The man who ran up Everest twice in a week

“Kílian Jornet is a freak of nature,” said Jonah Ogles in Outside magazine. Last week, the 29-year-old Spanish climber claimed to have raced up Mount Everest in a mere 26 hours, setting the fastest known time up the 29,029ft-high mountain from base camp – and he did it without fixed ropes or supplemental oxygen. Then, five days later, Jornet scaled Everest all over again: setting off from the much higher advanced base camp, he reached the summit in 17 hours – just 15 minutes short of the record. That involved running 8,000 vertical feet up a mountain “on which it’s hard to breathe, period, for the last third of it”, in less than a day. To get a sense of his achievement, compare him with Adrian Ballinger, an “extraordinarily strong” climber who set out from the advanced base camp the same week as Jornet, and took three days to reach the summit. It’s not that Ballinger is weak; the Spaniard is just “absurdly gifted”.

Jornet’s latest feat is “no surprise”, said John Walters in Newsweek. The son of a Pyrenean mountain guide, he scrambles up and down “the world’s tallest and most precarious peaks with the alacrity of a mountain goat”. Jornet holds the fastest known times for ascent and descent of the 14,692ft-high Matterhorn (completing the round trip in two hours and 52 minutes), Mont Blanc, and Denali, North America’s tallest peak. For most people, the phrase “no mountains left to climb” is metaphorical; “for Jornet, it is real”.