I’m thinking of having a bash at (road) everesting my local hill (ditchling bostal) on weds. I won’t be going particularly quickly (maybe 500m/hour of ascending – 4 laps), just plodding away. Planning on having my car parked at the bottom with spare tube/tyre/chain/cassette/tools in, and I’ve bought a kilo of supermix and a few bottles of lucozade. I have to start early (pre-dawn) as I have to look after the kids that evening, so I’ve got a hard stop some time shortly after 8.

I figure being the font of all knowledge, some people will have done this before and have some nice wisdom for me..?

Take some proper food 🤗what the **** is supermix?

Bleurghhhh

Edit/ just seen the reference to people who have done it. I failed at 4400m, but was still quite pleased with that effort on s proper off road route.

On a more serious note, what time you starting? Won’t you need to leave at 2am to hig your schedule, or perhaps midnight to allow some contingency. Would be awful to be almost there and then have to bail.

Anyway, good luck
.

500m/hr and 8800m….and back by 8. That’s quite an early start. But good luck, I’m watching with interest. You also need to do a lap naked (clic24 style 😉)

I figured I just wanted stuff that’d easily digest into energy, but I’m no fan of gels. I guessed there’s not much advantage of taking a cheese and ham sandwich that my body has to work at turning into useful, but I’ll be grabbing some bananas from the shop later too..

yeah 2am is probably the approximate start time, 500m/hour allows some contigency already (I did a 10 lap test this morning at a relaxed pace and was going about 5 laps per hour which is 700m/hour). 4 laps an hour is actually 572m/hour which would get me done by 6.30 or so..

@AdamT I’ll be keeping all my clothes on this time. probably..

I did mine on The Struggle out of Ambleside up to Kirsktone Pass summit.

Car parked about 2/3rds of the way down the hill, in the car was a full toolkit, track pump and so on. Cool bag full of food – do NOT try doing it on energy stuff alone, it’ll wreak havoc on your guts, you will NEED some proper savoury food. I had a mix of stuff like pork pies, sausage rolls, some cold tuna pasta, easy snack stuff like bananas and nuts and a few sweet treats. Plus some gels and energy drink although I think I only had about 2 or 3 gels throughout. Thermos of coffee too.

There was also a load of clothing in there and I changed shorts and gloves at one point.

Stop on the descent, not the climb.

Pace yourself. Know how many ascents you have to do, the rough time you’re taking per climb and work backwards to calculate food stops. Take AT LEAST two GPS bike computers. One of mine died at about the 8000m mark and I’d have cried for a week if I hadn’t have been using a backup! Make sure you have a small powerbank for charging them on the move. Also make sure auto-stop is turned off, the computer needs to be running the whole time even when you’re stopped.

Carry the absolute bare minimum with you. Water bottle half full, tiny toolkit (worst case you should just be able to get back to the car and fix it properly there). You don’t need to carry a phone either, that’s just an added distraction.

Where will you go to the loo? That needs planning in too, especially leaving the bike somewhere safe while you do!

Starting at night / dawn is a good move, it gets the night riding out of the way early on while you’re still fresh. I started mine at about 3am and had the mental boost of riding into the daylight and then not needing to do any more riding in darkness.

Good luck! Most of Everesting is a mental challenge plus some logistics.

thanks @crazy-legs – some top tips there. I’ve done the sdw a couple of times, which is a similar length ride (although some more differences in scenery and having to carry all your gear with you), so have a little experience with things of this kind of length..

For the struggle – did you use regular road bike gearing or something lower? the bostall is shorter and less steep (my car will just be at the bottom as its that or the top) – but the average gradient is only 9% and I’ll still be planning on just sitting in bottom and spinning 🙂

I’ve only got one proper gps device (garmin instinct solar, which should last the full duration with some to spare) – will be using my phone as a backup/music source. I wasn’t planning on carrying any tools as I figure I can just drop back to the car if anything is wrong (its never more than a mile away). That said, my bike is 30lbs, so maybe it won’t make any difference if I strap a multitool to the rack..

Make sure your bike is properly well sorted before you start, then there will be no need to carry tools. What are you expecting to fix anyway ? Basically if its sorted then you should be fine. You are only pedalling up a hill and freewheeling down it, so if you pop a new chain on and check all the bolts and tyres all should be fine.

Perhaps take a spare front / rear wheel so if you get a flat just swop the wheel, someone can repair it for you while you continue. I assume you have some support ?

