Return to Mt Faber – Everest, part III
August 29, 2019
Nuts. Crazy. Madness. Insanity. Just some of the words thrown at me after I posted a ride on Strava in the wee hours of yesterday. And I agree completely, but sometimes it just seems right to do some things, no matter how strange they might seem. The session in question was an “Everesting” on Singapore’s Mt Faber. For the uninformed, “to Everest” on a bicycle is to climb the equivalent height of the world’s highest mountain (8,848 metres) on a single hill, in one ride. No sleep is allowed, but thankfully breaks are permitted, indeed encouraged, by the keepers of the rules of Everesting, an Australian mob known as the Hells 500. Check them and Everesting out at https://everesting.cc
It took me 16 hours and 51 minutes of riding to hit the target, plus about three hours of downtime to eat, charge lights and Garmins (yes, plural, it’s best to have a back up for an Everesting), apply chamois cream and contemplate the existential meaning of life. I covered 333km of distance.
I’d actually Everested the mighty Mt Faber before, back in July 2014, as well as a second successful expedition on Singapore’s Rifle Range Road last year with my good friend Bastian Dohling (read about those rides here and here if you like). I’d like to have chosen another hill, but the few other candidates I deemed suitable in Singapore had already been claimed (Pepys Rd and Telok Blangah Park) by Daryl Chan, so this time I opted to return to Faber, but to only do the lower half of the hill. It’s a recognised climb in its own right, as the full ascent is split in two by a flat section.
Now the full Mt Faber gains 81 metres in height per ascent, so that was 111 laps back in 2014. This time I had to do a mind-boggling 263 laps to reach the 8,848-metres mark as each rep only gained 34 metres. The Hells 500 people nicely provide a website where you plug in a Strava segment and it calculates how many laps are required, https://everesting.io.
I could have made it less laps by slightly extending my course down the hill to the 7-Eleven and gaining six metres, but I chose to make my turn at the T-junction of Pender/Morse roads as it entails a much wider, smoother, faster and safer manoeuvre than the tight 7-Eleven option. Similarly, the turn at the top of my segment was made at the broad entrance to the car park which sits midway up Faber and which served as my base for the attempt. The climb is about 600 metres long and the average gradient is 6 percent, although that latter number is slightly misleading in that the last 200 metres are much steeper at roughly 10 percent average. Still, a nice hill for an Everesting, not too long, and not too steep or shallow.
But what the hell made me want to do this physically (but even more so mentally) demanding thing again? I’m not really sure but the idea had been floating around the back of my head ever since the last one with Bastian last year. That was kinda fun as we did every single of the 200+ laps together, sharing the pain and the laughs, the camaraderie of the road so to speak. And while I was the only rider to have done the entire first Faber Everesting, for all but the first five hours that day I had the company of at least one of my teammates from the Specialized Mavericks.
So if was going to do it again I guess I wanted it be different and the best way I could think was to do it completely on my own; unannounced, unsupported and solo. I also decided to start first thing in the morning instead of midnight or just after as I had done for the first two attempts. While I knew that going completely solo would be even tougher mentally, I was also thinking that I could quit any time I wanted as nobody but my wife Ruth knew I was going to do it. This way there would be no peer pressure or the thought of letting people down, which is what happened at the 2017 Ironman Malaysia. That day I got off the bike in my age-group lead but almost immediately my legs shut down and what followed was 42km of mental torture as I felt I just had to finish for fear of disappointing everybody who had given me so much encouragement in the lead up and who I knew were following me online.
So I didn’t let anybody else know I was doing it. Just Ruth, and even then I only let I it slip out to her the night before over dinner. That didn’t actually get through to her properly as when I said after breakfast the next morning I was off on my adventure, it turns out she just thought I’d decided to do another Everest attempt one day, not this day!
Anyway, despite appealing to her to tell no-one, unbeknownst to me she had informed our 18-year-old lad Jack for the simple and loving reason that she thought he could help me if I was suffering. And suffer I did, and even earlier in the day than I would have imagined. Having struggled through a four-hour session on wet roads (I couldn’t believe a two-month drought ended the day before my attempt!) I was telling her I was thinking of pulling the plug. She then relayed this information to Jack and eventually a message from him landed saying he knew what I was I doing and that he’d come down in the evening after finishing work at the Athlete Lab. What a good son but I had to tell him not to come due to my “unsupported” goal … and now I had to bloody well finish the thing as I couldn’t exactly let my lad down! But as you’ll see, he did provide some motivational words later when required, so thank you to Ruth for spilling the beans.
