Yeah, You Can Do That: A Decade Ago, the Trip That Changed the Trajectory of My Life
You're Too Old to Spend the Rest of Your Life on the Couch: Let's Adventure!
Nothing has been the same since
In 2013, I successfully summited Africa’s tallest mountain. It was the beginning of a whole new life in many ways.
I’d been exploring adventure travel, and was energized for more.
I planned to visit Tanzania for a month. A good friend, a retired NFL player, had a suggestion.
“You need to climb Kilimanjaro,” he said.
“But I just had knee surgery,” I whined.
“Nonsense. The snows are melting. If you don’t go now, you’ll slap yourself in the forehead at eighty for not doing it.”
The moment we hung up, I fired an email to my operator, eTrip Africa.
Add Kilimanjaro, I wrote.
With those words, I changed the trajectory of my life forever.
At the time, I was lifting an average of three to four days a week. I leapt into my research. I took e-Trip Africa’s planning advice and expanded on it.
As I was living in Colorado at the time, I was already used to high altitudes, but now I had to add endurance work and a variety of training methods.
By the middle of that summer, I was cycling, swimming and running tens of thousands of stairs a week. I hiked a number of fourteen-thousand-foot mountains, which are plenty enough of a challenge.
The air gets thin that high and the going gets far rougher. Some folks can barely drive through Denver without a nosebleed. I was getting ready to climb nearly four times higher than Denver proper.
For those unfamiliar with the challenges of climbing at altitude, please see this article about altitude sickness. Anyone can get it, including experienced Everest hikers.
Training for Kili has far more to do with building endurance and heart.
By the end of summer I was putting in long bike rides over steep hills and long morning hikes with a weighted vest.
Kindly, I am THE clumsiest athlete you’ll ever see but I am by god determined.
I put in three, sometimes four hours a day training while listening to the soundtrack from the movie Rudy.
E-Trip recommended that I take the eight-day Rongai Route. That provides more time for the body to adjust to the demands of altitude.
There are three-day programs run by budget outfits. Sure there are.
That’s a good way to head down toes up, which is as true for Kili as it is for Everest Base Camp or any mountain adventure. That can also result in porter and guide injury or death, albeit too many of us don’t stop to think enough about our teams.
Of course I got overuse injuries. I had Rocktape on my shoulders, knees, ankles. The part I came to love the most was stair-running at altitude.
I loved the feeling of strength, the surge of good strong muscles. I’d never felt so strong, and I was sixty. These days that sounds so young.
Those legs got me up hours of hard hiking, as the air thinned out, as it got harder to breathe and even harder to find interest in eating and hydrating, which are both critical.
The last two hours as we rose towards twenty thousand feet, it got brutal. My water line froze, and we had to knock the ice out to get me hydrated. I was nauseous, which is a common side effect of altitude sickness, but not serious enough to quit.
Finally, after moving at a shuffling snail’s pace to reach the iconic sign, we celebrated, grinned, ate granola bars, and took a half-minute break.
For one brief, transcendent moment, I stood quietly by myself, picked up a rock. Hefted it.
“If I can do this,” I thought, “What else can I do?”
The reasons we made it were many. Among them, a well-trained and happy porter crew. To wit:
The summit, in effect, was the easiest part. Exhausted by the long night we headed down. Kili is a slippery scree field all the way back to base came, almost four thousand feet of skiddy, dangerous slope.
Any serious climber will tell you that one of the big reasons there is so much death on Everest in particular is that people focus solely on the summit. You and I have to have serious juice left in the tank for the treacherous, long way down no matter the mountain, even if it’s a so-called “easy” day hike.
You hear little about what it’s like to head back down hill. I cranked my knee about one-third of the way down. Seconds later both Ignas and August appeared on either side of me. I wrapped my arms around their necks and we skidded back to base camp in minutes, met at the bottom by porters handing us ice-cold mango juice.
Nothing has ever tasted so good before or since.
After lunch we headed down the opposite side along the more scenic path through dense, mossy forests. After a long, solid night’s sleep in our tents punctuated by a hard rain which turned to snow, it was Tip Day.
Tip Day means The Dance, when the porters and guides joyfully celebrate your climb. And, of course, getting paid.
The way back down, step by faster step, bodies sore and aching, our lungs regaining oxygen and strength because of increased appetite, we made our way back to the park entrance.
In no time flat we were back at our lodge, where I collapsed gratefully into a comfortable bed. I woke up with that sense of unreality that I had just done a momentous thing, especially when I gazed out the window at that magnificent peak.
Of course I was so sore I couldn’t move, but before I found that out, I just considered that view. I couldn’t do much else until I located my muscle cream, after which I slathered the entire can of it on myself just so that I could go pee.
Then I collapsed back on the bed and stared at the summit.
I did that, I thought. Holy cow. I did it.
Before I left, this:
After that trip I got more involved with Kilimanjaro, especially after learning about the Kilimanjaro Porter’s Assistance Project or KPAP, of which e-Trip was an active leader. KPAP is a leader in supporting the lowest-paid and most vulnerable workers on your trip: your porters.
Taking on Kilimanjaro at sixty really wasn’t that big a deal, not in retrospect. Since then, I’ve read stories about others who summitted not only disabled, or blind, but without feet or hands, much older than I am, or morbidly obese.
E-Trip also took me up Mt. Kenya and send me on some eight trips all over eastern Africa to multiple countries, expanding my understanding of this amazing continent and its extraordinary people.
Kilimanjaro, the easiest of the world’s seven great climbs, represents a rite of passage for many. Certainly if nothing else, the effort will dispel doubts you and I may harbor about ourselves and we can accomplish if we would but commit completely.
I became an adventure athlete as a career. Part of that work has been to help recognize and support those remarkable men and women porters who, all year long, go up and down Kili, just as they do with tourists all over the world.
We struggle to do it just once.
If you’re thinking of doing this, please consider using someone who is a partner in the KPAP family of outfitters. That way you are assured that your crew is well fed, fairly paid, the tips are transparent, they get proper tents, clothing and gear. Such things are not guaranteed by all outfitters on Kilimanjaro.
For a list of those companies please see this.
Perhaps then you too, will stand under the iconic sign, your tired arms raised in victory, for a memory that will last a lifetime.
Above all, find a seriously badass goal, the accomplishment of which, and journey along the way, will give you great joy.
Let’s play.
Thanks for taking a short trip with me today. I hope you’re inspired to find your own mountain to climb, and that the way both up and down is joyful for you. If you are inspired, please consider supporting my work or
If you know someone else who’s considering a big climb, please also consider
Whatever you do, play well, play smart, play hard, but above all, PLAY.
Total badassery!! Thanks, Julia!
You have my deep admiration, Julia!