Here he is, on a unicycle, at 2 a.m., 21 hours into an odyssey even his mother never believed would happen. He starts up the paved road of Observatory Hill. What hurts? Everything hurts. The leg muscles, pedaling upward for the 128th and final time. The knees, stabilizing the single wheel.
Second-year College student Mason Allen is minutes away from completing his task of gaining 29,029 feet of elevation in a discipline known as “everesting.” He is minutes away from a world record.
Four friends on mountain bikes who have joined this final lap fan out around him, and a fifth person, some random student from a neighboring dorm, labors up on foot. At the tip of this phalanx comes Allen, coated with a mixture of stale and fresh sweat, his diet of Clif bars and cheap Halloween candy bucking at his insides.
“It was a sight to see,” Peyton Hurt, one of the bikers in the group, said.
It was also a slapdash effort, from conception to execution.
The process started earlier this fall, when Allen, a Crozet native, decided he wanted to break the unicycle everesting world record. It ended in the wee hours of Nov. 3, after 128 laps up and down the road that starts by Slaughter Recreation Center and travels up to the McCormick Observatory. He finished, officially, in 21 hours, nine minutes and four seconds, shattering the previous world record of 23 hours, three minutes and 17 seconds.
It all sounded “like a joke” at first, completely ludicrous. But Allen figured he might as well. It looked cool, after all, and the idea had wandered around his brain for a while. So he decided he would do it, attempt this thing that even seasoned endurance bikers scoffed at.
The rules of an everest, as the official website says, are “fiendishly simple.” Ride up and down a hill until you reach an elevation gain — five-and-a-half miles — equal to that of Mount Everest. The feat is most popular in the bicycling world but also includes running, skiing and stair-climbing.
Only one person — Ben Soja, the best unicycler on the planet — had ever done it on a unicycle. That hardly deterred Allen, a lifelong endurance biker who spent his childhood following his father on what Hurt describes as “these grueling, horrible, long rides.”
The stories from friends are endless. There was the time Allen decided, in the middle of a 60-mile bike ride, to attempt the fastest ascent of a particular segment of mountain — and got it. There was the time he continued, after a social ride with U.Va. Club Cycling, to “putz around town for three hours,” in the words of fourth-year College student Luke Flaxman, the club’s president. There are all the “silly endurance rides” he has done with Flaxman.
“I always say his brain works pretty differently from most peoples,” Laura Allen, Mason’s mother, said.
This story topped them all.
The idea of a bicycle everest had knocked around Allen’s mind for years. He started considering a unicycle version over the summer, after reading about Soja. Allen thought it sounded cool. He also noticed that Soja, who finished in 23 hours, stopped for seven hours during his attempt.
“I was like, ‘That’s a lot of ground,’” Allen said. “I think, if I just stop less, I can take it.”
He floated the idea first to his mountain biking friends. Nobody seemed surprised that he would entertain the idea. But they never really believed it, greeting the thought with a laugh, wondering why.
Flaxman, on the other hand, knew, the moment the words left Allen’s lips, that it was happening. It was just a question of when and where. The concept solidified in Allen’s mind as the fall semester progressed, until he decided for real and started telling people it would happen.
Allen performed about seven training rides in the weeks leading up to the Nov. 2 attempt. Before that, he had last mounted a one-wheeled bike in February.
The schedule, though, remained vague. An interested Hurt, out for a ride with Allen Oct. 31 — a Thursday — asked when the attempt would take place.
“He said, ‘Saturday,’” Hurt said, pausing. “And I was like, ‘What, two days from now, Saturday?’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah.’”
Allen chose a brutal place to do it. An ideal mountain for a cycling everest allows for laps of 30-40 minutes on a consistent slope of 11-12 percent incline. O-Hill is far from that — the laps last roughly four-and-a-half minutes, with grades that fluctuate from close to 0 percent to close to 20 percent. The hill’s two “unproductive” flat portions are the most difficult, wasting time and effort without adding to the elevation gain.
But Allen committed to O-Hill a couple weeks before the attempt. It was close, and it was convenient. He could just roll out of bed and go there from his nearby apartment. Turns out that’s exactly what he did.
He mapped out almost nothing for the momentous day. He had no scheduled start time, no reserve brake pads, no headlamp. His most thoughtful piece of preparation consisted of eating a bunch of pasta the day before. He went to sleep after midnight and, struggling to sleep, woke up a few hours later and started getting ready. He began in the darkness around 5:10 a.m., alone, holding his phone flashlight to see where he was going.
