RIDING HIGH Crieff’sTom Simpson on climbing‘Everest’in a gruelling bike challenge

It is known as ‘Everesting’.

It is the concept of making the same climb over and over to rackup the height of the world’s highest mountain in a single activity.

Someone undertaking the 8848-metre challenge on a bike would normally choose a road with a nice smooth vertical.

But not Crieff ’s Tom Simpson. He decided to ‘Everest’ on one of the Comrie Croft trails, which meant repeating the climb 60 times and covering over 125 miles to achieve the feat.

Tom already has a few endurance events under his belt and, while training one day, decided to see if he could ride 10,000 feet by finding climbs around Strathearn so he would not get bored.

He said: “At that point that had been the most climbing I had ever done.

“Shortly after that, I came across an article of a man called Ben Hittle, who does massive climb challenges but is just a regular guy.

“I saw that he had done an ‘Everest’ in a day. That’s only 19,000 feet more. I thought: ‘I wonder if I could do that’, and thus the idea was born.

“Everesting became quite popular last year. With the pandemic cancelling nearly all racing, pro riders started a bit of a competition between each other instead and the record seemed to come down every other week.

“However, most of these attempts were road rides, which is much smoother and quicker - not something I was interested in as I like mountain biking, but it makes it a much slower and harder thing.

“I was thinking about doing it while the popularity was high but didn’t feel right with the pandemic going on. I didn’t want to crash, and then the arrival of my son Ben kind of made sure it wasn’t happening for a while.”

The 36 year-old’s Everest took 60 laps, 20 hours and 24 minutes of moving time – a total of 23:24 with stops – and he covered 30,080 feet, and 125.92 miles.

“I can’t imagine ever doing that again,” continued Tom, who also said he was inspired by Billy Monger’s cycling challenge on Comic Relief recently.

He went on: “Getting to the half way point was the hardest part - 30 laps of the Croft climb on a normal session would have been a real achievement, but knowing I had to do it all again was a sort of down moment as I was a bit annoyed at myself for not getting there a bit quicker.

“I don’t know why - it wasn’t like I was racing anyone. I think that was probably my mind playing games with me.”

Tom thanked Emily Greaves and Scott Murray, his wife Sarah and children Isla and Ben for their support, and friends who turned up to ride laps with him or cheer him on, distracting him from the discomfort, as well as Andrew Donaldson from Comrie Croft.

Local cycling coach Emily Greaves described Tom’s achievement as phenomenal.

She said: “I witnessed the most incredible feat of power, endurance and athleticism from Tom.”