O liver Foran was 16 when his mother died of brain cancer. Too young to process the grief, he says he internalised everything and for eight years did not shed a tear.

“I didn’t really deal with it... I didn’t cry… I didn’t show any emotion about it,” he tells The Independent . On the outside, everything was fine. He launched a business in real estate and his life had structure and direction. “But I felt empty inside,” he recalls. Finally, he decided to do something about it.

Foran is speaking to The Independent from a cafe located at an altitude of around 3,450m in Namche Bazaar in Nepal, halfway through a monumental challenge to break the sea-to-summit speed record for climbing Mount Everest.…