Most of the guests we have on the podcast are extraordinary by trade. World Tour pros, sports scientists, coaches behind Grand Tour wins. They're meant to do spectacular things; it's their job. Conor Griffin is not that. Conor sells truck parts. He works nine to five. He races, in his own words, in the "premium sought-after" category four — which is to say, the back of the field. And that is exactly why his story is the one I most want you to hear.
Because Conor went out and Everested. He climbed the full 8,848 metres of Mount Everest on a single Irish hill, repeating it up and down until he'd matched the height of the highest mountain on earth. A truck-parts salesman with a full-time job and no pretensions of being an athlete did one of the hardest single-day challenges in amateur cycling. When a pro does something spectacular, it's a Tuesday. When Conor does it, it's proof — proof that this stuff is available to ordinary riders, and that's a far more useful thing to most of us than another pro highlight reel. Let me break down how he did it, because every part of it transfers.
Say it out loud
The whole thing started, as these things often do, with a throwaway line. There was no racing during the pandemic, no calendar to train for, and the motivation had drained away — a feeling most of us recognise. A clubmate had Everested before, and Conor had always half-thought he'd like to do one, but had never actually said it. Then, stupidly in his telling, he put it in an email to Sean McKenna, one of our coaches: I think I'd love to do an Everesting. And that was that. Sean grabbed it like a dog with a bone, and suddenly it was real.
There's a genuine lesson buried in that, and it's free. A goal you keep in your own head is easy to quietly abandon. A goal you say out loud, to someone who'll hold you to it, becomes a commitment. The moment Conor told his coach, the Everesting stopped being a daydream and became a thing he was going to do. If there's a challenge you've been privately circling — a first hundred-miler, a sportive you keep not entering, your own Everesting — the single most powerful thing you can do is tell someone whose opinion you care about. Accountability is what turns "one day" into a date in the calendar.
It was built, not summoned
Here's the part that matters most, and it's the opposite of how these feats get mythologised. Conor didn't wake up one morning and heroically decide to climb Everest on a whim. The first attempt got scuppered by lockdowns, so they put it on the back burner and built toward it over the winter. Structured training. A coach. A plan that pointed at the day.
That's the unglamorous truth behind almost every extraordinary amateur achievement: it was prepared for. The Everesting was the visible event, but the months of consistent, structured riding underneath it were what made the event survivable. This is the same argument I make about any big goal — you don't rise to the occasion, you fall to the level of your preparation. Conor had a coach precisely because a challenge like this rewards structure, and if you're weighing up whether a coach is worth it for your own big goal, his answer was clearly yes. The feat was Conor's. The framework that got him there was built over a winter, on purpose.
Choose the right hill, and pace it
Now some genuinely practical race-craft, because the Everesting has a tactical layer most people don't think about until they're halfway up a hill for the fortieth time.
The choice of climb is everything, and it's a trade-off. Pick a short, steep wall and you do less descending — more of your metres count — but you have to climb it a punishing number of times, maybe seventy or eighty repeats, each one a hard effort with barely any recovery. Pick a longer, more gradual climb and you need far fewer repeats and you get real rest on the descents, but the total day is longer and you cover more distance. Conor chose the more gradual option deliberately, so that he could pace the climbs without going into the red and could actually recover on the way down rather than redlining every repeat.
That's exactly the right instinct, and it's the same principle that governs any long climbing day: control the effort, don't blow the doors off early, and protect yourself for the back half. An Everesting is won by the rider who paces the first two-thirds conservatively enough to still be functioning in the final third — the long-climb pacing lesson, stretched across an entire day. Go too hard on the early repeats because you feel strong and fresh, and you'll be a passenger by repeat fifty.
Fuel it, or it ends you
A quick but vital aside, because Conor told a cautionary tale that every endurance rider should tattoo on their arm. He once rode four hours in Colombia with a couple of light local amateurs, on a long climb, carrying a handlebar bag and barely any food — one bottle, in sightseeing mode rather than fuelling mode. Four hours in, at 80kg against their 61, he came apart so badly he had to stop on the roadside and capitulate.
The lesson is the oldest one in endurance: no amount of fitness or willpower survives an empty tank. On a challenge measured in hours and thousands of metres, fuelling isn't a detail, it's the foundation. Eat early, eat often, and treat the food plan with the same seriousness as the training. The Everesting that goes wrong is almost always the one where the rider stopped eating before they bonked, not after.
The hardest part is between your ears
Conor was clear that for all the physical preparation, the Everesting was mostly a mental battle — so much so that, he joked, he gets something like post-traumatic stress just thinking about it. And that's the truest thing in the whole conversation.
When you take on something this big, the legs will do more than you think, provided you've trained and you're fuelled. It's the mind that tries to quit. The way through it is partly preparation — arriving confident because you built toward it — and partly a trick every long-effort rider learns: you don't face the whole thing at once. You don't think about 8,848 metres. You think about the next repeat. Get to the top, turn around, do the next one. Break the impossible into the merely difficult, then break that into the next ten minutes. The mental tools that get a rider up a single brutal climb are the same ones that get Conor up a hill eighty times.
If you want to do your own
Maybe Conor's story has put the idea in your head. Good. Here's the shape of how an ordinary rider actually pulls one off, drawn straight from how he did it.
Pick the hill first, because everything else flows from it — that gradual-versus-steep trade-off decides your day. Then count backwards: an Everesting is a winter-long build, not a next-month plan, so give yourself the months to arrive ready rather than hoping to wing it. Sort the logistics that aren't on the bike — food and bottles staged so you're not under-fuelling like Conor did in Colombia, somewhere to shelter, ideally a mate or two to ride laps with you and keep you sane in the dark middle hours. Tell people you're doing it, both for the accountability and because their messages genuinely carry you through the low patch. And go in expecting it to become a mental fight in the back half, with a plan for that: the next repeat, never the whole mountain.
None of that requires talent. It requires a date, a structure, and the decision to commit. That's the formula, and it's the same one whether your goal is an Everesting, a first century, or a sportive you've been circling for years.
Why this is the most important story we've told
I've had World Tour winners on this podcast. But Conor Griffin's might be the most useful interview for the most people, because he's you. A working person with limited time, racing at the back, who decided to do something extraordinary and then did it — with a clear goal, some structure, smart pacing, proper fuelling and the mental discipline to keep going.
That's the whole "not done yet" idea made flesh. You don't need to be a pro. You don't need to be young or naturally gifted. You need a goal you've said out loud, a bit of structure behind it, and the willingness to keep turning the pedals when it gets hard. Conor had exactly that, and he climbed the height of Everest on a truck-parts salesman's legs. Whatever your version of that is, his story says the same thing: go and do it.
Hear the full conversation with Conor Griffin on the Roadman podcast. If you've got a big goal of your own, bring it to the community on Skool — saying it out loud is where it starts.