Hawaii’s Mauna Kea — the toughest climb in the world? Really?
I think it was in 2014 I read an article on Cycling Tips by some mad Norwegian dude. He had flown to Hawaii for the weekend solely to attempt the ride up a mountain called Mauna Kea. I remember being in awe of just how tough it sounded. And there was something about this crazy Norwegian and the excellent piece he wrote that made me wonder if I could do it. Around about the same time, perhaps because of the onset of reaching my 40s, I started keeping a bucket list of the things I need to do before I die. I wasn’t really sure what to put on this list so I think “Ride up Mauna Kea” was probably one of the first ones on there. (Others like “stand on the moon” remain a little more elusive for now…)
So it’s the toughest climb in the world? It surely can’t be that bad? In summary you ride from sea level in Hilo on Hawaii’s big island to the summit of Mauna Kea 68km up the road. The elevation at the summit is 4,200m (13,800 ft) for an average gradient of 6.2%. There are exactly zero downhill sections. Towards the summit there is a 9km soft gravel section which averages 11%. This is followed by a final 5km pitch to the summit, also at over 10% average. These last two sections are done with many hours already in your legs and, because of the altitude, just 60% of the oxygen available at sea level. Yeah, OK, that does sound quite tough.
My journey to this bucket list item does have a bit of a twist to it. For those of you that remember (and in fact teased me mercilessly about it), I took up speed skating in 2016. Yes, you can call it roller skating if you like. Turns out that despite my ambitions to become world champion in this sport-of-the-future I wasn’t great at it, and six weeks after I started I shattered my left wrist in a (low-)speed skating crash. This was just 5 weeks out from my attempt to ride up Mauna Kea. I remember trying to convince my surgeon on the day before the surgery that I should still be good to do it in a cast or just one-armed or something. He thankfully told me that I was really stupid, that it was going to take several months to get full strength back into it and about the worst thing I could do for it was to ride a bike. In hindsight, thank God I broke my wrist because knowing what I know now, I was nowhere near fit or prepared enough last year and I’m not sure I’d have finished it.
Every year in late November my then-employer Amazon Web Services has a big customer summit in Las Vegas which I normally attend. Hawaii is on the way to Vegas from my Sydney home, so that seemed like good enough logic to lock a November date in. So it was pretty much in January 2017 that I started making plans to do this. I even managed to convince a colleague of mine Adam Beavis to join me on this odyssey. I still reckon that the 6 beers we had when we agreed to do it might have had something to do with the decision!
How do you prepare for something like this? It’s not like there are ridable 4,000m+ mountains in our back-yard to train on. So we settled on “ride a lot”, especially in the 2–3 months before the event. I upped my kms, and threw in some long rides. I think I did 4 or 5 rides over 160km in those last few months. This culminated in us entering the Tasmania 3 peaks challenge in early November ‘17, which also has a reputation for being super tough (235km, 4,500m of vertical). I had a blinder that day and pulled out a pretty decent result, finishing in 8hrs29min — 5th place out of 300+ starters. This gave me a lot of confidence going into Hawaii. How hard could this be I thought? I’ve just finished the 3 peaks, felt great during it and whilst it was hard, it wasn’t crazy hard.
I have a minor heart issue lingering around too — I can get atrial fibrillation when push it too hard — one of the main reasons I gave up racing a few years ago. This happened a few times in the final couple of months before the ride. It’s not too serious an issue, but it does mean I have to stop what I’m doing and relax to let it settle down. Which is ok, but not when you are halfway up a Hawaiian volcano. I asked one of my cycling buddies with the same issue how he deals with it. “No booze and no coffee definitely helps” he said. “Oh, shit” I thought. Those of you know that know me know that I like a drink or two and love my coffee. I was probably drinking 2–4 cups a day at the time. So two months out I cut both booze and caffeine out of my life. I’m not sure if it was this move or just being super fit again, but my resting heart rate plummeted and I was able to put out pretty good power on the bike with no issues. In summary, I probably could not have been much better prepared physically. Actually that’s not true, being 20 years younger would definitely have helped.
In parallel to this Adam and I started doing some research on the climb. We read blog posts, watched a ton of YouTube videos, read Strava reports from others who had done it. (FYI Cyclist magazine has an article on Mauna Kea in their December 2017 edition.) Then about a month before we left the “Trainer Road” podcast did a full 30 min episode on the ride. What struck us was the gearing these guys had on their bike — 26:42. (Compare that to the “standard” road bike compact crank ratio of 34:28 and you’ll understand why we started panicking a little. “What climb can be so bad that you need a gear like that on?” we thought. I settled on a 26:32 as a still-stupidly-easy-sounding compromise. We also discovered that a chunk of the gravel section is basically unridable, so getting hold of mountain bike shoes and pedals for the inevitable walking was going to be essential too. Finally I fitted 28mm tyres hoping that might have made the gravel a little easier (plot spoiler — it didn’t really). I owe a huge thanks to Frank Conceicao and Stew “Computa” Campbell for helping me get my bike and equipment ready.
