Tony and Patrick reach another Everest Challenge milestone
To help motivate himself and others to get out and exercise every day, our colleague Dr Tony Smith (senior lecturer in leadership and organisational development) has devised a unique challenge: climb the height of Everest . . . but in the surrounds of your local area!
Alongside his climbing partner, Dr Patrick Marshall, Tony is raising money for both the UNICEF fund to support a global vaccination campaign, and a local food bank. You can sponsor Tony and Patrick here.
Interested in taking up the challenge yourself? Here’s how you do it . . .
The Everest Challenge
The challenge is to climb the height of Everest. It doesn’t matter about distance, and you can walk or run. The journey starts from Lukla (2860m) to Everest Base Camp (5,364m). Then begins the final ascent of Everest – over 3500 metres of the world’s most dangerous terrain!
At 7925m you arrive at Camp 3, which is officially in the dead zone. To make the challenge a bit more urgent from here, you have to reach the summit and descend into the safe zone in no more than 4 days (before the brain shuts down and you die).
Once the summit has been reached, there are two bonus challenges. The climb from Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal to Lukla. And then, if you still have not had enough, the climb from Kolkata at sea level, in the Bay of Bengal, to Kathmandu.
Joining the challenge
If you would like to join in the challenge, please email Tony at t.smith@shu.ac.uk and he will set you up on GoFundMe as part of the Everest Challenge team. We suggest you also set up your own GoFundMe Me account if you are raising money, which can then be linked to the Everest Challenge event page.
Participants also need to download Strava or another exercise phone app that records the elevation/ascent covered in walks/runs (NB distance is unimportant for this challenge just the cumulative altitude gained). It is possible to do the challenge without an app. If you plan to do the same walk all the time and can work out the altitude, you will ascend each time you do the walk. With Strava you can record any walk you do.
| Challenge Milestones | Altitude | Ascent |
| Lukla (start) | 2860 | 0 |
| Namche Bazaar | 3440 | 480 |
| Tengboche | 3867 | 1007 |
| Pheriche | 4243 | 1383 |
| Lobuche | 4930 | 2070 |
| Gorakshep | 5140 | 2280 |
| Everest Base Camp | 5364 | 2504 |
| Camp 1 | 6065 | 3205 |
| (Advanced Base) Camp 2 | 6492 | 3632 |
| Camp 3 (start of dead zone) | 7925 | 5065 |
| Balcony | 8412 | 5552 |
| Hillary Step | 8760 | 5900 |
| Everest Summit | 8849 | 5989 |
| (Bonus challenge) | ||
| Kolkata- Kathmandu | 0 | 1400m |
| Kathmandu – Lukla | 1400 | 2860m |
Recording your ascent
Record your ascent in the spreadsheet here:
Everest challenge – Ascent Totals.xlsx
Suggested Sponsorship
Sponsorship is flexible, but three ways you could sponsor/get sponsored:
Per milestone (e.g. £2 x 13 = £26)
Per metre ascended (e.g. 1p/metre x 5989 = £59.89)
Fixed figure (e.g. £75 pledged to reach the Everest summit)
Editing your milestone photos (Just for fun)
We also encourage that you publish photos of yourself superimposed on a photo of each milestone (location).
- Do a Google search for a background photo of the milestone and download, or use one of the photos already downloaded in the Everest Challenge shared folder (folder requires staff access)
- Remove the background from your selfie photo on https://www.remove.bg/upload and redownload the background-less selfie
- Place your selfie into the background using the online photo editor at https://ipiccy.com/ and redownload the finished photo
