Chapel-en-le-Frith joiner to push wheelbarrow 'up Everest' this weekend

After Sisyphus cheated death twice, Zeus, the king of the Greek gods, punished his trickery by forcing him to push a boulder up a hill in Hades for all eternity. 

Over 40 hours on Saturday and Sunday, Ben Brindley did the same with a wheelbarrow in Chapel-en-le-Frith.

“It’s a lot more technical than people realise,” Ben told the Chronicle the day before his multiple ascents of Peaslows Lane. “We’ve done the maths, and it’s 22.5 per cent harder running with a wheelbarrow than without one.” 

This isn’t any old wheelbarrow. It might just be the most high-tech one in the UK. The F1 car of uni-wheeled lugging equipment. 

The barrow originally weighed 14.8kg, but Ben and the engineers at DJ Racecars in Chapel have taken a full 5 kilos off that with various incremental tweaks and improvements.  

Bearings have been optimised, handles adjusted, and its new magnesium wheel is 900 grams lighter than the original. 

At 7am on Saturday, Ben made the first of 57 ‘Everesting’ climbs. As the name suggests, his total altitude gain adds up to 8,849 metres, matching the height of Mount Everest from sea-level. 

“I’m planning on power-walking up and running on the way down. It’s going to be by far the hardest thing I’ve done in my life – I've done seven marathons in seven days, and 40 to 45 people in the UK have done an ‘Everest’, but nobody has ever done it while pushing something.” 

The challenge marked the culmination of a year of wheelbarrow endurance events that he called Ben’s Wacky Races.  

In that time, he sliced almost 20 minutes off his best half-marathon-while-pushing-a-wheelbarrow mark, and covered more than 2,100km with his trusty companion.  

“All the other challenges have been to build up to this. It’s progressive overload. The 10ks are my speed training with most of the rest for endurance. 

“It all started about seven years ago in the pub. Someone laid down the gauntlet and I’m the type of person that if someone says something can’t be done, or you can’t do that, then I’m going to do it.” 

His efforts are in aid of Lighthouse, a charity that helps workers in the construction industry with mental health issues.  

Two people who work in construction take their lives every day in the UK. 

Forty-one-year-old Ben has been a joiner for 20 years and found his mental health under strain when he had time off for hernia surgery five years ago, exacerbated by being self-employed. 

“I ended up with this waiting list of jobs that needed doing while I was ill, but it started before that when I kept putting off sorting the hernia out. You just feel like you can’t take time off, but you need to look after yourself.” 

Scaling Peaslows Lane once is enough to leave most people out of puff. It climbs 164 metres over the mile-long stretch to Sparrowpit, with a punishing average gradient of 10.8 per cent.  

To complete the challenge, he ran run through the night, eating calorie-packed trays of homemade flapjacks to keeping his energy levels up as he ran the equivalent of four back-to-back marathons.

He added more than £2,000 to his fundraising pot over the weekend, bringing his total to almost £5,500.

Posting on Instagram the day after his final climb, he said, "It took longer than expected as my quads gave out, which is from the barrow dragging me downhill. 

"Staying awake was really hard at about hour 28, but [I] kept it going by just having a huge amount of sugar, caffeine and getting some tunes going.

"It was an amazing experience, brutally tough and probably was a stupid idea, but it's done and now it's time to recover and have some time with the family."

To donate to Ben’s cause, visit https://www.justgiving.com/page/benswackyraces 

For more information about Lighthouse, go to https://www.lighthouseclub.org/