We had everything booked, and had even convinced another of our colleagues Matt Allen to join us and drive our support car. “Come for an awesome holiday in Hawaii” I think was how we sold it. The truth was more like “drive incredibly slowly up a hill all day behind two middle-aged madmen”. The plan was to fly in Wednesday, have Thursday to get ready, ride Friday, keep Saturday as our spare day (or just to relax) and fly to Vegas on Sunday. Adam and I arrived on Wednesday fine, but then heard from Matt who was arriving later that his Melbourne-Sydney flight was grounded because of storms, so he missed his connecting flight to Hawaii. That screwed our plans to ride Friday, so we had to use our spare day. The other factor we were pretty worried about was the weather. Seven days before our ride the summit was closed with 150km/hr winds and a temperature of minus 3. The long range forecast looked good though and in the end we really could not have had a better weather day for our ride.
The weather patterns on Hawaii and around Hilo and the mountain are really weird. It pretty much rains every day in Hilo, but there is an “inversion” layer that means the rain and clouds remain below about 2,000m and the summit is almost always clear. That’s why there are 13 huge telescopes on top of the mountain. So the first half of the ride you can almost guarantee getting soaked. And the last half you will get amazing views above the cloud line.
Anyway enough preamble — to the ride day. We wanted to get it over with so decided to leave around 5am. So the first couple of hours riding out of Hilo were in the pitch dark. It was actually pretty spooky with noisy chickens and howling dogs that sounded like wolves as we rode past. We also decided to ride at our own pace, so I ended up on my own further up the road from Adam, making it even eerier. As predicted this first section, which is on the main highway between Hilo and Kona over the middle of the island, was wet and pretty cold. It was 45kms or so from the start to the turn off to the mountain road. I took about 2hrs 50m to this point. The altitude here is over 2,000m. On its own that climb to the turn-off is ranked in the top 30-hardest road climbs in the world. Then it gets worse. A lot worse.
The full ride essentially can be broken into four sections. This first one is this long 45km highway section from Hilo to the summit road turn off. Then there is a 8km steep section to the visitor station. Then the murderous gravel section. Then the last climb to the summit. Part of what makes this ride so hard is that each one of these sections is really tough but they just get progressively tougher which not only screws with your body but with your head too. I had moments on the last section where I was just delirious and convinced that I just could simply not turn the cranks any more. If I had to rank these sections according to the just-invented-Gardiner-toughness scale out of 10, section one is a solid 7, section two is an 8, the gravel section a 9 and the last top section is a definite 11.
The first 45 km on the highway to the turn-off was uncomfortable, but not too bad. It was just wet and cold and uphill. The next hour to the visitor centre at 2,800m altitude had some crazy steep sections, but was actually tolerable — my legs were still functioning ok and there was a bit of oxygen. The gravel section was brutal — just horrific. It was loose basalt-sand, steep, rutted and just impossible to get into any kind of rhythm. The loose parts would pretty much “grab” your wheels causing either the front wheel to sink and get twisted sideways or for the rear wheel to skid. I managed to ride through most of — I maybe walked 1.5km in total. But the entire section was really challenging on both the legs and mind. By the end of the gravel I’d gone up another 1,000m vertical from the visitor centre (to 3,800m) and I was 6 hours into the ride. A factor that I hadn’t really considered was the lack of any rest whatsoever. On a normal ride you actually get quite a chunk of time free-wheeling or drafting someone else, or going downhill. At no point on this ride was I able to get any kind of rest, unless I actually stopped. In short I was utterly fucked at this point and couldn’t really breathe properly.
From the end of the gravel it’s about 5km to the summit. Alarmingly you can see the summit and just how steep the road is that takes you there is. I reached for the emergency Coke and filled one of my bottles with it, hoping this would be the magic elixir I needed. It helped but not as much as I hoped. That last 5km took me almost an hour. It took every part of my physical and mental toughness just to keep the cranks turning on these last steep sections. It was beyond description nasty. If you really want the blow-by-blow recap of the ride I’ll do this over a beer sometime.
On Strava only 81 people have ever completed this ride from Hilo. It took me 6hrs 50mins putting me 21st overall. My heart rate averaged 144 for the whole ride for an “epic” suffer score of 250.
The upshot from this? I’m really happy that I managed to do this. It’s a big tick on the hard/stupid things you can do list. My preparation and planning was about as good I could have done, but even then this was a hugely challenging endeavor. What’s next? To be honest I don’t know. Perhaps I could be the first person to ride a bike on the moon?