To the ride. I left home shortly after 7am and was on the hill by 7:30am. My bike for the day was an S-Works Tarmac Ultralight SL6 with Roval CLX32 wheels. I knocked the first 30 out quite easily, but I expected this. The stint took a few minutes under two hours. The road was quiet with only a few cyclists but even they were all gone by 9am. The armada of tour buses that invade Mt Faber every day didn’t start coming until about 10am either and the buses weren’t as much of a problem as when doing the full Faber loops. It was after the first stint I took my longest break, of about 45 minutes. Why so early? I needed to nip the 4km into town to pick up the family car from Ruth’s work. She was off on a business trip to Shanghai, which was another reason for choosing that day, so that I could have the car for my base. I turned my Garmins off for the ride into town and the drive back. Remember, breaks are allowed and none of those miles were recorded so I was within the rules … or so I hope!
I then found a spot for the Honda in the Faber car park, headed back down the hill and restarted the Garmins. No sooner I had got going again than that rain appeared. It had been visible over to the west all morning, and the weather radar seemed to suggest it would stay there. Alas not. Now the 600m descent isn’t really technical, indeed it has just two sweeping bends that require a feathering of the brakes at most, but add the rain, the accompanying slippery leaves and broken branches and boughs, and you have a much more difficult proposition. It only actually rained for about two hours and it wasn’t especially heavy, but it took another few hours to dry out completely even after it stopped. I reckon that wet spell, and another incredibly frustrating burst that followed later in the day, added another hour onto my ride time. And frayed my nerves.
As I mentioned in my previous two Everesting attempt ride reports, it’s the descending that ends up being the most difficult aspect. Riding up is “just” a case of physical endurance and concentration isn’t really required. But when the mind gets tired it’s easy to wander from the racing line and/or the task in hand and hit a hither-unforeseen bump or hole in the road. And of course there are the cars, buses, other cyclists, and walkers and joggers making unexpected moves ... or just being there! During the first wet stint my back wheel slipped out twice on the second of the turns which leads into the fastest part of the course. I saved it both times but my nerves were shot for a while.
It was soon after this initial wet session while having my delicious lunch break of pooris (fried bread) and teh tarek (hot, strong, sweet and milky tea) at Lakshmi Vilas, a hidden Indian food gem at the bottom of the hill, that I messaged Ruth I was thinking of calling it quits. I was only a third done. But the rain had finally stopped so I climbed back on and with the roads starting to dry I felt better again. And the legs were good.
Indeed, the legs stayed strong throughout, unlike the mind. My strategy for the climbs was out of the saddle for the first 30 seconds or so of every rep in the big chain ring, then dropping into the small ring just before then “ramp”, which I span up in either the 24- or 27-cog for each and every lap. I’ve been know to have a few back problems when cycling as well as a few other creaking joints, but the body survived the ordeal remarkably well this time. I put that down to two main things. First that getting out of the saddle on each lap kept the back and hamstrings quite limber, but I’ve also become a bit of a yoga addict over the past nine months, and the not-quite-daily practice seems to have worked wonders. There wasn’t even a peep of a dreaded leg cramp throughout. And the Champion System bibs and Rapha chamois cream did a fantastic job of protecting the nether regions.
The body didn’t go completely unaffected, though. My feet and my hands suffered a fair bit. and I frequently had to slip out of my shoes during break time. Curiously they only seemed to cramp and fire up when climbing off the bike, but when it came it was brutal. The problem with my hands was the very thin gloves I wore. They are still tingling as I write this some 36 hours later. I didn’t prepare that well for this attempt. I should have had two pairs of shoes and two pairs of gloves, I should have brought a cable to charge my Garmins, and perhaps I could have brought more than one light for each end of the bike. The cable I found in the 7-Eleven, which I only stopped at twice to buy a sum total of two small bottles of Coke, two Mars Bars and one last big bottle of water to see me though the last two hours.
In the car I had an eski with eight bottles of 1.5 litres of water, a can of Irn Bru, two cans of Coke, six tubes of Clif Shot Bloks, one Clif Bar, two Larabars, one big bag of Tyrells salt n vinegar crips, two bananas and a tube of Nuuns. Add a dinner of mutton byrani and veggies with another teh tarek for dinner at 8pm and that was my nutrition.
That dinner saved me as I had just done another hour on wet roads, I still had a third of the way to go and my spirits were down. The rain this time came out of nowhere and only lasted five minutes. But it soaked the road again and coincided with darkness falling. Add the glare from the street lights (which are now much brighter than before I reckon, which is good I suppose) and a body and mind fatigued from 12 hours in the saddle and you have the perfect conditions to bring on another near mental breakdown on the descents.
