The day before reaching the summit, our lead guide August told us to be prepared for this climb to be really, really hard. "Maybe the hardest thing you ever do," he said.

I was journaling about this later and wrote something like, "Yeah right. This has been almost too easy. When I think back to the hardest things I've ever done, I don't even know if this cracks the top 10."

It turns out he was right, and I was wrong. Given the physical and mental shape I was in, I wanted to make summiting Kilimanjaro look easy. I did not.

I got stuck in the suck with everyone else. There were a few moments where I really struggled and if it weren't for a guide handing me a sip of Coca-Cola, or someone in my group giving me some warm water, I might have been in a completely different frame of mind.

It goes to show that at some point, you need other people whenever you're doing hard things. Being in shape helps, but accepting the help of others helps more.

Getting out of the suck

What is this "suck" that I've talked about so much?

It's what I've named the moment that seems to happen often in extreme endurance challenges when things start to...well...suck. While it usually sucks mentally far more than physically, your brain tends to rationalize it by calling to light all the things your body is going through as a way to get you to give up and ease the pain.

I found some really good ways to get out of the suck that I want to share here. It's worth noting that just applying these for a few seconds or minutes doesn't necessarily make things easier. It has to be an all-encompassing mindset shift, or else things will continue to suck.

1. Stop looking up: The worst thing I did early in the night was try to spot the ridgeline in the dark. All I could see was headlamps ahead of me, and not only did they never get closer, but they continued to deteriorate my mindset getting up the mountain.
   
   What did help, surprisingly, was looking down at the shoes of the person in front of me. When doing this, I wasn't thinking about the top. I wasn't thinking about how long was left. All I cared about was matching the cadence of the person in front of me, and it created a micro goal that, while incredibly boring, made the ascent far more bearable than continuing to hopelessly wonder "How much further?"
2. Focusing on others: I learned this from the book Unbeatable Mind, but it was a technique that worked very well. I knew if things were sucking for me, they were definitely sucking for others. So, during breaks, I made sure to check up on others and see if they were doing okay and if I could do anything to help.
   
   Psychologically what it is doing is causing me to forget about my own pain, and focus on someone else's. If you're constantly worrying about others, you forget to worry about your own pain.
   
   It's arguably unhealthy to do this in daily life, but in extreme endurance events, you're just trying to play tricks on yourself to keep pushing further, so it's a useful hack to forget what you're going through.
3. Talk, talk, talk: As I mentioned earlier, I could tell that we all entered the suck when everyone got quiet. So what better way to cheer everyone up than to just talk? When things were going well, that's what we were doing, so why not try to return to that?
   
   I'll admit, I don't know if this helped anyone but myself, but mentally when I started talking again, it gave me the confidence that everything was relatively normal, and that was a powerful mental tool to use to emerge from the suck.
   
   Along these lines, I also tried to crack jokes with people. The only problem was that my brain was fried from the altitude and whenever I opened my mouth I couldn't say what I really meant. My jokes were so unfunny that I can't even begin to describe how awful the attempt was.
4. I had no choice: This may sound ridiculous, but mentally, I had already summited Kilimanjaro 20 times before I even set foot in Africa. I saw it in my mind's eye so many times that I had no choice but to make it. This technique is called visualization and is also described in Unbeatable Mind.
   
   Even as we were climbing, I mentally felt like I had already made it, despite hours left to go. When things got tough, I returned to that mental image in my head as a reality check for what I foresaw happening. Then I just leaned into that and kept moving.

Applying all these for an extended period of time made things a lot better. Soon things were looking up, I felt mentally recharged, and I left the suck behind me.

Leadership

While I used all these tricks to make it to the summit, none of it would have been possible without the guides who led us not only throughout the night but for the 6 days prior.

I especially felt that our head guide, August, put on a master class in leadership getting 11 of us to the summit. Here are some of the things I admired most about his leadership style:

1. Tough love: It's hard to manage the egos of that many people all the way up a mountain in the dark. People ask for breaks, people want to sit a little longer, people want to go faster, people want to go slower.
   
   We had a longer leash for the first 6 days, but when it came down to crunch time, he didn't care what you thought. He just told you what to do, and we all followed.
   
   This sounds so simple, but convincing a dozen tired, cold hikers to collectively do something in the middle of the night with no room for negotiation is an impressive feat.
2. Stick to the plan: Throughout the 8 days on the mountain, he had a plan every day and he stuck to it, no matter what outside forces were at play. The 1:00 AM traffic jam was the biggest eye-opener for me. Despite 100 antsy climbers waiting to get around him, he stuck to the pace, and everyone behind him just had to deal with it. He didn't care about other people's plans–they weren't going to get in the way of his.
3. Words of encouragement: While we were in the suck, August was the only one offering words of encouragement to everyone. They sound so simple in retrospect:
   
   Keep going strong people, keep going!
   
   Never, ever, ever give up.
   
   Thanks for coming!
   
   Don't stop!
   
   But something about the tone of his voice and the intensity of the situation made these short phrases really resonate with me. If anything else, I wanted to keep going just to continue to hear the sound of his voice.

The bottom line was that when we made it to the top, I was in awe of his ability to lead us there. It felt like he had willed us there against our own volition but for our own benefit. I had never been on the receiving end of anything like that.

Not to mention, he was doing this in English, which was probably his 3rd or 4th language!

What a guy. There were so many takeaways from his ability to lead.

Conclusion

Summiting Kilimanjaro was more transformative than I had expected. While I stand by the fact that completing an Ironman triathlon was harder, reaching the summit was in that ballpark.

It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to live out this experience, and I'm so grateful to have accomplished it with strangers who turned into amazing friends over the course of the week.

Also, special thanks to the Georgia Tech Office of Special Scholarships for making this trip possible financially!

One summit down. Six more to go.

Until the next adventure 🫡