Higher Calling

by Max Leonard

  Two laps more than the six I had managed previously does not sound like an outrageous increase, but I was destined to learn the hard way, that the human body is not a machine. Marathon runners know that half of 42 is not 21, but 35.fn4 Although there is no limit to our endurance, we force back the boundaries in ever smaller increments and the effort required for a single forward step becomes ever greater. Mathematicians would say our limit is like an asymptote which we can approach but never reach.

  On that day, the last Sunday in March 1993, he was forced to stop, because of exhaustion and a sore knee. He had failed, and his plans were put on ice until spring came and the weather improved. ‘During the winter months which followed, I dissected every detail of the past attempt. I assessed each of the principal variables and devised a strategy for another attempt,’ he wrote. In the meantime, he kept up his expedition training mainly by walking up and down his closest hill wearing a heavy backpack.

  Life and the weather forecast conspired against him early in the Antipodean summer, and it wasn’t until 31 October that he finally had a chance to get back to what he called his ‘treadmill’. Treating this sortie to Donna Buang as a training session, he neglected to bring his final cassette tape. Even the soundtrack to his previous attempts had been well planned: Dvorak or Beethoven for a mellow start, followed by rock music from Bryan Adams, The Cure or Midnight Oil, then Jimi Hendrix or John Mellencamp to raise the energy and, finally, Dire Straits’s Alchemy to reinvigorate the legs on the final lap.

  George forced himself to think of the first four laps simply as ‘a chore’. On lap five, although he no longer felt strong, a sense of relentlessness took hold; six went OK; after seven he felt ‘wasted, but not quite exhausted’. And though he did not have his Dire Straits, after almost a year of trying, having been awake since 2 a.m. and by the light of the rising moon, he completed the eighth ascent. ‘I should have been awed by the occasion but instead could only feel my sore backside and painful feet,’ he wrote. Then he climbed the observation tower at the top, for the first time ever, to take in the view over the blackness, carefully freewheeled back down and went to bed. He’d cycled 272 kilometres and climbed 8,800 metres. Everesters these days will know you have to pedal every single one of those 8,848 metres, and he had wondered briefly if he ought to ride another kilometre to make up the symbolic last 48 metres that would take him all the way to the metaphorical peak, but he decided against it.

  For him, at that time, the challenge was complete: ‘It had taken me one step closer to the asymptote. How would I take the next step?’

  George II made it to Everest – the real Everest, that is – and was gratified to find that apart from the Sherpas he was the fittest person in the expedition party. He summited one fine morning at 5.30 a.m., just after sunrise, and was down at high camp again by 9.20 a.m.

  When he returned from Everest he pushed the Mount Donna Buang challenge further, until he had achieved an incredible 10 ascents – 11,000 metres – in a 24-hour period. Then he tried 11 (and aborted due to stomach problems) but after that, he wrote, he did not plan ever to go back to Donna Buang. He felt that, after all that riding and his time in the Himalaya, he was at a peak of fitness he would never reach again. His Donna Buang achievements were unimprovable. This particular chapter of his search for up had finished.

  That was in 1996, and we may never have heard about any of this if it hadn’t been for a friend of his who passed Mallory’s ‘Mount Everest in a Day’ piece to the Australian website called CyclingTips. CyclingTips published it in 2012, and the very well written account received a lot of online comments. Among them, some snark said: ‘If it’s not on Strava, it never happened!’ And so George reasoned he’d better go out and do it again. Two tries later (one was ended by a broken spoke), and he had 8,848 metres to post on Strava.

  That inspired a group of Australian riders who called themselves the Hells500 (‘In Search of Up’ is their motto) to exhort their members to go and have a pop at ‘Everesting’ too. And with Strava as a global platform – somewhere to record, validate and build a community around Everesting attempts – the idea spread to cyclists everywhere. Since then, there have been more than a thousand successful attempts, and some of the most famous mountains in the world have been Everested, as well as some of the world’s most forgettable suburban streets and obscure dirt trails.

  And so we meet again on Firle Beacon. That’s the potted history of how Jimmy and I ended up on top of the South Downs at 4.30 a.m. in the morning. Impressionable victims of cycling extremists dedicated to ensnaring not-so-young men and recruiting them via the internet to do inhuman things in the name of an unhealthy cult.

