I never thought I would be here writing this, but yes, I managed to climb a mountain, Mount Kilimanjaro.
You may say, “thousands climb that mountain every year”, and in fact they do and this makes it look easy and so reachable, but it’s not. Many still fail to reach the summit and many are overwhelmed by altitude sickness or by sheer exhaustion. Kili is still a mountain and mountains are hostile places where, we as human beings are totally out of our element.
“So why do it?!”. For me it was simply to do something different, to have a target and to prove to myself I could achieve something which not everyone (in Malta at least) does. Also, unglamorous & egoistically as it may sound, it was a target to get myself training again, loose weight and feel good and fit again. I am 41 years old, so to shed the extra pounds is not an easy task, but I felt the challenge would make it possible and in fact it did.
I joined a Maltese run organisation, who prepare a group to climb Kilimanjaro yearly. The aim is not only to reach the summit of Africa, but also to raise funds for children in need and last years target was a nice €75,000 to build a kindergarten school in Wushwush in Ethiopia. So in April of 2017, I became a part of KC11 (Kilimanjaro Challenge team 11)
From here we started training and fund raising, which were the two most important elements to prepare ourselves, all18 members of the group for the Challenge of the 5985m. Training details in the next posts!
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