There’s a hill a couple miles from our house, on a stretch of road between Roquepine and Mas d’Avignon in the South West of France. It’s a rural, barely traveled farm road connecting two ridge lines. On new authority, I can tell you it sees less than a half dozen cars in a normal day.
The last time I was up at 5:15am the day after NYE might well have been never. But unprecedented times, in service of an audacious goal, call for unprecedented wake up calls.
This audacious goal was not mine. I don’t yet have goals for 2021. I figure I’ll have some extra planning time. But my 17 year old son Colin has been mapping out this plan, subject to weather conditions, for weeks. The wind (or lack thereof) and window of opportunity landed him on New Year’s Day.
Perhaps you’ve heard of the crazy endurance challenge called “Everesting?” Probably not, but it’s a thing in the cycling and endurance athlete community.
Everesting is where you pick a hill, anywhere in the world, and ascend it repeatedly until you climb a total of 8,848 meters (or 29,029 feet) - the equivalent height of Mt Everest from sea level- in a single go. You can stop for fuel and be supported but it has to be completed in one 24 hour period.
For perspective, the total elevation gain is more than double the climbing of some of the hardest stages of the Tour de France. Or more simply, it takes longer than there is daylight at this time of year. With that kind of promise of suffering, only about 14,000 people in the world are known to have completed the challenge.
And so, at 5:30am on January 1 2021, Colin rolled out his bike into the cold (1 degree C), extremely dark fog to get acquainted with every groove of that pitched road to Mas D’.
His little brother set his alarm to run over shortly after dawn to run part of it with him. He later came over with his bike to do several ascents. His big brother was checking in hourly by phone. And his Dad (aka bike mechanic) rode three of the hours with him. I kept him fed.
And: HE DID IT. Colin conquered his Everest after 12 hours, 33 minutes in the saddle. Four and a half hours in the dark, 4 punctures and the temperature never crested 3 C. He missed French evening Covid curfew by 8 minutes (whoops). (And he’s official on the Everesting Hall of Fame.)
Our own kids amaze us, people doing courageous things amaze us and yesterday I got to see a rare intersection of those moments. Well done, lad.
Now as I look ahead to the New Year, I have his example of mental toughness and a reminder that sometimes the thing worth doing requires a start or finish in the darkness.
Lawton put together this video to capture the event.