Lachlan Morton breaks Everesting record (for real this time)
EF Pro Cycling’s Lachlan Morton has unofficially broken the Everesting record, setting a time of roughly 7 hours and 30 minutes less than a week after his previous attempt was nullified due to bad elevation data.
An official time has not yet been confirmed. We’ll update this story when we get it.
Morton made his second attempt on the same climb as his first attempt, the backside of Rist Canyon outside Fort Collins, CO, but used a slightly different Strava segment. According to his Strava file, he completed the required climbing roughly ten minutes faster than the previous record, held by Keegan Swenson at 7 hours, 40 minutes and 5 seconds.
Morton’s previous attempt, last weekend, had to be scraped from the record books after it was determined that the elevation gain provided by Strava was not accurate. CyclingTips independently verified that Morton was 2.3 laps short of 8,848 meters, which, even if he’d reached the elevation target, would have put him behind Swenson’s record.
Ahead of Morton’s second attempt, the group behind Everesting, Hells 500, verified the new segment using highly accurate LiDAR data and expertise from the co-founder of OpenTopography, Chris Crosby. Strava marks the segment as gaining 189m, but the data show it actually gains 190m per lap, which means Morton needed 46.57 laps to hit the height of Everest. According to our own analysis of Morton’s ride, that should put his official time between 7:29:30 and 7:32:00.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, after his first attempt was removed, Morton rode an extra lap just to be absolutely sure he hit the 8,848m mark.
Check back for more.
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