His parents, even that morning, hardly viewed the attempt seriously. It took them until the middle of the day to realize it was happening.
“We’re like, ‘Yeah, I guess we’ll go over and say hello,’” Laura Allen said. “We didn’t think he’d make it that long. Just cause he’d get bored.”
The rules of everesting are unforgiving. No sleeping. No partial laps. Just up and down the same stretch of asphalt with maybe a few short breaks, a monotonous mental slog. Allen’s whole life of biking had conditioned him to deal with that. He planned to erase the emotion, the thoughts about what was to come, and just take it “one lap at a time.” But it was still a slog.
“No matter how fit you are,” Hurt said about endurance rides of this magnitude, “you are going to get to that point, that [mental] low point — and stay there.”
The first few hours, as light replaced the darkness and people stirred in the abutting dorms, sailed past with relative ease. Allen moved consistently for the first 11 hours, stopping for only 45 minutes. He reached the halfway point two hours ahead of the world-record pace.
People rotated in and out during those early hours, mostly just his parents and a couple of friends. Local biker friends joined him, cycling up the hill for a lap or two. Allen ate basically the entire time, as he rode or during short breaks. By the end, he consumed somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 calories.
“That’s the entire trick with ultra-endurance events,” Allen said. “It’s just an eating competition. It’s just how much food can your stomach handle while doing a bunch of physical activity.”
At around 10 a.m. he dispatched his mother to buy new brake pads. It was going fine. But by 6:30 p.m., Allen, a couple hours past the halfway mark, received a call from Hurt.
“I’m 19,000 feet in,” Allen told his friend. “And mentally dead.”
And so the grueling monotony continued. Allen lost count of the number of laps somewhere in the 90s, reverting to tracking elevation on his devices.
In the last nine or 10 hours, his legs “kind of blew up.” At one point, Allen sent out an SOS to the club cycling group chat. He needed ice to numb his ankles and knees. So Flaxman drove to 7 Day Junior and returned with a bag of ice, which Allen used between laps. Flaxman also supplied the club cycling headlamps.
By nightfall, Flaxman and Hurt were both texting people, trying to marshal support, trying to push Allen through the mental warfare. About 20 or so people hovered around the hill from 8 p.m. until the 2 a.m. conclusion, from club cycling teammates to adult bikers to local high schoolers. He would not have finished without them.
“I think it made all the difference,” Laura Allen said.
They hung around for the last couple hours, stationed along the hill, raising his spirits to try and wring out those final ounces of effort. He finally reached the last lap with that impromptu formation of riders, exhausted and beaten, clawing doggedly up the mountain.
Allen and the group reached the top. He dismounted, moving slowly, clothes wet and sweaty, towards the camping chair awaiting him. He melted into it, a man overlooking his kingdom.
It took a little while for the emotion to puncture the wall of fatigue. Exhaustion had filled every recess of Allen’s mind for hours, and only the next morning — after getting shuttled back to his apartment and collapsing into bed — did the magnitude of his accomplishment really sink in.
In interviews a week later with Allen and the people around him, one thing became clear — he never did it for the glory. He found it anyway. Users of the exercise app Strava, scrolling their feeds the next morning, must have stopped in disbelief.
“It looks like a joke,” Hurt said. “No unicycle ride could be that big on such a small hill. It looks like it’s edited or photoshopped. And, sure enough, it isn’t.”
How did he do it? Hurt referenced Allen’s “extreme mental ability to keep on going.” Laura Allen pointed to years of physical and mental conditioning. Flaxman just shrugs and says Allen’s been preparing for this all his life.
“I’m competitive,” Allen said. “I thought I could get it. I don’t have any world records. It seems like it’d be pretty cool to have one.”
Allen has no real plans to take his biking professional. He wants to qualify for a world cup, at least. But mostly he wants to take his recreational biking as far as possible, go to graduate school and get a PhD in Economics. That just makes it all even more ludicrous.
“A lot of people are very amused that there's just this random kid from Virginia who has no unicycling pedigree who just went and took the record,” Flaxman said.
Other professional unicyclists have started strategizing, Allen has heard, to break the record. They will likely succeed, given the rushed nature of Allen’s attempt, the inferiority of his equipment, the poor terrain and his existence as a less-than-professional unicyclist.
Allen just wants to hold the record for a little while. Maybe a year. That would be nice.
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