The first real food in seven hours no doubt helped save me, but so did Jack. As I now knew that he knew what I was up to, and Ruth was on a plane, I wrote to him while waiting for my food and told him the past 45 minutes had been hellish. He replied with this masterly piece of gonzo motivation:
“FINISH IT YOU PATHETIC QUITTER, IS THAT HOW YOU WANT TO BE REMEMBERED? A GOD DAMN HOODLUM BALL OF BILE? A HOODRAT DOG? A DESCENDANT OF JUBBA THE HUT? NO. YOU'RE GONNA BE THE FIRST MAN TO EVEREST IN SINGAPORE WITHOUT SUPPORT...A MAN WITH BALLS OF STEEL...NEIL ARMSTRONG 2.0...A PIONEER...A RECORD BREAKER...MORE THAN A MAN...YOUR CHOICE...YOU CAN DIE ON YOUR FEET TONIGHT OR LIVE THE REST OF YOUR LIFE FORVER ON YOUR KNEES...WITH REGRET...BECAUSE YOU QUIT…”
While I’m not sure if I was the first person to Everest in Singapore without support, I loved what he wrote and nicely chastened and with my belly full, I duly got back on the bike. I had about 90 laps to go. By now my stints were down to 15 laps at a time, interspersed by five-minute breaks. The road never completely dried up for the rest of the night, but the steady stream of cars coming down the hill from whatever escapades their occupants had been up to helped the process and it became less nervy to descend again. Although my laps for the final few hours were now hovering around the four-minute mark, where earlier in the day, especially when dry, I was consistently hitting 3:20s.
The stints went down to 10 laps, then eight and the final session was just six laps long. It was just after 3am when I climbed off the bike for the last time. And that was that. To be honest, there was no great sense of achievement, I was just glad to be done. I had wanted to test my mental strength by doing an Everest completely on my own, but I ended up questioning my sanity or more than one occasion. This was the hardest of the three I’ve completed by far, although notably the fastest.
Will there be a fourth, fifth, sixth … attempt? Honestly, probably not, but never say never. However, I can guarantee that if I do it again it will be with friends, or maybe with Jack. Never underestimate the value of riding companions.
While there are no photos of this attempt as there was nobody around to take any, here's the Strava file of the ride: https://www.strava.com/activities/2657086294
Nuts. Crazy. Madness. Insanity. Just some of the words thrown at me after I posted a ride on Strava in the wee hours of yesterday. And I agree completely, but sometimes it just seems right to do some things, no matter how strange they might seem. The session in question was an “Everesting” on Singapore’s Mt Faber. For the uninformed, “to Everest” on a bicycle is to climb the equivalent height of the world’s highest mountain (8,848 metres) on a single hill, in one ride. No sleep is allowed, but thankfully breaks are permitted, indeed encouraged, by the keepers of the rules of Everesting, an Australian mob known as the Hells 500. Check them and Everesting out at https://everesting.cc
It took me 16 hours and 51 minutes of riding to hit the target, plus about three hours of downtime to eat, charge lights and Garmins (yes, plural, it’s best to have a back up for an Everesting), apply chamois cream and contemplate the existential meaning of life. I covered 333km of distance.
I’d actually Everested the mighty Mt Faber before, back in July 2014, as well as a second successful expedition on Singapore’s Rifle Range Road last year with my good friend Bastian Dohling (read about those rides here and here if you like). I’d like to have chosen another hill, but the few other candidates I deemed suitable in Singapore had already been claimed (Pepys Rd and Telok Blangah Park) by Daryl Chan, so this time I opted to return to Faber, but to only do the lower half of the hill. It’s a recognised climb in its own right, as the full ascent is split in two by a flat section.
Now the full Mt Faber gains 81 metres in height per ascent, so that was 111 laps back in 2014. This time I had to do a mind-boggling 263 laps to reach the 8,848-metres mark as each rep only gained 34 metres. The Hells 500 people nicely provide a website where you plug in a Strava segment and it calculates how many laps are required, https://everesting.io.
I could have made it less laps by slightly extending my course down the hill to the 7-Eleven and gaining six metres, but I chose to make my turn at the T-junction of Pender/Morse roads as it entails a much wider, smoother, faster and safer manoeuvre than the tight 7-Eleven option. Similarly, the turn at the top of my segment was made at the broad entrance to the car park which sits midway up Faber and which served as my base for the attempt. The climb is about 600 metres long and the average gradient is 6 percent, although that latter number is slightly misleading in that the last 200 metres are much steeper at roughly 10 percent average. Still, a nice hill for an Everesting, not too long, and not too steep or shallow.
