Tell us about your weekend ride

Woop! Just got confirmed as the first ever person in history to 'Everest' on a fixed gear bike!!!

I wanted to start at 5am and finish by midnight, that didn't go to plan. Had 5.5 hours sleep and woke up at 6.15am. Got the to the climb and has issues doing a last minute tyre swap. Ended up hitting the start button at 7:49am.

I was doing it up Pepys Road in New Cross. It's about 6-7% average. 40m of gain in 700m of horizontal riding. 42/23 gearing. Impossible to get a smaller chainring on a 144bcd crankset and I feel like a >23t cog would have to be specially made. The gear was SMALL. On the descents I was unclipping and assuming the aero position with my feet wedged between the down tube and seat tube. It worked out nicely.

I had already 1/4 Everested the same road the same week 5 days earlier on Tuesday in 3 hours, 47 minutes. I had high hopes of getting a quick finishing time as my bike setup was going to be a lot lighter than for the 1/4. That quickly turned out not to be the case... Maybe it was just lack of sleep, too much excitement, something, but my legs weren't feeling as good as they were the days in the lead up to the attempt.

Can't recall exact timings, but I was going slower. It might have had something to do with needing a poop for the first two sets of 12 reps and the stress of not knowing where I could poop. Ended up finding a church at the top of the hill which was open. Lol! What a relief. At about 11am Laner showed up and did a couple of reps. Then I was on my own again. I was taking too long on my breaks. I had to do around about 225 reps to do Everest, and if I was breaking every 12 reps for 10-15 minutes that was going to really add up. I wasn't riding slower than training (you don't really have a choice on the fixie!), I was just breaking for too long.

The lowest point was about 1/3rd of the way in. I had a whole bunch of friends hanging out in the park. It was nice and warm. A bit of sun was poking through. Lack of sleep was starting to take effect. I just really wanted to nap and chill with my mates, not suffer for hours and hours more. The thought of the 12 rep sets was starting to weigh on me and the fact it had taken me 6-7 hours to do 1/3rd was making me realise I was going to be there late into the night which I hadn't mentally prepared for at all.

Nonetheless, I got some crisps and Coke in me - previously I had been on the Nakd and Trek bars but there comes a time where you crave the junk and on these long rides I always feel like it's about comfort over speed, but that's just me. With a few more people doing reps with me I quickly got to the half-way point and that was a huge mental swing for me. I had less left to do than I had already done. EASY.

I then kicked it up a notch after hitting 10 sets of 12 reps (120 reps in the bag) and started on sets of 15. More time moving, more well-earned breaks. Thanks again to Laner for that suggestion, it helped tremendously! It seemed way more manageable to have 7 sets of 15 left. That was around 6.5-7 hours of riding. I could be finished by 3am!!! Lucky my past experience of riding through the entire night on 24 hour rides made that prospect seem not too bad.

Then we had our first technical difficulties... The Garmin screen was off. I had been connecting it to a battery pack each break so it should't have been out of battery. It would start up then a white flash would occur then it would turn off. Wow. The Garmin had quit on me! Luckily I had had my iPhone recording on Strava in my back pocket the entire time... and it hadn't crashed or paused by mistake. I was getting fearful of the iPhone now f**king up as it was my sole proof now...

With 1/3rd of Everest to go and less than 75 reps remaining my good stupid-challenge-doer-wither pal Jack turned up to offer support. The sun was setting. It seemed pretty epic. A few people were riding with me but I got serious, put the headphones in and turned the Hatebreed up LOUD. I even managed to genuinely drop Jack on the ascent with him on a geared mountain bike.. and that guy is a strong rider! I was getting primal. I could taste victory!

A forecasted 3am finish soon became a forecasted 4am finish, a forecasted 4am finish soon became a forecasted 5am finish... I had mentally settled with the fact that it was going to take as long as it takes. I felt physically pretty good. I wasn't sleepy. I was fine with just going with the flow. Screw it, I'd even take 24 hours if I had to. I was deep and committed, no going back.

The sun started peaking through as I hit 225 reps for an Everest. I didn't want to take any chances so after a bit more of a break I smashed out 10 more. It was 5:20am and I was done! Time to upload! The iPhone had survived! Oh wow! It says 'Syncing one activity' but has been saying that for 15 minutes now! Even by the time Jack had dropped me home and I had connected to wifi the ride still hadn't uploaded. I did some Googling and very nervously quit and restart the app. Was everything lost...? After a few seconds the relief of the blue 'Ride uploaded' notification appeared. YES!

But wait...

Total elevation gain: 8820m! Everest is 8848m! No! This could not be! 0.3% of Everest, less than one measly rep... Thank you iPhone 4s and Strava! Luckily my reps were there to see and the height gain of the road can be found through other means. I took 40m as my baseline. Turns out I had only done 234 reps (pretty could mental counting if you ask me) so 234 x 40m = 9360m of total elevation gain.

I submitted my ride to the Everesting.cc guys and just got confirmation back of my ride being a successful Everest and also the first person to ever complete the entire challenge on a fixed gear bike. I'm feeling pretty chuffed! Bring on the bragging rights... but first, some spotty bananas.

I'm going to get round to making a few YouTube videos out of it but yeah, that was pretty brutal. Not as bad as riding solo from London to Newcastle in 24 hours, but definitely up there!

Total distance: 344km
Total elevation gain: 9360m
Elapsed time: 21h30m

Strava link, obviously: http://strava.com/activities/592634190

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