The number one takeaway from mine was pacing and gearing. Specifically lowering both more than you might think necessary.
The first 5 hours I did at a fairly solid pace (I was going for the British record, which would be much harder now!), then completely popped and ended up having a sit-down lunch in the van. The first half should feel properly easy, if not you’re pushing too hard!
Gearing wise, go as low as you reasonably can, there’s not really any downsides. I left fairly standard road bike gearing on, which was fine while I was on for the record, but once the pace dropped I did a lot of weaving about and swearing.

For me, the fact of always going up or down made the nutrition aspect a lot harder. Even in a marathon MTB event there are normally a few flat bits where you can sit up and properly wind in some food, but if you’re always climbing or descending these moments are much harder to come by. Because of this I’d strongly recommend the use of liquid calories, from a sports drink or similar. If you can be constantly taking in calories fairly passively with your drink, you remove some of the risk of bonking, and it’s not something you have to stop breathing long for, unlike a sandwich. As others have said though, take in lots of food and in good variety. I like to set an alarm on my garmin for every half an hour to remind me to eat something, then eat ad hoc on top of that schedule.

Oh and don’t go mad on the descent. It’s easy to find yourself wanting to make up time by going full Nibali, but the risks on an open road far outweigh the reward.

Good luck with that one..
I thought about the bostal, but i think the descent owould require too much concentration!

I’m thinking of a real life attempt on teh south downs sometime soon.

I recently did a vEverest, and though it may or may not be comparabl;e, I found that setting off at a nice steady pace, probably slower than you’d like, was the key..

I stuck at 210w (roughly 3w/kg) for the climb, and kinda stuck to that.
for my IRL attempt, i’ll try to stick to that wattage too…

Bon chance

DrP

Perhaps take a spare front / rear wheel so if you get a flat just swop the wheel, someone can repair it for you while you continue. I assume you have some support ?

hah, no no support at all, and I don’t have any spare qr wheels anyway. I figured that I have enough slack time to fix things like that myself if I need to, and I just dropped on a fresh pair of marathon plus tyres (the last set lasted > 20,000km without a flat, so touch wood I should be avoiding flats here too)..

Gearing wise, go as low as you reasonably can, there’s not really any downsides. I left fairly standard road bike gearing on, which was fine while I was on for the record, but once the pace dropped I did a lot of weaving about and swearing.

Its a ~9% average and 16% max gradient. My bike currently has a 34/30 ratio – I don’t think I can go any lower on the front easily (sram rival chainset) but I do have a (used) 36th cassette I was thinking of leaving in the car that I can fit if I need to (the rest of the road drivetrain is fresh, so I’d prefer not to mix them unless necessary). The current gearing gives me ~5mph at ~60rpm (which is where I’m comfortable, I’m not much of a spinner) – if I can’t maintain that kind of speed I think I’m done for.

For me, the fact of always going up or down made the nutrition aspect a lot harder.

do you think that’s because you were going hard? I was going pretty gently on the way up earlier (average heartrate was ~135 – ride is here if anyone wants to pick it apart.. https://www.strava.com/activities/5349326711 ) and I had a few limited snacks in my baggies for the way – I wasn’t struggling to grab a few sweets and shove them in my mouth at opportune times (but I certainly would be if I was trying to break any sort of record!)

Oh and don’t go mad on the descent. It’s easy to find yourself wanting to make up time by going full Nibali, but the risks on an open road far outweigh the reward.

great thought – the beacon is a mess with drivers at the best of times (and curved along the majority of it). I’ll be chilling out on the way down/sitting high to try to increase wind resistance.

I stuck at 210w (roughly 3w/kg) for the climb, and kinda stuck to that.
for my IRL attempt, i’ll try to stick to that wattage too…

interesting. I don’t have a power meter, but a calculator recons on a similar sort of output but I’m abigger lad so it was about 2.5w/kg (spinning along gently in bottom gear). I think using a single gear and a relatively constant slope makes managing effort (without a meter) possible?

For the struggle – did you use regular road bike gearing or something lower?

@5lab – I used my CX bike but with road tyres (28mm Schwalbe instead of my normal 38mm CX tyres). Oh and I put road pedals on instead of the usual MTB clipless just for better power – I used my lightweight stiff road race shoes which were fine throughout although I took them off for a bit during my “lunch break”.

CX has a 34/36 low gear and The Struggle has a couple of sections higher up where it touches 20%. Also, the CX has disc brakes compared with the rim brakes on my road bike and that allowed far more control on the descent – The Struggle can be VERY fast going down, the speed builds up really quickly. The 3lb extra weight over the road bike was well worth it for the lower gears and the disc brakes.

Even in a marathon MTB event there are normally a few flat bits where you can sit up and properly wind in some food, but if you’re always climbing or descending these moments are much harder to come by. Because of this I’d strongly recommend the use of liquid calories, from a sports drink or similar. If you can be constantly taking in calories fairly passively with your drink, you remove some of the risk of bonking, and it’s not something you have to stop breathing long for, unlike a sandwich.