  Basically, it had only been a matter of time.

  When I first heard the word ‘Everesting’ and understood what it meant, something lodged at the back of my brain. Then sat there like a crystal under a microscope. I had harboured it secretly for a while, not wanting to let on for fear, perhaps, of talking too much and not acting. But it was a dark and heavy itch that needed scratching. Then I met Jimmy and we began to scheme. Our preparation was nowhere near as rigorous as George’s had been, but the most well-thought-out part of it had been our choice of hill. Jimmy lived in Sussex, south of London, and was a specialist at a climb called Ditchling Beacon. He had, in fact, ridden up it for a Strava competition some 130 times in 30 days. (British cyclists, and especially those familiar with the traditional London to Brighton route, might recognise just how unhinged this is.) I liked the cut of his jib instantly. When I lived in Brighton, close to Ditchling, I had ridden up it a fair few times myself, and it turned out Jimmy and I had been independently mulling over an Everesting attempt on it. Only those pioneers who manage a ‘first ascent’ get their name and achievement recorded on the Hells500 Everesting map, so we decided to join forces and ride it together.

  Ditchling Beacon is all of 1.5 kilometres long and according to Strava has an average gradient of 9.1 per cent. However, it is quite a busy road, and the descent is winding, with poor visibility and high trees, so we shifted our focus around 20 kilometres to the east along the same chalk ridge of the South Downs. Firle Beacon is less famous than Ditchling and it is also steeper. This was a good thing, because steeper meant less long: Firle was 1.3 kilometres at 10 per cent, so for every metre climbed we would have to ride ever so slightly less far horizontally. Over the course of an Everesting that meant something like 215 kilometres v. 195 kilometres, which to me was pretty clear cut. In addition, Firle is not a through road. At the top there is only a car park, for walkers, and it is also very pretty. In our choice of hills, we had a winner. Other than that, my preparation consisted of borrowing a friend’s wheel with a 28-tooth cog on the cassette, to give me an easier bottom gear than I usually had. Oh, and I made a large stack of peanut butter sandwiches and bought a couple of 10-litre bottles of water. The forecast was promising a very hot day.

  All too suddenly there we were. Bikes assembled, the sun coming up. And the scale of the task was sinking in. The top of Firle is 155 metres above sea level. That’s 2,647 less than Bonette and 7,893 less than Everest. Each ascent would be only 128 metres. We had 68 to do. There wasn’t much else for it but to start.

  There was no first flush of enthusiasm, no losing one’s head and pushing into the red – we would have carried that pain all day. Almost before dawn Jimmy’s friends were with us for a couple of reps’ companionship. The sun rose, the morning passed. Gently does it. Neil, a friend from Brighton, rode up and stayed for a long time, talking us up and down. Each time I reached the top I pulled a sweaty pencil from my jersey pocket and added to the tally on a length of masking tape I had stuck on my top tube for that purpose. Each one a bar on a five-bar gate, and the five-bar gates marching down the tube towards the saddle. At a certain point they ceased to matter. We knew we had to climb all day, and then some. What mattered was keeping moving and the fact that time passed. As long as we kept on going up and down and up and down and time kept passing, I was sure
we would get to the top. Or the end, or whatever it was.

  Same view from the bottom, same from the top, connected by the same middle. But the details became endlessly fascinating: a scrap of sheep’s wool caught in barbed wire; the deep furrows of a ploughed field seen through a stile; and around us moved the sun, pushing shade across the road. Cows on their way to pasture watched from the amphitheatre of the hill. Each ascent was different, because time was a river and you can never swim in the same river twice. ‘Mountain climbing isn’t all that important to me any more,’ Rheinhold Messner once said. ‘Not the climbing part. What counts is just to keep on going and going and going.’

  It became very hot and my masking tape became soaked in sweat, blurring the pile of gates I was raggedly constructing upon it. My bib shorts started squeaking and squelching on the saddle. Another friend, Oli, rode over, and then two friends from Strava arrived, and suddenly we had a little happening. I reflected upon how little one had to do to convince men of a certain age and cast of mind to bunk off work and come and hang out on a hillside.

