Five years on, Ronan ponders what it would take to beat his own fastest time and whether he can be successful in convincing Tadej Pogačar to take on the challenge.
Ronan Mc Laughlin
Five years ago, our very own Ronan Mc Laughlin set the Everesting world record, a record that still stands to this day.
He rode 78 laps of his local Mamore Gap climb in Ireland. It’s 810 metres long with an average gradient of 14.2%, which meant his total ride distance covered 125.96 km to reach the necessary altitude of 8,848 metres in 6 hours 40 minutes and 54 seconds. He beat American Sean Gardner’s record by nearly 20 minutes, who in turn had taken the record off Ronan after his initial attempt in July 2020.
Why I spent 18 months planning a 400km, 10,000m ride (and threw the plan away)
Optimising and off-the-cuff combined for a remarkable Everesting challenge.
To mark the occasion, we’ve got Ronan along to share his memories of the day, and to answer some pointed questions after an intriguing Instagram post hinted he may be getting ready for another attempt.
Jonny Long: Ronan, it’s five years on, almost to the day I believe, from your successful Everesting world record attempt, which still stands. Firstly, what are your memories looking back now on that day?
Ronan Mc Laughlin: First of all, I think the professionals who are much more talented and faster than me have moved back on to real racing. So I timed my record absolutely perfectly in terms of getting in there [as] last person to put a time on the board and then everybody else had already moved on, the world opened up and everyone went back to racing. That’s an important thing to mention first of all. Memories-wise, I’ve done three of these things and each one only feels like three or four laps (despite being 60 or 70) because it all blurs into one. I just have a memory of it being a pretty nice day. The most recent one was a spring day, decent weather conditions and just horrible pain for seven hours. Prolonged agony.
JL: It was your second successful record attempt which beat Alberto Contador’s time, after you first broke the record in July 2020. You had planned to do another Everesting in the autumn of that year but were delayed by COVID-19 lockdown, which meant American Sean Gardner got a chance to break the record, did that provide extra motivation or were you already hell bent on logging a faster record by that point?
RM: I’d done seven hours and four minutes in July 2020 and very shortly after that having conversations with various people – Josh Poertner from Silca for example – people who can work these things out were saying I could have gone faster and being that close to seven hours I could be the first person under seven hours. So that became the target for that summer. Long story short that didn’t happen and Sean Gardner became the first person under seven hours. I had to wait a whole Irish winter thinking, “I wanted to do that but he’s beaten me to it so now I have to go even faster.” That was possible as I had a three-month training block and went 19 minutes faster than him. It was easier to build up to that rather than tacking it on to a racing season.
The Mamore Gap climb Ronan set his record on, and which has since attracted other record attempts.
JL: Looking at the seven fastest times for men, you can see how much of it was a lockdown thing, do you think ultimately the fact that real life has returned and people now have other options for entertainment which is why your already fast time has stood?
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