FIND CHALLENGES

Andy is also a founding member of Hells 500, the light-touch curators of the Everesting website that helps puts some structure around the challenge. An increasing labour of love, it now takes him a couple of hours a day to verify attempts.

“It goes back 12 years,” he explains from his home in Melbourne. “As a small group of cycling hill climbers, we’d run the gauntlet of Fondos in Melbourne and were creating our own challenges to make us crawl out of bed in winter. When everyone else was under the doona [duvet], we’d hit the alarm, get up, and ride.

“We’d try to out-do the challenge from the year before and it started to gain notoriety. Back then, if you rode over 3,000m elevation it would draw attention. For 5,000m, the whole community would know.”

When a road in the High Country in Victoria was paved to make a 235km loop with 4,500m of climbing, a national event organiser seized the opportunity for a new sportif, marketing it as ‘unachievable without support.’

“But we’d already ridden it,” Andy adds. “So, to really stick it up them, we thought: ‘We’ll ride it again! Then we’ll turnaround and ride it in reverse!’ I’ve a penchant for round numbers and could see that if we added one more hill at the end, we’d get 500km and 10,000m of vertical climb. The ride took just under 36hrs and was so off the wall against anything at the time.

“We also had this habit of naming our rides. Given we were riding 500km and would be going through hell, we called it Hells 500. Forever after we were introduced as ‘those Hells 500 guys.’ It just stuck!”

No-one was prepared for the interest that followed. Requests to join the next attempt flooded in from Auckland to London to New York. “But this wasn’t an organised event,” Andy explains. “This was my parents handing out homemade muesli bars on the side of the road! Once you reach 25 riders, you need a permit and there’s no way I could claim ignorance.”