Outdoors: Hiking/Camping

NORTH KINGSTOWN — To climb Mount Everest, Timothy Warren reasons, you need to make yourself hard to kill.

The mountain is treacherous, and it will try to throw everything it has at you — wind, cold, low oxygen levels, rocks, unanticipated storms. You need to be prepared for these and worse at 29,000 feet, or you will die, as 186 people before you have done.

But you can’t train on the mountain. You live in Rhode Island, not only the smallest, but technically the flattest state, and climbing Foster’s 812-foot Jerimoth Hill is hardly going to prepare you.

So Warren, 46, a Warwick chiropractor who is planning to climb to the summit of Everest in April and May 2007, has tried to create a training regimen that prepares him for the famous mountain waiting on the other side of the world.

“Everything is designed to simulate it, as much as I can, at sea level,” Warren said recently from his home, in Saunderstown, after returning from a hike through nearby hills, a 30-pound pack on his back.

Warren then walks into his garage and climbs a metal ladder, up through a trapdoor to a small second level. Gymnasts’ rings hang from the ceiling, weights are strewn about among medicine balls and climbing equipment, and the walls are littered with tacked-up workout routines.

Welcome to the Pleasuredome.

The sarcastically named garage is Warren’s refuge, the place where he goes to try to break his body down and rebuild it into the machine that will take him to the top of the mountain.

Warren grabs a pair of “ice tools” — sickle-like axes used for climbing vertical ice faces — and hangs them over a beam in the roof.

He dangles from the axes and starts doing pull-ups, to train his hands and arm and back muscles to be familiar with the angles and grips of the actual equipment he will use on the mountain.

Mountain climbing requires a strong body, but not in conventional terms. Big, puffy muscles don’t help; in fact, they’re a hindrance.

What’s needed is a highly efficient system that can accomplish multiple functions. To achieve this, the body must be viewed as a machine.

It must be sturdy and balanced enough to carry all the equipment needed up sheer cliffs and steep, rocky inclines without tripping or falling. It must be efficient enough to process the thin air and keep oxygen flowing to the bloodstream and to perpetually tired muscles. It must be strong enough in the core and legs to climb day after day with this heavy weight and limited oxygen.

And the upper-body’s pulling muscles, the latissimus dorsi of the back, must be strong enough to pull the climber up ropes and along vertical rock faces.

So Warren ignores conventional gym exercises such as the ubiquitous bench press, which builds the flashy pectoral muscles of the chest. Muscle is heavy, and Warren strives to avoid building even a gram of muscle that he doesn’t need.

“Pecs are extra weight. They are extra muscle to oxygenate. I need functional muscle,” he said.

He uses workouts tailored for those trying to increase muscle endurance, not build muscle mass. The routines, downloaded from climbers’ Web sites on the Internet, have women’s names — he likes “Angie” and “Cindy” — but that masks their viciousness. Angie, for instance, forces him to do 100 push-ups, 100 pull-ups and 100 squats with no rest in between, as many times as possible. At the beginning, he couldn’t complete the sets, and his times were poor. Now, he cruises through the workouts and is beginning to target specific weak points — his lower quadriceps muscles, the leg muscles just above the knee.

“I’m just in the best shape of my life,” Warren tells his training partner, Kathy Miller.

Miller, a competitive bodybuilder and fellow resident of North Kingstown, read about Warren’s plan to climb Everest in a June article in The Providence Journal.

“I said, wait, there’s someone climbing Everest who lives three miles from here?”

She located his phone number and called to pepper him with questions about the climb and offer her assistance in muscle training.

Warren, like many climbers a bit of a lone wolf, was hesitant at first, but after the first workout, he was convinced.

Now, she helps him work on his problem areas, and provides a little bit of levity as Warren hoists himself up on the rings.

“Would you call this load-bearing?” Warren says as he pulls himself up onto the loops hanging from his ceiling.

“I’d just call it hard.” Miller responds.

But climbing strength is not all muscle. Balance is just as important, to avoid the inevitable falls and recover from them when they happen.

To build his balance, Warren loads his backpack with weights and goes walking up and down nearby hills, backward and sideways. He uses a sideways walking technique called French cramponing in which he crosses one foot over the other, making for slow going but a challenging workout.

Even in these casual hikes, he tries to simulate mountain conditions as much as possible. The heavy leaves and dirt mimic the feel of the snow, and Warren trains with as much of his real gear as possible, including the $700 boots he will wear on Everest. (He bought the boots two sizes too big, because at high altitude the feet swell. So for now, they’re stuffed with extra socks.)

Warren will spend the next few months working on his body and mentally preparing to make the climb. Warren will leave his chiropractic office in the hands of another doctor in March, and prepare for the flight to Katmandu, Nepal, to meet his fellow climbers. He is on a team organized by Seattle’s International Mountain Guides and led by seven-time Everest climber Mark Tucker. While the exact composition of the team is not yet determined, it will have no more than nine members.

He has also focused on fundraising and has spoken at clubs and schools around the state to raise money to cover the $75,000-plus cost of the trip. Last week, he secured a donation from Verizon for $15,000. He says he has $25,000 in hand and pledges of much more. He will make up whatever is left from his personal savings.

In the meantime, he walks, lifts and stretches. His dog, Palmer, joins him for nearly every hike. Sometimes, when he walks up and down the hills for hours, boredom becomes a bigger problem than exhaustion. But Warren looks at the mind as just another muscle he must train and make stronger — and when needed, he plays a little Guns n’ Roses on his iPOD Nano to break up the grind.

“Sometimes it gets a little long,” he said of the near-constant, repetitive training schedule, but “The purpose of training is to make you hard to kill.”