But what the hell made me want to do this physically (but even more so mentally) demanding thing again? I’m not really sure but the idea had been floating around the back of my head ever since the last one with Bastian last year. That was kinda fun as we did every single of the 200+ laps together, sharing the pain and the laughs, the camaraderie of the road so to speak. And while I was the only rider to have done the entire first Faber Everesting, for all but the first five hours that day I had the company of at least one of my teammates from the Specialized Mavericks.
So if was going to do it again I guess I wanted it be different and the best way I could think was to do it completely on my own; unannounced, unsupported and solo. I also decided to start first thing in the morning instead of midnight or just after as I had done for the first two attempts. While I knew that going completely solo would be even tougher mentally, I was also thinking that I could quit any time I wanted as nobody but my wife Ruth knew I was going to do it. This way there would be no peer pressure or the thought of letting people down, which is what happened at the 2017 Ironman Malaysia. That day I got off the bike in my age-group lead but almost immediately my legs shut down and what followed was 42km of mental torture as I felt I just had to finish for fear of disappointing everybody who had given me so much encouragement in the lead up and who I knew were following me online.
So I didn’t let anybody else know I was doing it. Just Ruth, and even then I only let I it slip out to her the night before over dinner. That didn’t actually get through to her properly as when I said after breakfast the next morning I was off on my adventure, it turns out she just thought I’d decided to do another Everest attempt one day, not this day!
Anyway, despite appealing to her to tell no-one, unbeknownst to me she had informed our 18-year-old lad Jack for the simple and loving reason that she thought he could help me if I was suffering. And suffer I did, and even earlier in the day than I would have imagined. Having struggled through a four-hour session on wet roads (I couldn’t believe a two-month drought ended the day before my attempt!) I was telling her I was thinking of pulling the plug. She then relayed this information to Jack and eventually a message from him landed saying he knew what I was I doing and that he’d come down in the evening after finishing work at the Athlete Lab. What a good son but I had to tell him not to come due to my “unsupported” goal … and now I had to bloody well finish the thing as I couldn’t exactly let my lad down! But as you’ll see, he did provide some motivational words later when required, so thank you to Ruth for spilling the beans.
To the ride. I left home shortly after 7am and was on the hill by 7:30am. My bike for the day was an S-Works Tarmac Ultralight SL6 with Roval CLX32 wheels. I knocked the first 30 out quite easily, but I expected this. The stint took a few minutes under two hours. The road was quiet with only a few cyclists but even they were all gone by 9am. The armada of tour buses that invade Mt Faber every day didn’t start coming until about 10am either and the buses weren’t as much of a problem as when doing the full Faber loops. It was after the first stint I took my longest break, of about 45 minutes. Why so early? I needed to nip the 4km into town to pick up the family car from Ruth’s work. She was off on a business trip to Shanghai, which was another reason for choosing that day, so that I could have the car for my base. I turned my Garmins off for the ride into town and the drive back. Remember, breaks are allowed and none of those miles were recorded so I was within the rules … or so I hope!
I then found a spot for the Honda in the Faber car park, headed back down the hill and restarted the Garmins. No sooner I had got going again than that rain appeared. It had been visible over to the west all morning, and the weather radar seemed to suggest it would stay there. Alas not. Now the 600m descent isn’t really technical, indeed it has just two sweeping bends that require a feathering of the brakes at most, but add the rain, the accompanying slippery leaves and broken branches and boughs, and you have a much more difficult proposition. It only actually rained for about two hours and it wasn’t especially heavy, but it took another few hours to dry out completely even after it stopped. I reckon that wet spell, and another incredibly frustrating burst that followed later in the day, added another hour onto my ride time. And frayed my nerves.
As I mentioned in my previous two Everesting attempt ride reports, it’s the descending that ends up being the most difficult aspect. Riding up is “just” a case of physical endurance and concentration isn’t really required. But when the mind gets tired it’s easy to wander from the racing line and/or the task in hand and hit a hither-unforeseen bump or hole in the road. And of course there are the cars, buses, other cyclists, and walkers and joggers making unexpected moves ... or just being there! During the first wet stint my back wheel slipped out twice on the second of the turns which leads into the fastest part of the course. I saved it both times but my nerves were shot for a while.
It was soon after this initial wet session while having my delicious lunch break of pooris (fried bread) and teh tarek (hot, strong, sweet and milky tea) at Lakshmi Vilas, a hidden Indian food gem at the bottom of the hill, that I messaged Ruth I was thinking of calling it quits. I was only a third done. But the rain had finally stopped so I climbed back on and with the roads starting to dry I felt better again. And the legs were good.
