Peaky Finders
Fancy climbing the height of Mt Everest?
UNLESS YOU HAPPEN to be ultrarunning wizard Kilian Jornet, it’s unlikely you’ll ever run up Mount Everest.
But there is a new challenge that allows runners to do the next best thing:
Everesting. The rules are simple: clock up the equivalent ascent of
Mount Everest (8,848m) on one hill, in one go, with no sleep. The hill can be as long or as short as you wish; all that matters is that you hit the required amount of ascent. The good news? You don’t have to run back down – Everesting is all about the uphill journey.
Andy van Bergen, the Australian cyclist behind the idea, says it was never designed to be a running challenge. ‘When a couple of local runners registered an interest in it, I thought they were bonkers,’ he says. ‘On the biggest days of the Tour de France, riders rack up about 5,000m of ascent; to run close to 9,000m seemed impossible.’
However, 75 runners from 15 countries have completed the challenge, including Carrie Craig (inset). Born in Scotland but now based in Chamonix, France, ultrarunner Craig and Canadian trail runner Sheri Bastien both recorded their Everesting in July 2019 and now have a place in the Hall of Fame on the Everesting website (everesting.cc),
‘I’d injured my knee skiing and couldn’t run downhill. So I was looking for a challenge,’ says Craig. ‘Sheri and I did it on the Vertical Kilometre route; a ski lift runs next to it.’ The duo started at 4am, and after 10 ascents and 19 hours, they’d joined a very exclusive club. ‘Mentally, it was super-challenging,’ says Craig. ‘As you’re completing the same ascent, you have multiple opportunities to quit when you reach the bottom.’
And there is a specific challenge: ‘Similar to Everest, there’s an area we call the “death zone”,’ says van Bergen. ‘It’s between 7,000 and 8,000m. That’s where we see a lot of people quitting.’
Although van Bergen has completed several Everestings on two wheels, the rise of the two-legged event worries him. ‘I have an unwritten rule: anything I ask people in the community to do, I have to try, so I’m going to have to run one.’