Matthew Fairbrother - The Everest Challenge

Matthew recently became the youngest person in the world to complete this challenge, on his mountain bike.

The Everest challenge requires participants to climb the height of Mt Everest (about 9000m) in a given time. Many people do this over a month, but Matthew completed it in one go on his mountain bike, climbing 9006m in just under 21 hours, which also included over 348km of distance travelled. He did this cycling up Sumner and Summit roads from Lyttleton.

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done both physically and emotionally. It started getting hard about eight hours in and I was wanting to give up (knowing I wasn’t even half way in), having to push through that is what made it so hard mentally. I’ve had the idea of doing this for a about two years now but never said much about. Every weekend I’d get up as early as I could and would go riding until it got dark that was my training. I never thought I was capable of it until about a week before then. I went on a big ride and something clicked and I knew I could do it.” – Matthew Fairbrother.

The numbers whilst huge only tell part of the story. He got up at midnight Saturday on a few restless hours sleep, started riding at 1:30 am Sunday from outside the Lyttleton police station in thick fog. Got questioned by the police at the top of Mt Pleasant at 4:00 am while he bravely hid behind a car! Had to change clothes early morning due to being soaked from the thick fog. Peddling all through the day only stopping briefly each lap to feed. Struggling to stay awake on the descents late Sunday night and finally finishing 3:00 am Monday morning. 

"He actually stopped riding thinking he had one lap to go, but he'd had enough. It was only when we uploaded Strava that we realised he had not counted a lap.  So yeah, bloody huge effort, so so proud of him.” – Mike Fairbrother, Matthews father.