Queenstown resident Ben Hildred just spent 100 days doing more uphill cycling than almost anyone else could imagine. He talks to Shanti Mathias about its psychological impact.
Ben Hildred swings his leg over his bike, parks it, orders a kombucha and sits down opposite me at Bespoke, a Queenstown cafe. He is still wearing his bike helmet.
That’s not surprising, perhaps. For the first 100 days of this year, Hildred rode his bike every day for about eight hours. He was completing a challenge that, as far as he knows, no one has ever accomplished: to cycle up a million vertical feet in 100 days. “A million is a really good, big number and 100 is a fun and interesting manageable number, and I just wanted to squeeze them together,” he says.
Squeeze those two numbers together, as Hildred did, and you get 10,000 feet a day. That’s 3,048 vertical metres. Like biking most of the way up Aoraki each day; like going from sea level to the tip of Maungawhau 15 and a half times; like going along Wellington’s Golden Mile, except it’s vertical, and when you get to the end of Lambton Quay, you go a little bit further. Or, for Hildred, it meant biking from his home in Queenstown to the top of Ben Lomond saddle three times, and a little bit more, every day for more than three months.
The routine was intense. “I didn’t see a sunset all year,” Hildred says. He would wake up around 4am to start biking, factoring in about six hours in the saddle with another two hours to rest and eat. “I would eat a lot of vegan family sized pizzas, and Off-Piste plant-based jerky,” Hildred says. “I would be eating constantly, but it was never enough, seemingly.” By around 2pm, he’d be done, and would go home to rest and keep eating. He’d be in bed by about 6.30pm each night.
If he ever had time, he’d do some work – he runs a small business building people custom wheels for their bikes – but mostly, he was too tired. Although he managed to get some sponsorships from bike companies, “it was very detrimental to my bank account,” Hildred says. He hardly had the energy to see friends for three months and didn’t get to go to any gigs. “Slipknot was in Auckland in March, Fontaines DC was playing, I would have loved to see them but I just stopped looking because it made me too sad.”
Hildred is slim and lean, with wide set eyes and blonde hair. When we speak, it’s been a week since he finished biking, and Hildred says he feels physically nearly back to normal – “like 85, 90%”. Mentally? “More like 5%.” Hildred seems to have a penchant for uphill punishment. In 2021, he climbed a million feet in 200 days; in 2023, he did a “double Everest”, cycling up 17,698 vertical metres in one go. In 2024, he left the planet to find his next challenge, biking the height of Olympus Mons on Mars in one go: 21.9 kilometres in elevation. The chances of him doing something “big and silly” on a bike next year, even in the current state of depletion? “Relatively likely,” Hildred says.
Surprising, perhaps, that someone from Lincolnshire, the flatlands of England, would be so drawn to going up, and down, and up again. “My family support me, but they have no concept of elevation,” he says. “My friends just roll their eyes.”
Hildred doesn’t see himself as competitive. He just wants to push himself as much as he can, and to be on a bike. “I’m 36, and I have never put petrol in a car, I don’t even know how,” he says. “It’s just – bikes. They’re just remarkable. It’s honestly baffling to me that someone would get in a car if there’s only a short distance to travel.” He seems a little lost for words, still depleted.
It’s Hildred’s mindset I most want to understand. There is nothing easy about biking three vertical kilometres a day for 99 days (he did some extra biking to take day 50 off). Yet it’s a self-imposed kind of suffering. Hildred’s friends call him “Hypothermia Hildred”: the rainy days, and the times when the saddle was below freezing, were particularly hard, but the exhaustion was a constant, blurry companion. Why did he do it, when so many other people wouldn’t have started at all?
“It’s a deep-rooted curiosity: how far can you take the bike?” Hildred says. “It’s a skill I’ve gained as what I can make myself do has become heavier and heavier. You gain the ability to push your will.” You can see that will in the video of his double Everest effort: he starts hallucinating at one point, he nearly stumbles, but he keeps riding.
On bad days, the solitary nature of his challenge was isolating. “It felt kind of lonely, and almost solemn in its execution,” Hildred says. “No one knows what it feels like. It was impossible for anyone to relate to me because no one’s ever done it.”
There was a rhythm to it, as there always is in bikes: that metronome, of his feet turning around, his breath moving through his body, then the flow and bend of the downhill. He had initially wanted to do different rides, but realised it was easiest not to have to decide, to keep returning to Ben Lomond. In the repetition, an intimacy developed. “I knew every rock, every stone, every corner, the view,” Hildred says. He would pause on the saddle: on clear days, he could see Mount Aspiring, and on the other side, Lake Wakatipu, the clustered suburbs of Queenstown, the bony ridges of the Remarkables.
“On my last lap of every day, I tried to change the narrative a bit,” Hildred says. “Like: oh, now I’ve got to wait until tomorrow to experience that again… I kind of already miss it.”
During his 100 days, Hildred felt a dislocation between his brain and his body, because he had to neglect his drive to rest and recover. “I had this nauseous feeling in the morning, I just felt physically sick… it was so odd, I spent all this time diminishing [the pain], making it as small as possible in my head.” A week into stopping, with no big plans on the horizon yet, the effect is confusing. “I had a routine, I had a purpose… and then you just stop, and you have nothing.” He’s about to go on a bike ride, and it feels strange to him that he could just change his mind and turn around after 20 minutes if he wants.
If willpower can be trained, if bodily suffering can be ignored, then perhaps rest has to be learned, too. “I find it very hard to be still now, and listen to myself,” Hildred says. Yet it’s a desire for challenge that fuels him, just as it does walkers trudging up Ben Lomond or cyclists who inspire him, like Lachlan Morton. “You have to listen to yourself– but you have to ignore yourself too, sometimes.”
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