Reflections on climbing the fourth tallest of the seven summits, without much training.

Essay A

It didn’t hit me until the flight home, staring out the window as the captain announced our cruising altitude: 19,000 feet.

I looked down and realized with a sudden knot in my stomach that just two days prior, I’d been standing on solid ground at that exact same height. Looking out from Uhuru Peak felt like stepping off an airplane mid-flight. Kilimanjaro’s scale is terrifying on paper, but here’s the secret: it’s remarkably accessible. With a slow pace and extraordinary local guides and porters—who combine the stamina of marathoners with absolute warmth—anyone with enough grit can reach the top.

Before the Climb: The Fitness Shock

I booked the trip during a transition period between jobs, eager to make the most of my time off. Then I opened the training guides. It turned out my baseline fitness—a few casual jogs and carrying all my groceries in one trip—was wildly inadequate.

Panic set in, turning my living room into a workout torture chamber:

• Lunges became a daily exercise in leg destruction.
• Squats were performed until my quads vibrated like guitar strings.
• Crunches left me staring at the ceiling, questioning my life choices.

I spent weeks lugging a heavy backpack up gym stair-steppers, enduring puzzled looks while sweating through my gear.

5 Things I Didn’t Know About the Mountain

1. The Asymmetry of Hiking (Pole, Pole vs. Scree Sliding)

Going up and coming down are two different sports. The ascent is defined by the Swahili phrase “Pole, pole” (slowly, slowly)—you move at a slow-motion crawl to acclimate. The descent, however, is a knee-jarring gravity experiment, sliding down thousands of feet of loose volcanic gravel like a runaway trolley.

2. The Crew’s Superhuman Effort

While you gasp for air carrying a 15-pound daypack, a porter carrying a 40-pound duffel on his head will effortlessly breeze past you. They glide up the trail whistling, set up camp, and cook three-course hot meals in tiny tents high up the mountain.

3. The Daily Medical Checks

Every morning and evening, the guide clips a pulse oximeter onto your finger. For ten silent seconds, everyone holds their breath:

A reading of 90% oxygen saturation makes you feel invincible. A sudden dip to 72% triggers a quiet internal panic over whether you’ll make it to sunrise.

4. Walking Above the Cloud Line

By day three, you break through the weather layer into high-alpine desert. You look down to find the sky you were standing under days ago now blanketed beneath your boots in a brilliant, endless sea of white fluff.

5. Glaciers at the Equator

Kilimanjaro sits just three degrees south of the equator. Starting in lush, humid rainforest and ending next to 30-foot walls of ancient blue ice frozen into the volcanic ash is a geographical mind-bend your brain struggles to wrap itself around.

The Summit & Beyond

Reaching Uhuru Peak at 19,341 feet in the freezing dawn is a blur of gasping breaths, tears, and quick photos before the thin air forces you down.

The real reward comes at the base: a hot shower and an ice-cold local Kilimanjaro Premium Lager (tagline: “If you can’t climb it, drink it!”). The sore legs fade within a week, but the feeling of standing on top of Africa stays with you forever.

Essay B

Google tells me that at over 19K feet, Kilimanjaro is the highest point in Africa and the tallest freestanding mountain.

That number didn’t ever make sense to me, even after I’d climbed the mountain. The moment it finally hit me, was the morning after I came down, and was taking a flight to Nairobi. My tiny plane went through the usual takeoff machinations, took off, and broke through the 3-5 seconds of clouds – you all know what I’m talking about. At that moment, I sleepily looked out window, and realized that the peak I had scaled 48 hours ago was right there, eye level with me.

That’s right. I had just climbed to the cruising altitude of a small commercial plane.

Having said that, I should tell you all that I’m no paragon of fitness – with some training and a great deal of help, Kilimanjaro is quite accessible to climb, so don’t let that number scare you. I definitely couldn’t have done any of it without the amazing crew I had with me, specially my team from Kandoo Adventures who (sometimes literally) led me by the hand to the top!

Before the climb

As I contemplated the 3 month break between business school and Bain, I figured I should use it for something that may be too time consuming for me to pursue later in my career. (I’d be proven wrong about this by my amazing company 2 years later, but more on that some other time). The options we going to Antarctica, hopping on the Trans-siberian Railway, or Kilimanjaro. Given my recent brushes with the New England winters and impending future in the Chicago ones, the first two options didn’t really appeal, so the decision was quite an easy one to make.

The logistics of the trip were relatively easy – once I had picked Kandoo Adventures to do the hike with, nearly everything was taken care through a combination of their staff and incredibly helpful packing lists on what to wear/carry/drink/eat.

However, all the trekking gear in the world was not going to make me a trekker, so I had to get fit. And quick. My trip to Patagonia just a few months prior was proof that my endurance was middling at best. So began my regular regimen of weights and runs. I learnt all these words that were only random verbs used in other contexts – I used to “lunge” to grab that spilling coffee, “crunch” my numbers for accounting homework, “squat” to mop the floor and “raise” the blinds in the room, but now I was doing those things to not kill myself on a mountain.

6 Things I didn’t know about climbing Kilimanjaro

1. It takes 6.5 days to go up and 1.5 days to come down the same altitude

Altitude sickness is a real downer. The only way to treat it really is to come down. So, to acclimatize ourselves, we climb up REAL slow, and climb down REAL fast. All of my pre-climb training was of no use on the way up, as most of it was a casual slightly inclined stroll, but on the way down, my knees, toes, thighs and calves were all thankful for the weights training I’d been doing.

2. You hike all of it with only your bare essentials – sunscreen, 3L of water and snacks

Unless you’re a pro and WANT to carry your own stuff, most climbers go with huge (and I mean huge) crews that carry their tents, porta-potties, food AND their large backpacks – an average hiker is only going to be a carrying a small pack. Amazingly yet annoyingly, the crew carrying all of this would always leave camp after us, but always get to the next one before us – they would be whistling tunes and hopping about like goats on a mountain while we wheezily dragged ourselves up.

3. They measure your heart rate and oxygen levels multiple times each day to make sure your body is acclimatizing

It was the most stressful part of each day – the moment when the guides would come and place the little clip on our fingers to check heart rate and oxygen levels – too high a heart rate or too low an oxygen level meant immediately turning back

4. After day 3, you’re entirely above the cloud lines – so everywhere you look, your eyes will just see white fluffiness

I remember being overjoyed when we finally broke above the cloud line – because that is when you start to see the summit itself

5. Once you’re above the cloud line, you’re going to see the Milkyway.

Nobody told me this was going to happen, but in hindsight, it was so obvious. Where else can you get so little light pollution, non-existent cloud cover?

6. There’s a glacier at the top of the peak

Who’d have thought that there would be a glacier so close to the the tropics? Not me – but there you go!

After the climb

Buy a Kilimanjaro (beer), and enjoy your newfound bragging rights. ‘Nuff said.