Tours, whether it’s hiking, running, ski touring, or alpine climbing, all require you to be on a fixed program. In the Alps, most trips and tours are hut to hut, with a fairly consistent distance in between. And because the Alps are only so high, with a generally common amount of relief, days do seem to have an average vertical gain.

If I plug all that info into my head, and combine it with 20 years experience in the Alps, I’m going to come up with an average of 16 kilometers and 1200 meters of gain per day.

After I wrote this, I asked Janine and Kim to do the same thing. "What's an average day in the Alps?" They both gave me the exact same answer. Let’s go with 16km with 1200 meters of up!

This is what your body should be prepared to do, potentially for several days in a row. Of course for many tours it is absolutely possible to shorten days, and there's even more opportunity to increase the days.

For the running tours we did for our Run the Alps Switzerland book and Elevation : The Alps Trail & Peak Running Resource, the averages are actually higher, at 22 kilometers and 1400 meters of up for these sets of runs. We figure if you’re out in these beautiful places, why not stay out as long as possible? Hopefully, for all your time in the Alps, you have the same strategy.

What you do to increase your fitness is up to you. We suggest digging into what we know as the best possible resource, Uphill Athlete. There you will find training programs for specific mountain sports, or you can contact the team for training programs customized for your exact needs.

In addition to physical training, it also helps to understand how the Alps’ infrastructure allows you to travel as light as possible. Moving without any extra weight will also be influential for your experience. Why carry things you don’t need? This is a common thing we see, especially by Americans not familiar with the hut system and all the gear it allows you to leave behind.