It’s for that reason* that I parked midway along the hill. Do a climb. Down to the car, stop and eat something. Freewheel to the bottom. It gave me just that few extra minutes to digest food and feel normal, rather than eating at the bottom and then turning round and starting a climb straight away. Whether it made any actual difference or not I don’t know but it felt like it did so that’s got to be worth something!

*other reasons include having to pay for parking in Ambleside and having to be a customer of the pub at the summit to park there!

Personally I’d go over to Firle Beacon to do it. Much nicer to ride knowing you’ll only have a fraction of the number of cars on it. And I reckon you can come down it faster safely as well.

Personally I’d go over to Firle Beacon to do it. Much nicer to ride knowing you’ll only have a fraction of the number of cars on it

I’ve considered that, but ditching is my local (approx 1 mile from my house) so I figured that was a good reason for it. During the week it’s only really bad during the rush hours, early morning and lunchtime aren’t as bad.

Perhaps the best tip would be trying to remember why on earth you want to do it and then remind yourself of this towards the end, when your knackered, fed up and hating every pedal stroke.

Rice pudding is nice and sits well, comes in pots that don’t need to be kept in a fridge and taste nice at room temp.

Heart rate monitor instead of power meter.

a lad i know did it everesting flat white at the golfie recently.

The Struggle can be VERY fast going down, the speed builds up really quickly

discovered that last week after going up red screes, on the road section from the footpath down to ambleside we weren’t far of hitting 40 in places, i’d imagine you would add on quite a bit more speed on road tyres.

a lad i know did it everesting flat white at the golfie recently.

Tell me more. I’m intrigued. Been looking for a decent true MTBing Everest. Not convinced it exists though.

This will probably be a stupid question, but did he ride up Flat White?

< Goes off to Google it>

<Edit> ok. 23% Gradient. I guess not. The search continues…

yeah, all the climbing was fire road. wouldn’t get much of a rest decending flat white though so i would of thought it would be tough to do.

Henry did an MTB everest while he was at GMBN. Quite a good watch. One aspect I found interesting was that he was keen to make it normal. Ride his normal enduro bike on his usual trails. Not do anything to make it easier and lessen the challenge.

yeah, all the climbing was fire road. wouldn’t get much of a rest decending flat white though so i would of thought it would be tough to do.

Yep, that is seriously impressive.

Henry did an MTB everest while he was at GMBN.

Again, seriously impressive, but not actually an Everest according to the [hugely tedious] rules. You’ve got to go up down the same route that you go up.
I’ve racked my brains endlessly trying to think of a suitable location for this, but failed. Long Mynd looked almost perfect… 200m height gain over 3km. Lovely kitty litter surface. Good fun twisty descent. The problem was that most of the height gain was in the final km and it wasn’t rideable after the first few laps. The bottom section was awesome fun ‘up’ but it didn’t really get you much height gain.

I doubt that the perfect MTB Everest exists, but I’d love to find it…. [Almost] all rideable up on an MTB, difficult enough in descent to ‘require’ a mountain bike rather than a CX/roadie. With enough altitude gain to accumulate the 9000m.

Crikey, don’t try any serious sports, you know one of those with books full of rules. Quite how anything could be simpler than riding up and down the same climb in one ride to attain the height of Everest?

OP – Ian Barrington blogged about a couple he did – https://ianbarrington.com/2016/08/01/everesting-the-devils-elbow/

Again, seriously impressive, but not actually an Everest according to the [hugely tedious] rules. You’ve got to go up down the same route that you go up.

only if you’re not blocked from doing so – if you looped a 1 way trail (ie a trail centre, up and down the same hill) you would be within the rules..

– Rides cannot be loops. The descent must be via the same road unless you are prevented from doing so (e.g. one-way street or one-way trail). This is to prevent kinetic gain sometimes afforded by a loop, or an ‘easier’ descent.

Those rules seem pretty pointless but it does sound like if you do it at a trail centre with one way trails then a loop is fine. I doubt I’d ever do one but if I did I’d absolutely want to do a loop (or loops
) because that’s how I pretty much always ride. That is a mountain bike ride to me. Going up and down the same track repeatedly is too artificial. Just my opinion, if you manage to do 8849m of climbing in a day then however you do it it’ll be impressive

We’ll today was the day

Start was delayed a little as getting up 5 hours early plays havoc with my guts. First lap up and our local fly tippers have dumped a load of crap in the middle of the road, including some glass so i had to spend 10 mins sweeping it to the start of the road. Then, on the way down i ran over a meter long 1″ square steel tube at 20mph that had presumably also fallen off but on the other side of the road, so I hadn’t seen it (and didn’t see it until after I’d hit it with both wheels). I was glad for new 38mm marathon plus tyres at that point (although probably not for the rest of the ride)..

