From grief to world record
Andrew Roozen got back into cycling about the time his wife was killed in a hit-and-run while she rode her bike to work.
Rochelle Roozen, a teacher at Burnside High School in Christchurch, missed her bus and was travelling near Prebbleton when she was hit by a car in April 2010.
Yesterday, the man whom she spent 24 years of her life with, who ‘‘couldn’t run between two power poles’’ in 2010, finished five days of cycling more than 30,000 vertical metres.
‘‘I knew how things trigger you to do stuff [and] part of it was when Rochelle, my wife . . . had the accident,’’ Andrew Roozen said.
‘‘One of the schools gave me some running shoes, so I started to get fitter then, but I couldn’t run at all, basically. About half a year later that’s when I bought a new bike.’’
Seven years after that he would come to hold the world record for ‘‘Everesting’’ – cycling the height of the world’s largest mountain, just under 9000 metres. By yesterday, Roozen had essentially cycled higher than Olympus Mons on Mars, the tallest mountain in our solar system.
On Thursday, he did not know ‘‘whether I’m going to make it or not’’, but a final burst of energy allowed him to push through for a total of 641 kilometres cycled over about 100 hours.
‘‘Earlier on when you’ve got all those metres in front of you, you think how are you going to do it? But you just chip away at it, slowly, and you get there somehow.’’
Roozen had ridden a 69m-high stretch of road about 435 times when he finished his latest attempt.
Adding up all his attempts, he had conquered Everest nine times, when excluding a failure from a technicality.
An earlier effort would have made him the third place record holder for Everesting, with 16,000m, but he ‘‘fell asleep for too long, so it meant it didn’t count’’, Richard Greer, one of his supporters, said.
Riders attempting multiple Everests are allowed to sleep for a maximum of two hours between each Mt Everest climb.
Now he had climbed his mountain, Roozen would ‘‘look for a new challenge’’.
‘‘I do get a real buzz out of helping people get into cycling. Part of it is the physical side of it and part of it is the mental part.