Acclimatisation

Human life is not desiged to survive above 5,500m. Kilimanjaro’s Uhuru Peak sits at 5,895m, where the oxygen drops to 40% of sea level.

People say it’s like “working with one lung.” But what if you’re a 4ft 9 midget with asthma? That’s a double deficit. Because Asthma l constricts the “pipes” carrying what little oxygen is left.

On that final midnight summit push, I was breathing through a fraction of one lung- Four breaths per second for ten hours straight. My body was glitching for icy air while my ribs felt shattered.

No wonder it hurt that bad when I cried at the summit – a sudden outpour of all emotions I’ve ever known simultaneously released at once. Of course there was the utter joy of having made it to the roof of Africa with my own two tiny feet and all the odds stacked up against me upon ridiculously huge boulders…but it was predominantly the emotion of survival, finally, unclenching.

I have three triggers for an asthma attack: Cold, dry air; Fear; and Lack of Oxygen. Lol Kili said BET and gave me all three at once. My first full-blown asthma attack since I was seven. The kind where my mum used to call the ambulance and pray to every temple she knew.

An asthma attack feels like an elephant sitting on your chest. I felt that once before in Peru at ~3,400m on the Inca Trail. But Kili was the matriarch.

My chest didn’t just tighten it locked. No air in. Neck frozen. Zero oxygen. Panic colliding with the sheer torture of climbing a steep uphill in the freezing dark. Yeah, I’m not doing that again.

But how the FOK did I survive and summit?

Biological re-engineering.

Acclimatisation is basically your body hacking its design limits to keep you alive. And it’s one high-speed genius of a machine we got with so many back ups lying dormant that’s enabled homo-sapiens to evolve this far today.

Day 3 at Lava Tower, we hit 4,600m and waited a while to acclimatise, before descending back to down to Barranco camp to sleep. That day was so shit I think it might have been worse than summit night for me. I legit felt like I was dying – because I kind of was. I had vivid, feverish dreams about family and friends I had no signal to reach. I was in so much agony and cold that I wore every single piece of clothing I’d brought, inside that sleeping bag.

Acute Mountain Sickness (AMS) is a hypoxic wake up call. When AMS hits, your kidneys flood the system with EPO hormones, triggering your bone marrow to pump out new red blood cells. It’s a hard reset at high-speed. While I was “sleeping” at the base of Barranco Wall, my body was becoming more oxygen-dense by the minute. I woke up the next morning, breathing. Breathing as if I was back on sea-level.

Counter-intuitively, high altitude training can actually help asthmatics like it did for me, maybe. Because I’d built an engine that was primed to hunt for every molecule of air. My respiratory strength was a beast thanks to years of dancing and boxing; my diaphragm was trained to handle “air hunger” and knew how to fight for breath instinctively. #VO2MaxTrainings.

The Serendipity of the Fall when I later fell into my close-call hole, my circulatory system was already supercharged for survival in oxygen-depleted environments. Even with two fractured ribs making every breath a jagged agony, and five days of constant internal bleeding from a rupturing kidney, my brain and heart were already “mountain-trained” to function on less volume.

I survived the Event Horizon because I’d already survived the mountain.