I could prusik whilst watching Netflix every evening!
I've got an exercise machine that simulates rope walking that would definitely work your prussiking muscles in front of Netflix! You'd be welcome to borrow it for a while if you like - I'm not supposed to be exerting myself too much at the moment, so won't be using it myself for a while.
 

ChrisB

Well-known member
I've been pondering designs for rope treadmills. I think it's important to climb, then lower, if you want to accurately simulate how fast you can climb. If you climb and lower at the same time, you're not raising your body weight, just pulling rope round the system. With a belayer, you might manage to lower at the right time, but I can't see it with an autobelay.
 
Top