The Road to Kilimanjaro
I just fell down a YouTube rabbit hole of videos about Everest earlier so now I’m very curious.
A message sent to a friend on May 11, 2021. Toronto was on it’s third (fourth?) sort-of lockdown. The weather was miserable, summer teasing its presence on the horizon, spring basically non-existent as dirty snow piles clung to the gutters. And the internet had decided what I really needed was to watch fifteen videos about people climbing the tallest peak in the world.
Almost two years to the day, I sent the following to the same friend, after putting down a deposit on a guided hike for December: So, I’m officially doing Kilimanjaro?!?!!
There were numerous documentaries, several books, and copious articles between those two messages. There was the very rapid realisation that I was absolutely not going to climb Everest, not now, not ever. But there was also an itch. The sense that there was a kind of exploration I’d never really so much as nudged a toe at, a kind that was uncomfortable in a different way to what I knew or perhaps had begun grown familiar with. A kind that meant going up.
Some people have been surprised when I’ve told them.
“I didn’t really take you for a camper,” is one I’ve heard a lot, or maybe, “Are you a hiking person?”
“Not really,” I respond cheerily to both. I’ve camped a total of two days in my entire life, both long nights of pouring rain and thunderous storms that hardly left me aching to do so again. I’ve walked a bit, here and there, and am certainly more than capable of it.
From memory, the part I enjoyed most about camping last time was the hammock-by-the-water, bit.
“I’m an adventuring person,” I’ll clarify. The kind of person that’ll try anything once.
Those that know me well have been less surprised. I get an eye-roll or a gentle, affectionate sort of laugh that says, of course you’ve decided to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. I could say I was going to the moon and there are some people in my life who wouldn’t so much as bat an eyelid.
It felt more like a concept than it did a tangible reality. Even now, just a few days out from flying to Tanzania to begin my trek, it’s hard to form it into a concrete thing in my mind. It still feels like an idea: an idea I have prepared for, certainly; an idea I have trained for, to an excess. But still something that won’t entirely become real until my feet begin the long climb through four seasons and varied terrains to the highest point on the continent of Africa.
For two months, I’ve lived the part of an athlete in training, shifting my usual lifestyle into something so unfamiliar to my routine up to this point. For two months, my entire schedule and ethos for being has been centred around training plans and fitness memberships and moving up the weight rack. I was hungry constantly. My freezer was stocked with so much protein stuffed into individual ziplock bags that it looked like a crime scene. I walked the road back and forth to my bus to spin class so many times that people from the houses started waving at me as I went past.
This isn’t a me I’ve ever been before. I exercise regularly, sure, but it felt like it became my entire personality. At a time of year that I usually spent nesting into my creative pursuits, I was now the complete opposite.
I didn’t dislike it, and there was a strange kind of pride to be found in realising how much my body was capable of. How strong I was capable of growing, careful stages bringing me to a level of fitness I had assumed I would never be able to achieve.
But it also isn’t me. I find the gym tedious and, as much as I love the high energy and warm welcomes of my spin classes, I just don’t need to be there every single of day of the week.
The part that is me is the part I have yet to do. The part in the wide open with the mountain ahead of me, and a group of strangers who have yet to become friends walking along beside me. The part where I see a corner of world I don’t yet know; not the part where I stare down the crusty orange carpeting of the weight section at my local gym.
The part I’m doing it all for – the outdoor bit.
Did I overtrain for Kilimanjaro? Yes, probably. It’s not a technical hike, or even a particularly gruelling one. I could have exercised in my regular way and still got up and down without too much difficulty. Would I have had a good time? …Maybe not.
Rather that I be exhausted and breathless while I’m living out the drab days of early winter in Toronto than when I am up there. Rather have trained so hard now that all I wanted to do was eat and sleep, to be able to spend my days on the mountain enjoying each step forward. To be able to take in the landscape around me, and not just count down the minutes until I can collapse in my tent.
Because some experiences are meant to be once in a lifetime, and that’s certainly as many times as I plan to climb this mountain. (Now, as for the others…)
And if, like my mother, you still need someone to blame for this whole wild idea – someone that isn’t the YouTube algorithm – then you can lay that to rest at the feet of the doctor I met in the fall of 2021. With nothing else to do at the quiet vaccine clinic at which I was working, he offered to check our blood pressures and heart rates.
His eyebrows rose as he checked my pulse and he let out a low whistle. Panic momentarily gripped my chest at his expression until it shifted into a smile.
“Did you know you have the resting heart rate of an athlete?”
I’ll see you on the other side of the mountain.
