Former Tufts Runner Breaks Speed Record on Everest

Tyler “Ty” Andrews, E13, is the fastest climber to scale Mount Everest after completing a 9-hour, 55-minute ascent of the 29,032-foot peak on May 28. He broke the previous record by just over an hour, according to his team and a tracking site.

Andrews already holds more than 100 records for fastest known times scaling peaks across five continents. “None of them broke my heart the way this one did, multiple times, before it finally came together,” he said in a statement sent to Tufts. “The depth of the journey makes the accomplishment mean something different.”

‘A Worthwhile Challenge’

In 2024, after summiting Mount Manaslu in Nepal in a record 9 hours and 52 minutes, Andrews found himself musing that Everest was just 685 meters higher—and that its speed record had stood since 2003. “Something that’s been around for that long must be a worthwhile challenge,” he said. 

Even before he began ascending peaks at top speeds, Andrews was no stranger to racing. He ran track and cross country in high school and at Tufts and competed in the U.S. Olympic Team Trials for the marathon in 2016 and 2020.

As he weighed attempting Everest, he considered his strengths: his aerobic capacity from years of professional running, mental toughness from multiple ultramarathons, technical skills from mountain climbing, and altitude adaptation from living at 2,900 meters above sea level in Quito, Ecuador. 

“Everest is the ultimate test of everything I’ve been building,” he said. “No other mountain on Earth requires all of those things simultaneously at that level. I couldn’t not try it.”

But after his first attempt at the Everest speed record in spring 2025, he knew he had to improve his approach and become more self-reliant. “I really tried to think about it as an engineering problem,” said Andrews, who majored in mechanical engineering. “My Tufts education taught me to think carefully about hard problems and evaluate systems.” 

On May 24 of this year, Andrews set a record pace up the mountain from South Base Camp in Nepal, but weather and logistical challenges forced him to turn back less than an hour from the summit. 

Yet his body and mind felt ready. “This was the fittest and most physically and mentally prepared I had ever been,” said Andrews, who had just tested his lung and muscle performance at a sports science lab, and honed his balance and running mechanics. “I went in stronger and more confident than I ever have.”

Moonlight and Glaciers

Just three days later, shortly after 7 p.m. on the evening of May 27, Andrews set out for another try. The night before, he had seen no plume of snow blowing off the summit, and reports were of “completely calm” conditions and the lowest winds of the season. With most climbers done summiting for the season, the mountain was empty, its many bottleneck points clear.

There were still challenges, many of them totally outside a climber’s control, he said. There was the “uniquely unsettling” Khombu Icefall, with towers of ice the size of buildings “constantly shifting and creaking around you in the dark,” and seemingly bottomless crevasses that must be crossed with ladders. 

The avalanches were another concern. “You can hear them in the dark—these deep rumbling sounds echoing off the walls around you—and you can’t always tell how close they are or which direction they’re coming from,” Andrews said. 

But there were moments of rapture too, such as running up the Western Cwm—a glacial valley basin known for its beauty—with a nearly full moon. “I had this entire enormous glacial valley completely to myself. Just silence, moonlight, and these impossibly big walls around me,” he said. 

His past attempts and his experience with big mountains had taught him not to count on anything too early, so he didn’t let himself hope—till he hit a wall of glacial blue ice called the Lhotse Face and found a good rhythm.

After he got well beyond Camp 4, a site at about 26,000 feet that most climbers use as their final staging point before the summit push, his hopes increased. When he hit the South Summit and the true summit came into view for the first time, he said, he “really let myself believe it was going to happen.” 

He reached the peak just after 5 a.m. on May 28, according to his team. His time was verified by the organization Fastest Known Time.

Dedicating the Record

Andrews dedicated his achievement to his friend, fellow runner Greg Krupa—who died in April and whose photo he carried up the mountain—along with his many partners in the Everest project.

“Hearing my parents’ and my partner Anna’s voices, from the top of the world after six years of preparation and thinking about this goal, that’s not something I’ll ever forget,” he said. “I’m proud of every record on my list but this one lives in a different category. This is the biggest thing I’ve ever done, full stop.”

Andrews said he hopes his climb—which raised funds for his organization the Chaski Foundation, which supports youth athletes in Ecuador and Nepal—encourages anyone with a goal that seems hard to achieve.

“Keep going,” he said. “For me, after seven attempts over two years, the mountain eventually said yes.”