Back in June, a group of 7 riders set out to ascend the height equivalent to Everest on mountain bikes at The Golfie in the Tweed Valley in 24 hours. It was never going to be an easy challenge, 48 laps of the climb and descending the famous Flat White trail (it isn’t very flat).
Each lap was around 3.5km and had 190m of climbing meaning the lap solely consisted of up or down and in total equated to over 9000m of ascent and 165km.
The event was organised and ran by a group of Borders College students, as part of their HND course, and a couple of them even took part in completing the Everest Challenge.
The Tweed Valley is known for its world-class network of mountain bike trails and walker’s paths, it is the perfect destination for outdoor enthusiasts. As mountain bikers, we know how dangerous situations can occur quickly when out in the hills, so knowing we have the Tweed Valley Mountain Rescue to help us when something goes wrong makes our everyday environments far safer.
Therefore, we chose to donate the money in which we raised to the Tweed Valley Mountain Rescue. Our initial target was £500, and we thought we were being ambitious at that…
Back to the challenge, the boys started off very strong by doing each lap in around 23 minutes, they completed 5 laps at a time then would have a 10-15 minute break to refuel. They were all still going very well as the night drew in, they received some extra support from their coaches and friends which was a good morale boost!
After 11 and a half hours of pedalling, they were halfway there. Once it reached about 1 in the morning the morale had dropped and the riders were definitely feeling the effects from the lack of sleep, and as it was dark, they were having to concentrate far harder on the descent, the night was hard, really hard.
However, once the sun started to rise so did the moods of the riders, by 7 am they only had 10 laps to go! Each rider had their ups and downs and without the support from each other and all the people that came along to do a lap with them, it would have been a lot harder, when the fellow BASE students came along at around 10am the boys were deep in the pain cave, but they lined the track to cheer the boys on as they rolled through.
Finally, after 24 hours of riding they had completed it!
Words will never describe how hard Josh Noble from Peebles, Jayden Randell from Peebles, Lewis Brown from Innerleithen, Ben Jackson from Innerleithen, Wes Fife from Innerleithen, Johnny Bouch from Peebles and Shay Hayton from Innerleithen, had to try to complete this challenge. It is such an incredible and inspiring performance from each of them, and one they will never forget!
In the end, we managed to raise over £2200 for Tweed Valley Mountain Rescue, and we could not thank everyone enough for donating and supporting us!
Many Thanks
The Team behind the Tweed Valley Everest Challenge