An Australian climber is taking two months to scale Mount Everest. It could still be a speed record

Oliver Foran was 16 when his mother died of brain cancer. Too young to process the grief, he says he internalised everything and for eight years did not shed a tear.

“I didn’t really deal with it... I didn’t cry… I didn’t show any emotion about it,” he tells The Independent. On the outside, everything was fine. He launched a business in real estate and his life had structure and direction. “But I felt empty inside,” he recalls. Finally, he decided to do something about it.

Foran is speaking to The Independent from a cafe located at an altitude of around 3,450m in Namche Bazaar in Nepal, halfway through a monumental challenge to break the sea-to-summit speed record for climbing Mount Everest. In order to achieve a Guinness World Record, he must complete the feat without motorised transport – cycling over 1,000km through India from the seaside town of Digha on the Bay of Bengal, and then trekking to Everest’s 8,848.86m summit.

The previous record was set by South Korean national Kim Chang-ho, who completed the challenge in 67 days in the spring of 2013. Foran has set himself the challenge of completing his journey in just 60 days, reaching the summit before 31 May.

But the real goal, Foran says, is to raise as much money as possible for the youth mental health programme YouTurn, so that young people struggling with similar issues to those he has faced can get the help they need.

The Australian is relatively new to high-altitude climbing but has quickly built experience, climbing peaks like the Island Peak and Ama Dablam in the Khumbu region of eastern Nepal in the past two years. This will be his first attempt at an 8,000-metre-high mountain.

At every stage so far, Foran has had to fight adversity.

In India, when he was attempting to cycle 1,150km, it was the heat. “I was not ready for 42 degrees Celsius,” he says laughing.

Day after day, he cycled up to 135km, often riding for 10 to 12 hours at a stretch. “We were still putting in these massive shifts.” To cope, he broke the days down into fragments. “Every 20km, I would pull over… maybe talk to a vendor. Reset.”

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But along the way he has also built connections. One afternoon, he recalls, a gang of schoolchildren gathered around him when he was taking a break at a roadside. It was a hot day and he bought fruit juice from a nearby vendor for all of them. Soon, more children appeared. “I ended up buying all of his (vendors’) juices,” he says, laughing.

Added to India’s early-summer heat was the chaos of its road network. The mountaineer says struggled at first with all “the trucks and cows”, then adds: “But I got used to them.”

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On his Instagram page, he writes: “I struggled with my mental health. For a long time, I felt lost. Like I was searching for something, but didn’t know what it was. “I remember when I was that age… how much that would have helped me. I don’t want people to get to that point.”

He recalls the exact moment he decided to climb Everest.

“I was standing on the summit (of Ama Dablam) and I remember looking at it (Mount Everest), and I was like, Yes, that’s it. That’s my goal.”

The scheduled route through Nepal also hasn’t gone exactly to plan. While attempting to acclimatise himself en route to Mera Peak, which is on the way to Everest base camp, his blood oxygen levels dropped sharply overnight. “I checked it three times, and it was low every time. I remember starting to become a little bit delirious.”

At that point his team made the difficult decision to turn back and descend. “Safety was number one. We just went. There was no questions asked.”

Foran describes the moment not as failure, but of clarity. “What is the goal here? The goal is to get to Mount Everest… We’d figure everything else out once I was healthier.”

They’ve now planned a new route: a faster push along the usual Everest base camp trail, cutting a journey that normally takes over a week down to just four days. “So it definitely has been a bit of a stinger. But we’re not out of the park, and we can make this happen.”

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He knows the physical toll the expedition would take on him. But he says: “I think mental toughness is the key to an expedition like this.”

“I believe, through a lot of hardship, mental resilience is built in our lives. And personally, I faced, unfortunately, a bunch of it at a very young age. I was very, very close with my mom, and to watch her decline so dramatically and then pass away right in front of me. It was brutal, and that’s something that I definitely draw back on.”

He knows he will need the mental resilience for the next stage, which is the most dangerous: the climb from Everest base camp to the summit, through icefalls and the notorious “death zone” – a term used by mountaineers to refer to heights above 8000m.

“My mum has given me an opportunity here to keep going and hopefully inspire other people.

“It’s okay to speak about it… it’s okay to show emotion.

“The cause is the most important thing for me. Like, what we’re doing with (YouTurn).. I believe can save lives.”

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