Annie Seel is attempting to go higher than any biker has gone before with a daring assault on Mount EverestTop of the world: Seel is aiming to reach advanced base camp on Mount Everest at 21,000ft

Annie Seel is nicknamed the Rally Princess. She is 5ft 3in, weighs just 8st and next week she hopes to set a new world record for high-altitude motorcycling. The setting for her attempt? Mount Everest.

Fifty years after Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay conquered the mountain, Seel will leave her native Sweden and follow their footsteps on a Honda XL400. Clearly reaching the top is impossible, even for a biker of her standard, but if she reaches the advanced base camp the previous world record will be shattered.

The current unofficial record for motorcycling at altitude is 17,225ft, held by Doug Sunderland and recorded on the Khardungla Pass in India. If Seel makes it from base camp on the north side of the mountain to advanced base camp on its westerly ridge, she will have revved her oxygen-starved engine at 21,000ft.

It’s a tall order for a such a small biker, but then throughout her career Seel, 34, has made a habit of meeting challenges head on and she’s hardly perturbed by this one. “If a yak can make it up there then a bike should be able to as well,” she says.
Even as a 14-year-old, Seel remembers being mesmerised by the thrill of fast motorbikes. “I had just seen this stunt show with Eddie Kidd, the English jumper. He had jumped the Great Wall of China and things like that and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s so cool’,” she says.

Her parents didn’t share her enthusiasm and she had to persuade them that unlike all the other girls she really would prefer to ride a bike than a horse. While practising to pass her test she spontaneously began racing with fellow learners. “The instructor said I should try racing because I obviously liked to go fast,” she says. “I have always loved going fast. I love the control and the feeling of sometimes going, ‘Oh that was a close one and I somehow made it’.”

She progressed to rallying and motocross, but then in 1991, after a series of crashes and injuries — she has had 17 fractures so far — she gave up competition altogether and set up a marketing and advertising business in Stockholm.
It’s where she would have stayed had she not been “caught by the sand dunes” while on holiday in Morocco in 2000. She immediately resolved to get back in the saddle and race in the desert. The only problem was that the next race, the World Cup Rally in Dubai, was in 10 days’ time.

She made it, and finished the race despite having no experience of desert racing or the global positioning system used to stay on track — and despite breaking her foot.“Better a broken foot than a broken race,” she said afterwards.

She went on to compete in the World Cup Rally in Tunisia in 2001 — with a broken wrist — and also last year’s Paris-Dakar rally, which she finished with another broken wrist and a thigh injury. She was the only participant finishing in the 400cc Production class, in a race where only a third of all competitors actually crossed the finish line.
“The main thing is to finish no matter what,” she said after the race, adding that “the Paris-Dakar is the Mount Everest of motocross”.

That it may well be, but there is also the real thing to aim at. Seel and her team of five plan to leave Kathmandu on August 6 and head northeast through the Tibetan border town of Zhangmu. After reaching Lhasa, the Tibetan capital on day six, they will ride to Everest base camp on the north side of the mountain at 16,900ft, where the temperature will have fallen to 0C. If they reach advanced base camp, they will have to cope with temperatures of around —10C, with the wind chill making it feel far colder. The full expedition is expected to take 14 days and cover 2,300 miles.

“Altitude training is very hard if you don’t live near any mountains,” says Seel of her preparations. “I’ve been up in the Atlas mountains in Morocco and in the Pyrenees but that’s just 10,000ft, so it’s not really high enough.”

Seel and her fellow riders will take oxygen canisters and breathing apparatus in order to minimise the risk of alititude sickness, but their bikes will have no such assistance.

“The bike will be very tired,” she says. “That’s why I’m taking the Honda XL400, because it’s very strong. At high altitude they lose so much power — just like people, there’s not enough oxygen for the engine to run. It just gets weaker and weaker and so when you touch the throttle nothing much happens.”
And whereas the Khardungla Pass in India is a road, Seel’s route is nothing more than a rugged mountain track, skirting the glaciers. In parts it is likely to be covered in ice, and may be unstable.

“I heard about another expedition which was delayed because so much mud had come down the mountain and blocked the path,” she says. “That could be a problem. The tracks from base camp to advanced base camp are really very rough but I think we should be okay.”

Because of the terrain and the altitude the key to success is patience during the long ride up the mountain. “It’s the opposite of a race, really,” she says. “You don’t want to hurry, you just need to take a very steady pace.”

For the Rally Princess who has made her name through driving like the wind, that may prove to be the biggest challenge of all.

Link to article http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3824-763818,00.html