  At around 2 p.m. we repaired to the pub at the bottom of the hill to eat chips and drink Coke. Neil left us there, a broken man, and we were, for the first time for hours, alone. The scale of the task bore down upon us. Thirty climbs to go, which at a sustainable pace – eight minutes up, three minutes down – would take us well into the night. What else could we do but continue?

  The reps from 40 to 50 and the centimetres climbing to 5,000 and then 6,000 metres were hard won. Together alone in the heat on the unchanging hill, sweating, eating, drinking and dealing with the mental pressure of 12 hours in the saddle. To paraphrase another great Alpinist (and writer), Walter Bonatti, we were between discomfort and hope, going on, though slowly, one rep at a time towards the heights. However, in the furnace of the afternoon the difficulties and the unknowns seemed to multiply rather than diminish.

  Within the infinite loop we had created other elements began to repeat. The sun regained the horizon, the cows wandered back from pasture, Jimmy’s friends from earlier returned, to ride a while or cheer us on at the top, having all managed to fit in a full day’s work while we were there stuck on repeat. As the evening settled, in coolness, quiet and pastel-hued mists, with 10 reps to go I knew we would finish. The last few were accomplished in total blackness, and for the final one our companions left Jimmy and me to spin up on our own, chatting easily in the night. Sixty-eight reps, 13 hours, 56 minutes ride time, 8,894 metres, a ride profile like the teeth of a saw.

  We parted then at the top of the hill without much fanfare, bikes slung into cars, kit placed into plastic bags to be incinerated later. On the way home I stopped at a 24-hour services on the motorway and ate all the Big Macs. Then a deep and dreamless, a calm sea of oblivion on the other side of the imaginary peak we’d just scaled.

  It took me a few days, weeks even, for the events of that day to settle. We had succeeded but, bizarrely, it was an anticlimax. In all honesty I hadn’t countenanced the possibility of failure; correspondingly, there didn’t seem to be all that much to celebrate. We had passed the time and the itch had been scratched but I was not elated. Physically I was tired, but not severely so, and that passed too. In that sense it didn’t feel like I’d really pushed any limits, because climbing itself had never been a problem. The main difficulties had been the heat, eating properly and keeping focused – exactly the issues one might experience in any long ride. Almost immediately it seemed like a good idea to do another Everesting, to pass another day on another hill, to push a little further and see what would happen.

  This deflation and the psychological effects took longer to process. We had surrendered all speed, all form, all vanity, simply to go up, and the world seemed a little smaller as a result. Or do I mean bigger? A normal bike ride, even taking in a mountain or two, now seemed much more manageable. There had been a flattening, an opening out. We had somehow changed what was possible. Yet there was no thunderbolt moment. Haruki Murakami’s book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running explores his deep personal connection to that sport, and how it shapes the rest of his life. An accomplished marathon runner, he recounts at one point the story of his first 100-kilometre (62-mile) ultramarathon, and the feelings it left him with afterwards. It’s worth quoting:

  I don’t know what sort of general significance running sixty-two miles by yourself has, but as an action that deviates from the ordinary yet doesn’t violate basic values, you’d expect it to afford you a special sort of self-awareness. It should add a few new elements to your inventory in understanding who you are. And as a result, your view of your life, its colours and shape, should be transformed. More or less, for better or for worse, this happened to me, and I was transformed.

  With the Everesting all the right ingredients were there, but my cake didn’t rise like Murakami’s. This self-knowledge (and is it self-transformation too?) is perhaps one of the major things we seek in climbing mountains – real ones or imagined or even metaphorical ones, on bicycles or with ropes and pitons and ice axes. I had hoped that this Everesting would help me to understand something in extremis about the ‘why’ of it all, which would illuminate all those other, smaller challenges in the mountains. But no eureka moment yet. What counts is just to keep on going and going and going.

  I meet George II in a steep small town in the Dolomites. He is in Europe on a tour of the great cycling climbs but it has been an unpromising day. Today he wanted to ride Monte Crostis (a really tricky climb last programmed by the Giro d’Italia in 2012, but not actually ridden because the descent is so hairy) and the weather had been so poor he hadn’t been able to give it a crack. It is not late but the light is flat and fading and the clouds, as they do in the Dolomites, are threatening to slide in level with us at any moment, and cut us off from the sheer rock faces and luscious dark forests on the other side of the valley.

