DESCENT INTO THE COLD & DARK

To highlight the shocking statistics on men’s mental health, Chris Hall rode down, and up, Box Hill 91 times. He tells Vern Pitt how it went

- Vern Pitt

It’s the early hours of Sunday morning on the slopes of the famous Box Hill in Surrey. The mercury has dropped below zero and the surface is starting to get slippery. Bombing down through the darkness for the umpteenth time, his way lit only by the lights on his bike, ultra-endurance athlete Chris Hall tentatively squeezes the brakes through the Olympic climb’s off-camber hairpin.

He’s lost track of the number of times he’s done this now, his body and brain chilled to the bone and his head is starting to loll with fatigue, his eyelids getting heavy. An icy slip could derail his whole quest to complete his metaphorical, and literal, descent into the darkness. Things are getting dangerous.

Hall’s mission that night was the same as it had been for the previous 24 hours – to descend, in distance, to the deepest point on earth, a place where little life survives, the Mariana Trench. The idea was to raise money for charity Movember and raise awareness of men’s mental health issues, depression in particular.

Why the Mariana Trench? “It relates to that idea of spiraling down and that spiraling out of control. But also, there’s a way out of it, you can climb out, and you can get out of that situation as well.”

But why do it on Box Hill, one of the busiest climbs in the country? “We were talking about the 2018 suicide statistics, and it really quite shocked me. Any suicide is a tragedy, the person could have been saved, or it could have been prevented. But what shocked me is three-quarters of all suicides in the UK are men. That’s 13 every day, 91 a week, or one every two hours,” says Hall.