Once you’ve chosen your hill, create a Strava segment for it if there isn’t already one and put it into the Everesting calculator (www.everesting.io) to get a rough idea of how many laps you need to do and how long it will take.

Use this as a gauge, don’t take it as gospel.

The online calculator stated our first Everesting required 28 laps while the reality was that we needed to do 31, while the same calculator for our second Everesting said we needed to do 19.9 laps while the reality was 21.

I cannot imagine the pain of spending 19 hours in the saddle and heading home “victorious” only to have the attempt nullified as you’ve only actually climbed 8,720m.

When inputting the info into the everesting.io page, reel your Olympic spirit right back in and be brutally realistic with yourself.

Make your average ascending speed painfully – no, embarrassingly –  slow and put in a ton of breaks.

However, bear in mind that there’s only so slow that you can physically descend a hill and interestingly, you’ll most likely find that you’ll get a run of PBs on the descent as the attempt continues.

Descending the same hill 20+ times both acquaints you with the racing line while simultaneously increasing your descending prowess.

Once you’ve got your time and reps estimate, take your bike and do 3 or 4 repeats using a Garmin (or anything that isn’t an iphone for reasons we all know) and paying particular attention to the segment’s exact start and finish elevations to see if they tally with the online calculator.

My advice is to do this over a few sessions in different atmospheric conditions – low pressure, high pressure – to get a really clear picture and if in doubt, don’t hesitate to ping a mail off to info@hells500.com to get clarification on the number of laps required.

Bear in mind that if there are any doubts, your total elevation is taken off your recording device so make sure it’s up to the job and there are no surprises lurking.