DESCENT INTO THE COLD & DARK
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
