Navan man's bid to become the first person to complete gruelling 'double-double Everest challenge

Despite suffering a potentially career-ending injury in January, Navan man Graham Macken will attempt to become the first person in the world to complete a "double-double Everest" when he does a double Everest Run on Mount Brandon in Dingle, Co. Kerry tomorrow (Thursday).

"A Double Everest is where you run or cycle up and down a hill enough times until you reach 8,848m the height of Mount Everest twice", explains Graham. But only the going up counts."

Having already cycled a double Everest on Tara Hill last year, which meant 250 repetitions of the hill and a total distance of 716km over 43 hours, Graham hopes to become the first person in the world to both run and cycle the distance.

"People have either run or cycled a double Everest, but I'm hoping to become the first person to do both. It will involve climbing Mount Brandon, which is 953 metres high, 22 times. It’s a total distance of 165km, which should take around 40 hours. I'm not worried about the distance, but climbing could be tricky. The surface is very dodgy with jagged rocks, and the weather can be brutal, especially as you go up higher. I did a few reps as a test run and rolled my ankle on each one, but luckily I've got two ankles..."

Graham counts himself lucky to participate in the run after seriously injuring his knee when he was attempting to run Ireland's Way in January, an injury could have proven fatal in dangerous running conditions.

"I was trying to set a new record of 10 days on Ireland's Way”, he said. It’s a 1,038km route consisting of half roads and half mountain trails and bogs starting in Ballycastle in Antrim and finishing in Castletownbere in Cork.”

However, the weather conditions deteriorated unexpectedly, which made running extremely dangerous, as Graham explains.

“I was running through the Sperrin Mountains on the first night of the run and as I climbed higher, the weather rapidly deteriorated. It was the worst weather I had ever run in. It was minus eight degrees, so there was snow, freezing fog, and howling winds from a wind farm which was nearby, it was so cold, the sweat on my leggings turned to ice crystals.”

“I lost the path, and my GPS equipment failed and my battery died, so I lost touch with my crewman Andy Reilly who was supporting me.

There was a portacabin for people working on the wind farm, and I considered smashing it to get shelter. I could have sat down and waited for daylight to come, which would have been at least seven hours away, but I was hypothermic and so cold there was a realistic chance that I wasn't going to wake up; people have died in those conditions.”

With little other option left, Graham decided to make a break for it and hope he made it to safety. "I just ran like the clappers and hoped for the best. As I ran down, I began to come across boggy, marshy ground. I fell into three bog holes in about 30 seconds, and after the last one, my knee just exploded underneath me. I didn't feel it much at the time, but I'm a physio, so I knew something was wrong."

It turned out the fall had caused significant damage to his knee. "I didn't realise it at the time, but when I fell into the hole on the first night, I tore my ACL, had two cartilage tears, a hamstring tear, did a patella tendinopathy and there was a cyst on my femur."

Graham eventually made it to safety after being rescued by his crew member Andy, but he had to pull out of the run due to his injuries.

"Andy was able to follow me on the GPS and picked me up after I eventually got to lower ground. The next day I was able to run 90km, but after a while, the pain was excruciating. I could barely cross the road. I knew I’d never finish it on time so I had to drop out. There was still 800km left, if it was closer to the end I might hobble through but it was too far.”

Not one to stand still, Graham has no intentions of resting on his laurels after his double Everest run.

“I’m moving my business, Spun Cycles and Spun Run Megastore from Trim to Johnstown in July and I'm also hoping to run the Ireland’s Way Course again in August to raise money for Nahyan, a young Navan boy who is battling cancer, but I'll see how the Double Everest goes.”