oMG how many repeats was that? Mine was 144 and I thought that was nuts!

Good onya, MFW. I hope you get plenty of support on the day.

Thanks for all the messages of support, especially from Zoom and weetbix, I didn't realise there were more vorbii that had done this thing, as well as the illustrious XCguy.
Any advice from you would be very welcome!
I did my test ride with two GPS devices (iPhone and borrowed garmin GPSMAP 76CSx) but I currently having trouble getting garmin connect to talk to the latter

Was there a certain 'meterage' where you guys really suffered? Many talk of the 5000-7000m doldrums and 7000m to finish being the death zone.

My issue with a 4am start is that on a 22+ hour schedule that puts me riding the death zone from 10pm - 2am. From my test ride that wasn't a nice time to be riding, but starting earlier incurs more sleep deprivation.
Keep flip flopping on this one but wondering if I could try and get an afternoon nap then start around 5-6pm, then I would hit the doldrums around first light, and have plenty of daylight / supported time in reserve for the death zone.

I guess my Everest was a little different from the norm. First, it was a 4.5% gradient which would barely classify as a climb any other day of the week (hence the huge distance to cover). When I set off in the morning I was not 100% if I would go the distance, my plan was to go halfway and see how I felt (do a Cook) - though I did take plenty of supplies (bananas, water, gels, OSM bars) just in case - also it was 500 metres from my house so it was good for resupplying.

I had a routine of eat something every 20 minutes and tried to cycle between banana, gel or a bar, calculating that if I did that I should be fine for the duration. There was some maths involved before even beginning, figuring out average speed, required repetitions, distance, overall time including stops and ride time etc. I made sure I had everything on-site in case of unexpected, so plenty of sunscreen, warm clothes, spares etc.

I started around 6:30am. Weather was favorable, hot day but calm winds. the first 6 hours went fairly quick though plenty of bladder stops until it heated up. It was not a long climb so quite repetitive (ha!) but not too taxing, heart rate never got above 160, it was more a test of endurance.

The afternoon was hot and hard work but by that time some people on the street had begun to wonder what this idiot was doing going up and down their street all day so I did have a couple of chat stops, and some good support which made it a bit easier, though I opted to do the ride solo without bike support.

from about 6pm I'd already been going 12 hrs and the hours were now starting to take longer and longer to tick over, I spent more time looking at the clock than I should have been. 6-9pm felt to me like the longest.

Once the sun went down it was actually quite nice for a couple of hours, still warm and pleasant and was still feeling okay, but it was still ticking over so slowly and I was completely sick of the routine but there was no way I was going to stop

at 11pm things got a little weird. Sleep deprivation and exhaustion hit me like a wave. I just felt really bad and had to stop for 30 minutes on the side of the road and try and wake myself up somehow. It also caused me to make a stupid mistake on my garmin, I had paused it and when I started again instead of hitting start button I just mashed the screen and had hit the save button so the bloody thing saved prematurely. I was not sure of my elevation, and again another stupid mistake I just decided to hit start and carry on blindly in the hope I could add both rides up later on. In retrospect if I had just gone and viewed the ride history before starting again I could have found my elevation but by that stage I was mentally fucked.

so I carried on having no clue how far I had to go. Now I was trying desperately to remember what the garmin said, and I spent about 2 hours agonising over it, because if I stopped and it was too short I'd never live it down! So i just kept going, and going and going.... until 3am when the garmin was down to 3% and I had to stop - because if I ran out of battery saving that ride that would be even worse! By that stage I was a zombie so plodded home and collapsed - I actually felt drunk, everything was spinning, weird what the body does!

Next morning I checked both rides - total over 10k, I had completely over-cooked it and could have stopped hours before I did, but hey 10k and 400km ride as a result so I'll take it lol. I don't think I'd ever actually aim for a 10k ride, if I had of seen my garmin hit 8848 I would have stopped for sure

Edit - couple of other things. I did use music for the second half otherwise I think I would have gone crazy, but it was a dead end road and very quiet so was safe to do so. I also setup my garmin with 2 pages. The first was just a clock, that's all. The second was a few stats, namely elevation and distance and overall time. 99% of the time my garmin was on the clock. I thought if I had it on elevation it would drive me crazy, so I just left it on a clock and ignored it. I would only check elevation every 4-5 hours just to make sure it was still going up I also think this saved me a lot of battery life, I had read up beforehand on ways to extend the garmins battery. i didn't use ANT devices, no heart rate monitor, no complex screens, dimmed the backlight, and adjusted the interval collection time. I had also read that using regular GPS satellites as opposed to GLONASS can increase battery life by a few hours so I used that - there is no real difference in terms of data capture as far as I could find, GLONASS works in additional to regular GPS and helps decrease fix times and improve accuracy, but regular GPS is pretty good on its own.

It's a memorable day and one you'll never forget, you'll remember it vividly (and as being not as draining in retrospect) go for it! Don't even think about the elevation, just treat it as riding your bike for X hrs, and after that you'll have an Everest

That's a superb, inspirational, and motivational story, thanks weetbicks
10k, thats epic+

Zoom wrote:You will also need people to feed you, if you don't you will waste a heap of time not moving, and believe me this adds up.

This shouldn't be an issue if you have everything made up, laid out etc. On my second Everest I was entirely self supported and had a total non-riding time of 16 minutes. Every hour or so I'd stop at the car, throw my empty bottle and wrappers in a bin, open the chillibin and grab a new bottle and a couple of items of food, wipe my face with a wet flannel, take a photo of my GPS (backup in case it died) and then was off again. All up, only 60-90 seconds for the stop. But I was going for a fast time so if you don't care about how long you're out there then stopping time doesn't matter so much.

Go MFW

It's all on for a 5pm start on Thursday, just letting cyclone Pam get out of the way and stuff, so estimated finishing time around 3pm Friday.
Fingers crossed I'll be able to put the first red spot on the top of the south http://www.everesting.cc/hall-of-fame/

Will try and get mfw_wife to do some bloggage on facebook, I guess I can set the permissions to 'public' for all to see.

Oh, and here's a Shameless Girl Guides / Brownies fundraising plug

Good luck MFW. I can't imagine riding my bike on the flat for the best part of 22 hours let alone climbing the height of Everest.

First Everest done in Dunnos at the weekend! Up Rollinsons Road to Swampy Summit 20 times!

Well done Matty!

good luck MFW! Are you on Instagram so we can follow along with pics if possible? Also can you post a link to your FB if you are going to do updates there? Want to offer as much support as possible.

Well done Matty! Go South Island NZ!

I just made my FB account public, hopefully you can see updates here now:
https://www.facebook.com/martin.nichols1

he's underway !

weetbicks wrote:he's underway !

He is now on lap 21 of 130 after 2.5 hrs

Pit stop. 26 laps down