Inside Tyler Andrews’ Brutal Quest to Break Everest’s Speed Record
Everything in Tyler Andrews’ life is optimized around one goal: Summiting Mount Everest faster than anyone else on Earth.
He regularly logs seven-and-a-half-hour StairMaster sessions in a portable hypoxia chamber, which lowers the air's oxygen concentration to match alpine conditions. He lives in Quito, Ecuador, where he can take advantage of the 9,350-foot elevation, run laps on Cotopaxi in the middle of the night, and afford to live as a mountain athlete spending over 40 hours a week training. He eats the same trusted meals on repeat—chicken, rice, and vegetables. During his longest trail efforts, he forces down 600 calories of sugary gel (the equivalent of about three cups of pasta) per hour, front-loading his fueling before high-altitude-induced nausea takes over.
He even has a pet tortoise, which serves as a reminder of the type of strategy he’ll need to employ to run the fastest known time on the world’s tallest mountain—without supplemental oxygen. It’s a feat he’ll attempt for the sixth time in early May.
Andrews is no stranger to massive, treacherous mountains. The 35-year-old holds the speed records for Manaslu, Kilimanjaro, Aconcagua, and many others. But Everest has remained elusive. He attempted the speed record on the south face five times in 2025, gear snafus and perilous conditions forcing him to turn back before the summit. Somehow, multiple unsuccessful attempts across two seasons haven’t snuffed out his desire to keep trying.
On his podcast Ty’s Training, where Andrews shares wholesome conversations with his dad, he cites a sense of childlike wonder as the key to his ability to keep believing in the face of failure. He’s also just deeply determined and ambitious.
“I am very, very competitive with myself and my own ability,” he says. “I know I can go do Everest without oxygen, from base camp to summit, and I haven't done it yet. It’s gonna eat me alive until I do it.”
Chris Fisher
Staying the Course
On his first attempt at the Everest speed record last May, a broken zipper on his mountaineering boots forced him to turn back after Camp III. On his second try, days later, brutal winds thwarted his summit push. He tried again shortly after, looking to make the most of the small weather window when climbing the mountain is possible, but exhaustion cut the effort short.
He went for it again in September. In his first attempt, he fell into a crevasse in the Khumbu Icefall, where he hung in the darkness by a safety rope until he could calm his nerves and pull himself out. He dug with an axe into the ice above him, raining snow on his bare arms until he gained purchase. Freed from the glacier’s mouth, but cold, wet, and rattled, he continued until deep, unstable snow past Camp IV proved impassable. His second September attempt had the same result—the Sherpas who were helping clear snow on the highest section of the mountain told Andrews it wasn’t feasible to go further.
Five failures in, Andrews was wavering on his quest for the record he dubbed Project Himalaya: Run Everest. The ghost he’s chasing is a formidable one—the current FKT on Everest’s south face is a blistering 20 hours and 24 minutes, set by Kaji Sherpa nearly three decades ago.
Climbing Everest has always been a legendary feat, especially without supplemental oxygen, but current conditions mean new record attempts are even more challenging. Climate change makes ideal weather windows shorter and less predictable, and a massive influx of people on the mountain creates crowded paths and dangerous bottlenecks. Avoiding them means setting out on days with suboptimal weather and higher avalanche risk—aspects you really don’t want to deal with when you’re wearing minimal clothing and carrying as little gear as possible.
“There are all these different factors that are outside of your control, that are kind of connected like a web,” says Andrews. “If one of them gets all out of whack, then it messes up everything.”
Eventually, the sting of the failures faded. Despite the danger, Andrews couldn’t stop thinking about Everest; he couldn’t let it go. He decided to pivot to chasing the FKT on the north face, which is longer and less technical, playing to his ultrarunner strengths. There are currently several records on the north face, starting from various points, but Andrews is going for Kílian Jornet’s 26-hour base camp-to-summit record, set in 2017. The route covers 40 miles (round trip) and 13,100 feet of elevation gain.
“I kind of hit my head against the wall an awful lot of times on the south side,” Andrews says. “[Going for the FKT on the north face] is exciting, it’s different. When you have a project that you’ve been working on for many years at this point, if you can get a little bit of a breath of fresh air, that can be really helpful.”