Dawn was lovely and I had a good pace up,5 laps in an hour then a 10 min faff. My mate joined me just after 6 for 4 laps after which traffic got heavy..

I got to halfway at 9.45 feeling pretty fresh.i was eating 5 or 6 haribo per lap and only drinking lucozade so my energy levels were great. On the way down from this lap i was very nearly wiped out by a discovery that pulled out to overtake a cyclist going up as i was heading down. No idea how I missed them, I was on the (angled) curb at the side of the road for a short while..

I bumped into someone else doing laps and we had a chat for 5 laps. It was nice to have some company. Then at 18.07 i hit the magic 8849 meters. I was absolutely knackered at this point but figured i had 2 hours before curfew so decided to add a further 8 laps to take me over 10,000 meters. Wrapped this up at a couple of mins past 8, got a photo taken by a local club who total of 10101 meters of elevation, 72 laps, and 10,000 calories burned, all of which was haribo and lucozade with the exception of 2 bananas. I just didn’t feel like anything else.

Straaaaava here 🙂
https://strava.app.link/TfVGaBZ7zgb

Some effort, physical and mental.

Well done!

This is the end. In hindsight, the rack and guards probably weren’t needed..

Great job. Love how you just did it. Pretty much no planning from what I can tell. Do you still like haribo?

Great effort!

Then at 18.07 i hit the magic 8849 metres.

Awesome great effort.

I was absolutely knackered at this point but figured i had 2 hours before curfew so decided to add a further 8 laps to take me over 10,000 meters.

Love this. Really do. Well done.

10,000 calories burned, all of which was haribo and lucozade with the exception of 2 bananas. I just didn’t feel like anything else.

This, on the other hand is just sick. Yeurgh. Vile creature 😝

PS. Intrigued by the 10,000 calories bit. Shouldn’t it be 10,000kj?

According to my arithmetic anyway

( Though I guess calories burned is way more than GravEp due to inefficiency, but 23% seems low…

Great going, well done!

Pretty much no planning from what I can tell. Do you still like haribo?

that wasn’t no planning.. I planned to be home at 8 and I was there about 5 past, which meant my wife could still go to the pub 🙂 I haven’t touched a haribo since.

PS. Intrigued by the 10,000 calories bit. Shouldn’t it be 10,000kj?

I’m not sure. its what strava and garmin both reconed I was doing. on a faster lap I was pushing out about 290W-300W (judging by my mates power meter showing 320W – he’s got a little more weight but more sensible tyres), for just over 10 mins – so about 50Wh.

Strava underestimated this but I think its because it doesn’t really know how unaero/slow tyred/heavy the bike is.

assuming there’s not much aero going on (so the power needed is the same for a slower climb taking 12mins) – that’s 3600Wh or 13,000kj. Judging by this site https://www.trainerroad.com/blog/calories-and-power/ 20-25% GME is about right, so calories might actually have been higher (in the region of 12,000).

10,000 calories burned, all of which was haribo and lucozade with the exception of 2 bananas

this is more impressive than the Everesting to be honest 🙂

Brilliant! Like the way you did it with the panniers on.

Seriously impressive. Even if I could do an Everesting, I don’t think I’d have it in me to just decide to knock out another couple of thousand metres of climbing afterwards!

Excellent job. Really inspiring!

I don’t think I’d have it in me to just decide to knock out another couple of thousand metres of climbing afterwards!

the toughest bit of that decision was I knew I only had time to do the laps if I did them back-to-back (rather than a break every 4-5 laps as I had been previously). I figured I’d probably get a ‘nearly finished wind’ (which I did) so it’d be ok..

Seriously impressive. Even if I could do an Everesting, I don’t think I’d have it in me to just decide to knock out another couple of thousand metres of climbing afterwards!

I’d vaguely considered it on my Everesting – it would only have been another 2 ascents. I think physically I probably had it in me, mentally maybe not.

What sealed it though was the fact that one GPS had already died (not a low battery, it just crashed) and the other one was on it’s last legs and was so old that it didn’t have a recharge-while-riding function. So I called it a day once I’d got the full Everest.

Richpips and his son Tom (minipips) did an Everesting on a cobbled climb in Belgium and they miscalculated the number of laps needed, actually riding quite a few more than required. They got the 10,000m mark by accident!

Wow, that’s a seriously impressive effort. Well done.