A teenage fundraiser from East Kilbride has been awarded a Guinness World Record for smashing a charity Mount Kilimanjaro race in memory of his football coach.
Harvey Mitchell-Divers won the world’s highest endurance race - a half marathon - as part of the Uhuru Peak Challenge, also coming second in the vertical kilometre element of the challenge.
The 17-year-old used UWS’s state-of-the-art environmental chamber to train ahead of the challenge.
Known as the world’s highest trail run, it consists of a tough 3.5km run with 1000 metres of vertical climb to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro.
Harvey took part to raise money for The Brain Tumour Charity in memory of his football coach, Dougie Craggs, who lost his battle with brain cancer.
Following his epic success, Harvey told Lanarkshire Live : “After five pretty brutal days of hiking between four-to-six hours per day, I managed to complete the vertical kilometre in just under two-and-a-half hours – a climb that would normally take anywhere between four-to-six hours.
“I then began the half marathon descent from the summit, which took me three-and-a-half hours – a hike that usually takes one or two days to complete.
"Running all downhill for this long was absolutely grim, but I pushed through.
“Dougie Craggs is the real reason I took on this challenge, and I hope that I have done him and his family proud.
"When I felt like giving up, I remembered why I was here and I stuck it out, got the job done and never gave up.”
Harvey is no stranger to tough challenges – he recently won his age group category in the World Spartan Championships in Abu Dhabi and has set his sights on the OCR World Championships in Vermont USA next month, where he will compete in the 100m, 3k and 15k races.
To help him train and acclimatise to the conditions he faced, Harvey worked with Professor Chris Easton at UWS’s cutting-edge facilities, using the chamber to replicate the environmental extremes he would face on the challenge.
One of only two in Scotland and the only one in the West of Scotland, the chamber can mimic the same conditions as walking in the desert to standing on one of the world’s highest mountains, and can be used by individuals to improve physical performance in the run up to important events.
Chris Easton, head of sport and exercise at UWS, told us : “Everyone at UWS is incredibly proud of Harvey for taking on this unbelievable challenge.
"Taking part was inspiring enough, but to have performed so well is incredible.
"Harvey has ambitious plans for more challenges in the future and everyone at UWS would be delighted to work with him again to help him prepare in any way we can.”
Make a donation to Harvery's fundraiser here.
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