Egyptian Athlete Becomes Fastest Man to Ever Climb Mount Moses

Egyptian athlete Rady Ahmed has been climbing Mount Moses since 2010. Almost every year, he has made his way back to Sinai’s St. Catherine. "It recharges my soul," he tells SceneTraveller. Over time, the trips stopped being travel in any conventional sense. Everything he owns—his gear, his clothes, the way he plans a journey—is built around being able to move through nature and sleep anywhere. "It became my life." This past February, he climbed it faster than anyone in recorded history, setting a new Guinness World Record. Mount Moses rises over 2,200 metres above sea level. For centuries, pilgrims have made the ascent without urgency, guided by faith rather than a stopwatch. Ahmed spent twelve months preparing to do the opposite, training three times a day, five or six days a week. Mornings: gym work or functional training, followed by thirty minutes on a StairMaster set to level 16. Evenings: hill running, local peaks, or track work for speed. "That machine is honestly the hardest thing in the gym," he says, "but the mountain has 800 steps at the end. So it's the best way to prepare." On the day of the attempt, the conditions were anything but incidental. Ahmed had arrived three days early to catch the weather, which came in harder than St. Catherine had seen in over twenty years: snow, rain, and wind that made the cold worse than cold has any right to be at that altitude. Bedouin guides, who have known this mountain across generations, said they hadn’t seen anything like it. “I wanted to see how I’d live with it; what it would be like to exist inside that weather.” With a GPS tracker on his back, a GoPro rolling, and witnesses stationed at the base, midpoint, and summit—all logged according to Guinness specifications—Ahmed secured the world record for the fastest ascent of Mount Moses. The exact time, however, remains undisclosed, set to be revealed in an upcoming documentary chronicling the attempt. What the record won’t show is that by the upper third, he was bleeding. The air was so cold, and he was breathing so hard, that at some point his saliva turned to blood. "I knew where each difficult part is," he says. "I break it into sections and pace myself accordingly." In his head, the climb was divided into three sections. The lower stretch, where the path is deceptive in its gentleness. The long traverse along the mountain's edge, which goes on far longer than any first-timer expects. And then the steps. Back in Cairo, sixty or seventy people were watching, a group he had built over three months, friends from different periods of his life, some of whom had never met each other, who had been training alongside him and checking in daily.  Now that’s he’s succeeded, Ahmed is already planning the next attempt, somewhere beyond Egypt, further into Africa. A documentary is also in production. "I want to show that Sinai is safe," he says. "A lot of people outside Egypt say they want to come, but they're afraid, when there is no reason to be." St. Catherine, he'll tell you, has mountains that make Mount Moses look like a warm-up—peaks that will beat you badly if you arrive unprepared. "Every mountain there has its own personality.”