In the beginning...

In March 2010, my neighbor's sister called me for advice about travel to Africa, since I had been there twice. When I found out that her "hike in Africa" was to climb Mt Kilimanjaro, I said, "Wow, I have always wanted to do that!" And she said, why not come climb it with me? I thought about it for a few days and decided, why not? I am not getting any younger, after all, and I figured I had six months to prepare. My husband Joe rushed to buy me a plane ticket, perhaps so I wouldn't change my mind!

And then I started digging in to setting up a training plan, researching gear, and reading about other people's experiences. That last part has been terrifying. Tales of people unable to sleep during the 7 or 9 days of the climb, throwing up, dizzy and falling down, not being able to remember the summit, being so cold and hungry and exhausted they wanted to just curl up and die --yikes, what WAS I THINKING? And yet, I am committed.

Finding information on how real people actually trained for this climb is not easy. So I decided to create this blog to document my actual training and then the climb itself. Hopefully, it will also help keep up my motivation, especially on grim days like today when it is snowing yet again and probably won't hit 40 degrees all day (those pictures are from this morning):




In my next post I'll describe what I've done in this first 6 weeks of training.
Cheers,
Marlene