Wow, this was a long time in the making! Our San Francisco crew had been, somewhat jokingly, been tossing a "Tam Everest" around for a while... and I couldn't stop thinking about it. Luckily for me Nick Handel couldn't stop thinking about it either so we finally picked a date so that we could utilize the same crew despite doing separate efforts out on the mountain.
We decided to follow the same route as KK (HAM on Tam) which departs from the clock tower at the Mill Valley Depot and takes the normal Mt Tam climb route up and comes back down the exact same way. This allowed our crew to stay central and consistent. Nick and I took off from downtown Mill Valley at 3:00pm on Friday July 24th in hopes of avoiding as much of the heat that would start in the morning the following day. Nick flew on the road section of each lap in a way that was truly impressive and he lapped me on my lap 8 his lap 9. I tried to stay as steady as possible running 50-55minutes up and 35-40minutes down hill aiming for ~1:40 a lap. I unfortunately took a bad fall coming down the scramble on lap two and I thought my day might have been done there, I banged up my whole left side and my bruised elbow made using my poles hard for a lap or two.
We cruised through the night with different friends jumping in for laps and we were treated to the most amazing sunset and sunrise, truly a treat! As expected it started to get warm when the clouds burned off in the morning causing the last two laps to be a scorcher up on the trail that gets direct sun starting at sunrise. I was able to hold it together and finish a lap behind Nick in 20 hours 56 minutes for my Everest or 12 laps of Tam in under 24hours. At the time I don't think we knew the FKT route was most summits in 24 hours, but I'm not sure if either one of us were ready to head out for any more laps just then either! Maybe that means I'll have to do it again to get that 13th summit, but for now I've got some other projects in the works. As Nick mentioned after a long quite spring and early summer of missing our ultra community it was incredible to have our local running friends come out to support this attempt, it was incredible to have us all safely together during these strange times!