MEMBERS of the Shimna Wheelers Cycling Club have become the latest local participants to take on the ‘Everesting’ challenge.
Everesting has grown in popularity with cyclists and runners. The goal is to find any hill and climb up and down it until you reach the elevation of Mount Everest which is 29,029 feet.
This is something I had achieved myself last year with a friend, Danny O’Boyle, as we opted to cycle.
Due to the strange times this year, an indoor cycling app called Zwift has also become very popular. On this app you can attempt the Everesting challenge virtually. In July, myself and Jimmy McVeigh started at 7am and completed the challenge. The total climbing was 29,045 feet, or 140 miles.
I thought this was my Everesting done for the year, but it only made Jimmy want to do an outdoor one even more.
Two weeks later I got a call from him saying he wanted to give it another go outside. Because we are losing daylight, I told Jimmy if we were going to do this it would have to be in August, so we decided on the last Saturday of the month.
As I had done one before Jimmy left it up to me to find which hill we would attempt this on. Hells 500 are a group which started this crazy idea and they have an “Everesting Calculator” which you can enter a Strava segment on and it works out how many hill repeats you will need to complete to get the desired elevation.
We chose Station Road, a local hill which we knew well. The calculator told us 117 climbs was needed to complete this attempt. We knew this was going to be a brutal task but we got ourselves motivated for it.
Last Saturday at 5.30am, we started the countdown. A couple of hours in, I noticed that our elevation wasn’t adding up to what it should have been. Unfortunately it was bad news, and Jimmy confirmed what I had thought.
When the segment was created, the Garmin which recorded it must have had an elevation error so it wasn’t what we had worked it out to be which was 117 laps. Instead it would end up being 143.
This was news we did not want to hear as we had worked out what pace we should cycle at and what food we needed.
However, we had already said before we started it didn’t matter how long it took us we would stay until we completed it — and that we did.
So back on to Hells 500 to submit our results and get put into the Hall of Fame for our achievement which at the minute makes us the only two people in the North of Ireland to have completed such a feat more than once.
This could not have been possible without the help of so many people. We had friends, club members, other cycling clubs, local businesses and even the residents of Station Road cheer us on throughout our long day and night.
Words can’t explain what it means when you undergo such a task and get so much support. It makes it all worthwhile. We had various cyclists turn up and climb with us throughout our attempt, some doing repeats of up to 40 climbs with us. We had different people turn up as night fell and drove up and down the hill making it safer for us to climb and descend by lighting up the road.
Jimmy and I would just like to thank everyone for the part they played in helping us achieve this challenge.