Indeed, the legs stayed strong throughout, unlike the mind. My strategy for the climbs was out of the saddle for the first 30 seconds or so of every rep in the big chain ring, then dropping into the small ring just before then “ramp”, which I span up in either the 24- or 27-cog for each and every lap. I’ve been know to have a few back problems when cycling as well as a few other creaking joints, but the body survived the ordeal remarkably well this time. I put that down to two main things. First that getting out of the saddle on each lap kept the back and hamstrings quite limber, but I’ve also become a bit of a yoga addict over the past nine months, and the not-quite-daily practice seems to have worked wonders. There wasn’t even a peep of a dreaded leg cramp throughout. And the Champion System bibs and Rapha chamois cream did a fantastic job of protecting the nether regions.
The body didn’t go completely unaffected, though. My feet and my hands suffered a fair bit. and I frequently had to slip out of my shoes during break time. Curiously they only seemed to cramp and fire up when climbing off the bike, but when it came it was brutal. The problem with my hands was the very thin gloves I wore. They are still tingling as I write this some 36 hours later. I didn’t prepare that well for this attempt. I should have had two pairs of shoes and two pairs of gloves, I should have brought a cable to charge my Garmins, and perhaps I could have brought more than one light for each end of the bike. The cable I found in the 7-Eleven, which I only stopped at twice to buy a sum total of two small bottles of Coke, two Mars Bars and one last big bottle of water to see me though the last two hours.
In the car I had an eski with eight bottles of 1.5 litres of water, a can of Irn Bru, two cans of Coke, six tubes of Clif Shot Bloks, one Clif Bar, two Larabars, one big bag of Tyrells salt n vinegar crips, two bananas and a tube of Nuuns. Add a dinner of mutton byrani and veggies with another teh tarek for dinner at 8pm and that was my nutrition.
That dinner saved me as I had just done another hour on wet roads, I still had a third of the way to go and my spirits were down. The rain this time came out of nowhere and only lasted five minutes. But it soaked the road again and coincided with darkness falling. Add the glare from the street lights (which are now much brighter than before I reckon, which is good I suppose) and a body and mind fatigued from 12 hours in the saddle and you have the perfect conditions to bring on another near mental breakdown on the descents.
The first real food in seven hours no doubt helped save me, but so did Jack. As I now knew that he knew what I was up to, and Ruth was on a plane, I wrote to him while waiting for my food and told him the past 45 minutes had been hellish. He replied with this masterly piece of gonzo motivation:
“FINISH IT YOU PATHETIC QUITTER, IS THAT HOW YOU WANT TO BE REMEMBERED? A GOD DAMN HOODLUM BALL OF BILE? A HOODRAT DOG? A DESCENDANT OF JUBBA THE HUT? NO. YOU'RE GONNA BE THE FIRST MAN TO EVEREST IN SINGAPORE WITHOUT SUPPORT...A MAN WITH BALLS OF STEEL...NEIL ARMSTRONG 2.0...A PIONEER...A RECORD BREAKER...MORE THAN A MAN...YOUR CHOICE...YOU CAN DIE ON YOUR FEET TONIGHT OR LIVE THE REST OF YOUR LIFE FORVER ON YOUR KNEES...WITH REGRET...BECAUSE YOU QUIT…”
While I’m not sure if I was the first person to Everest in Singapore without support, I loved what he wrote and nicely chastened and with my belly full, I duly got back on the bike. I had about 90 laps to go. By now my stints were down to 15 laps at a time, interspersed by five-minute breaks. The road never completely dried up for the rest of the night, but the steady stream of cars coming down the hill from whatever escapades their occupants had been up to helped the process and it became less nervy to descend again. Although my laps for the final few hours were now hovering around the four-minute mark, where earlier in the day, especially when dry, I was consistently hitting 3:20s.
The stints went down to 10 laps, then eight and the final session was just six laps long. It was just after 3am when I climbed off the bike for the last time. And that was that. To be honest, there was no great sense of achievement, I was just glad to be done. I had wanted to test my mental strength by doing an Everest completely on my own, but I ended up questioning my sanity or more than one occasion. This was the hardest of the three I’ve completed by far, although notably the fastest.
Will there be a fourth, fifth, sixth … attempt? Honestly, probably not, but never say never. However, I can guarantee that if I do it again it will be with friends, or maybe with Jack. Never underestimate the value of riding companions.
While there are no photos of this attempt as there was nobody around to take any, here's the Strava file of the ride: https://www.strava.com/activities/2657086294