Learning to Love the “Impossible”
Andrews has only been chasing FKTs in the mountains since 2020, when canceled road races left the professional distance runner and Olympic marathon trials qualifier without any competition. He browsed fastestknowntime.com for interesting routes, excited about the prospect of racing people throughout history. He quickly learned he was really, really good at it, breezily setting the record on 19,347-foot Cotopaxi. Now, he has 99 records to his name.
The Massachusetts native’s athletic career began with high school cross country, where he was an average runner until one fateful conversation with his coach. He told Andrews that with a little more effort and consistency, he could be great. Andrews didn’t believe him, but—like any defiant teenager—decided to try just to prove him wrong. Unfortunately, showing up to practice and running five days a week did make him a stronger athlete. The simplicity of the formula—put in X amount of work, get Y reward—was intoxicating. It lured him away from his former passion, making music.
“Music, for me, felt very subjective. It didn't feel like a meritocracy, which felt very frustrating to me as a teenager who was very logical and data-driven, and running was the opposite. It was extremely objective,” Andrews says. “You know, it’s about who won the race. What’s the time on the stopwatch?”
Chris Fisher
While he wasn’t always a star athlete, he was driven. He was forced to be resilient at only six years old, when he spent weeks in a hospital fighting aplastic anemia, a condition in which bone marrow fails to make enough blood cells. He got into music early on and pursued it with dogged dedication until he found running.
“I thought [music] was what I was going to do with my life. And [the attitude I have about running] is very similar to the one I had toward music. I was extremely self-motivated. I would practice all the time, and I played in a million groups.”
Then, he found a new place to exercise his intensity. “[Running] tickled my brain in a way that was powerful,” Andrews says. “It touched that same nerve of being a perfectionist and wanting to get the most out of myself.”
His parents have played a massive role in helping him reach his otherworldly goals. Andrews’ father, Tim Andrews, doesn’t hide his worry about his son’s extreme missions in the mountains. He talks about it on their podcast. But Tim's admiration for his son clearly outweighs the fear. That unwavering support is lifeblood for Andrews.
“[My parents] are not mountain people. So all this stuff to them, I think, is very, very new, and can be very scary,” Andrews says. “I think they definitely get a little bit freaked out from time to time. And I think at the same time, they do a really excellent job of balancing their own feelings of trepidation or anxiety with being really supportive of what I want to do, and trusting that I have the ability to know where my limits are. They know that this stuff is important to me. It's my career, it's what I'm doing with my life, and I love it.”
Santiago Guerrero
Andrews describes his disposition as “having a screw loose, but my shit together,” a line he connected with when he was reading The Other Talent: The Curiously Complex Role of Mental Health in Athletic Greatness and Why It's Never Too Late to Harness Your Potential. It’s what leads him to log 7,000 feet of vertical climbing a day around Quito, wearing an AirTrim mask to warm and humidify the cold high-alpine air and stop coughing fits. It’s why he sleeps in a hypoxia chamber. And it’s why he climbed the height of Everest on a treadmill after his failed September attempts at the real thing. (He needed a goal to tide him over until he could start his training block for the May 2026 attempt.)
He broke that record handily, summiting the 29,029-foot treadmill version of Everest in 8:17:09, breaking the previous 12-hour record and raising over $25,000 for youth athletic programs in Nepal and Ecuador through his nonprofit, the Chaski Foundation. On a table next to the treadmill sat a yellow duck Beanie Baby, the same one that kept him company in the hospital when he was battling aplastic anemia as a kid.
“I kind of joke, but it's very true—the same motivation I have to climb Everest today, it's the same motivation I had to PR in the 5K when I was 17 years old on the cross country team. It's exactly the same thing,” says Andrews. “Being unsure if I can do something, working really hard, and then doing it…that's the most fulfilling thing to me in life.”
Perhaps the most exciting unknown surrounding Andrews’ pursuit of the Everest FKT is not whether he’ll get it (though it seems to only be a matter of time). Maybe it’s what he’ll chase when he’s done.