19-year-old Mason Allen loves a challenge. He’s now in his second year of college, double majoring in economics and English while completing a minor in math. He’s been racing mountain bikes for a decade, and back in junior high he mastered the art of riding a unicycle.
“With a bicycle, if you fall it’s really easy to get tangled up, and there’s no graceful way to fall, but the unicycle is a little bit less painful to learn, since you can just step off," he explains.
This year he read about a guy who rode a unicycle up more than 29,000 feet in less than a day – stopping often to rest.
“Ben Soja is a Swiss unicyclist who did it in LA," says Allen. "He had a total time of 23 hours. He had about six hours when he was not peddling the unicycle. I thought if I could just take a few hours off that, I could ride slower and still be faster overall.”
So at 5 a.m. on November 2nd he began riding up Observatory Hill on the UVA campus – a climb of 219 feet. He’d do that 130 times to claim a new world record – 5.5 miles up, the height of Mt. Everest.
Of course, conditions were nothing like those Everest. Hikers there battle snow and ice, but Allen says his weather was ideal with a high in the low 60’s.
“It was about as good as it gets for a day in November with quite a bit more Oxygen down here too," he jokes.
Allen found it easy to fuel his ride with bagels, Cliff Bars and bags of candy.
“This was two days after Halloween, so that came cheap,” he recalls.
Members of UVA’s Cycling Club, friends and family came to cheer him on and to leave even more food.
“There were probably 10-12,000 calories just sitting on top of my car.”
On some downhill stretches he got going 18 miles an hour – but his average was around six, and early the next morning, he completed the mission in just 21 hours. His knees and ankles hurt, but he had Sunday to recover and limped his way to class on Monday.
Now he’s training to compete in the North American Unicycle Championship, while basking in the glory of his remarkable ride up Observatory Hill – talking with a half dozen news organizations including one publishing in China.