  There is only one thing for it: pizza.

  George is a compact, trim man, and very understated. If you didn’t know about his dedication to climbing, you would not suspect from his outward appearance there was anything out of the ordinary going on. However, there is something hard as granite in his eyes and he is clearly in very good shape. Though he had promised himself never to go back to Mount Donna Buang, it had not lasted. He had regained his love for that mountain, and in fact in the years since he wrote his piece had shaved around 10 minutes off what he had supposed, back in 1996, was his best time for one ascent. The personal best is now under an hour and he had, of course, Everested it when piqued by the CyclingTips comment. (By my count he has completed seven Everests, with the quickest in 10 hours, 12 minutes on what sounds like a miserably steep slope.)

  And now he was in Europe. I couldn’t help thinking of that line from his article: ‘It had taken me one step closer to the asymptote. How would I take the next step?’

  We order two pizzas from the counter of a takeaway-cum-sit-down joint in the deserted town centre and take a seat in the window, and George tells me that – at the age of 56 – he has just retired from his job as an engineer. His erstwhile profession suited his mathematical mind and his taste for numbers, data, precision. He is, it turns out, very keen on ‘benchmarking’ his cycling; that is, measuring his performance to some kind of yardstick or external standard. And cycling on the flat, because of the speeds involved and the sheer number of variables on performance, is not a good laboratory, he explains. It is the implacable force of gravity that creates good test conditions. ‘I very quickly took the view that I was interested in hill climbing because I would be able to benchmark. I would be able to obsess over my own results. You can with hill climbing,’ he tells me. Obsessing over results meant spreadsheets: ‘I [used to have] this giant spreadsheet of all the climbs I’d ever done,’ he says. ‘The spreadsheet had the distance and the elevation gain and therefore the average gradient, and then my best time on it. Then it worked out the rate of ascent.’

  It sounds like it was almost a Strava-before-S
trava, I suggest.

  ‘Well it was … The thing is it only had my own data,’ he replies. ‘In those days all you could do was benchmark against yourself. I do honestly believe that for most weekend-warrior cyclists, most of the time, the best benchmark is your prior self.’ (Thinking about the chasm between Richie Porte’s time on the Madone and mine, I’m inclined to agree.) But as George II got more data, his knowledge of his own capabilities improved, the measurements he sought became more sophisticated and targets more exacting. ‘When you spreadsheet it all out and you plot it out on a graph, you can see how your rate of ascent tends to taper off as the hills get bigger and bigger and bigger,’ he explains. ‘What you really want is to expand that envelope of rate of ascent plotted on hill height. So that led to the concept of the VAM envelope.’

  To explain: VAM stands for the Mean Ascent Vertical (but backwards, as it was originally coined in Italian by that man again, Dr Ferrari). It is the number of vertical metres climbed in an hour, and it is a measure that most Strava users are familiar with. Let’s say a nominal ‘average’ road cyclist may be able to ride a 500-metre-long hill at a VAM of 1,400. That means that if that effort were theoretically extended to last an hour, that rider would ascend 1,400 vertical metres. However, a 500-metre-long hill will only take a minute or two to ride; make that hill 10 kilometres in length and the VAM will go down to 1,000, or even less. For short bursts of high-intensity exercise the body can work anaerobically – without oxygen – but this causes lactic acid to form, which accumulates in the blood and soon causes muscle fatigue. Once lactate levels become intolerable, you have to slack off. Longer hills require aerobic work – efforts the body can sustain by delivering oxygen to the muscles – so they will be climbed slower and, as George II puts it, the rate of ascent will taper off. The interesting thing about VAM, from his point of view at least, is that on some climbs, generally the steeper ones, the rate of ascent will be better than on others (although there is always a point at which the gradient gets too much and your muscles give up). Find the hills that suit your abilities, and then train harder and better and more specifically, and you will start climbing longer slopes at a higher VAM. I think that’s what they call pushing the envelope.