A lot of sweat and grit | Two Mumbai runners who finished the gruesome Everesting Run Challenge share their experience

‘Fiendishly simple, yet brutally hard. Everesting is the most difficult climbing challenge in the world.’

This is how the Everesting website describes the challenge, and while one may say that such a verdict must be passed by participants and not by the organisers themselves, it is a fact that till date only 341 runners across the world have managed to complete the full Everesting Run Challenge.

In India, till last month, there were only three runners – all males – who had managed to successfully finish the gruesome challenge. But then something happened that put Everesting as an event in the limelight, especially in the Indian running community.

Two runners from Mumbai attempted Everesting and ended up creating national records in their own way – one became the fastest Indian male to finish the run while the other became the first Indian female ever to achieve the feat.

On January 9, Manish Jaiswal became the fastest Indian to finish the run in 18 hours and 58 minutes, breaking the earlier record of 32 hours and 22 minutes set in March 2019 by a wide margin. The next day, his fellow runner Mahejabin Ajmanwala become the first Indian female to enter the Everesting Hall of Fame by finishing her run in 34 hours and 39 minutes.

What is Everesting Run Challenge?

So, what exactly is the Everesting Run Challenge? It’s simple, on paper! You need to pick any road on a hill and do loops of that road to achieve an elevation of 8,848 metres, which is the height of Mt Everest. Not to forget, sleep breaks are not allowed during the run.

Manish, who is also the coach of a running group called Snails2Bolt, started preparing in October 2020. He was already a regular runner having participated in many marathons but this was a completely different challenge.

“Running a marathon and Everesting are completely different. We started going for hill runs twice every week apart from our regular runs so that our heart rate gets acclimatised to the elevation gains,” said 29-year-old Jaiswal.

He knew the national record and was determined to break it. “I had set a target of 24 hours and never imagined that I would be able to do it in under 20 hours,” he said.

Charting the smallest detail worked in his favour. “I planned everything right from the quantity of liquid and solid intake and the frequency of hydration,” Jaiswal, a software engineer by profession, pointed out.

For Mez, as Mahejabin is popularly known in the running circle, it all started in a WhatsApp chat!

“Manish pinged me asking if I am interested in a 100-km run. I was anyways upset since Ladakh Marathon got cancelled last year and was looking for a different challenge. I decided to give it a shot though I had no clue at that time that what he was referring to was Everesting. I had never even heard about Everesting,” said Mahejabin, who works as an executive in a real estate firm.

The preparations began in October and sometime in November, the duo went for an eight-hour non-stop hill run at Dongri near Gorai, which is in the suburbs of Mumbai. Since they knew they will have to run for 20-30 hours while Everesting, they even practised staying awake continuously for 24 hours on a few occasions.

After evaluating a few routes, they zeroed in on Neral-Matheran road, which is 6.7 km long with a gradient of 9.8 percent and a total elevation of around 680 metres.

They began their run in the evening on January 8 and did 14 loops of the road, running while going uphill till the endpoint and returning to the start point in a car with the volunteers. Everesting factors only the uphill elevation and hence runners can come downhill in an assisted manner.

Manish and Mahejabin, however, were quite occupied during the downhill ride that took around 15 minutes, as that was the time they got some rest while also having food and charging their Garmin watches so they last the entire run.

An uphill task

While Manish was very clinical in his approach and mostly finished each uphill run in under 70 minutes, Mahejabin took a couple of hours to cover the 6.7-km stretch and was on the verge of a breakdown after the seventh loop.

“I was not able to even walk straight since I was sleep deprived and tired. But my team supported and encouraged me and that is what kept me going. There was a point when I was so tired that the physio had to really work hard on me to make him go again,” said 37-year-old Mahejabin, who even had to do a video call with her doctor once to ensure that she is fit enough to continue.

Manish, on the other hand, hardly wasted a minute after reaching the start point after his downhill ride.

“I was clear that I wanted to break the record. So, I had my food in the car while stretching my legs as well. I used to remove my shoes and give my legs and toes as much rest as possible to prepare for the next loop,” he said.

He even accompanied Mahejabin when she was doing her last loop to enter the history books.

Interestingly, the enthusiasm of the runners and the support crew was such that even the local taxi drivers on the route clapped for the duo at the end of every loop and some even kept the count of their loops.