Walking a mountain to help beat muscle-wasting conditions

Last month saw Sarah Revell, Dan Kenward, Aaron Felton, Adam Felton and Elspeth Robertson join a group of 12 others to tackle the 6-day challenge of climbing Kilimanjaro.

This amazing adventure saw them spend nine days in Tanzania scaling to the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s tallest free-standing mountain at 5,895m / 19,341ft above sea level, to raise thousands towards Muscular Dystrophy UK. The charity gives emotional and practical support to 70,000 children and adults in the UK living with muscle-wasting conditions, and funds ground-breaking research into treatments. The Managing Director of the company they work for has a rare type of the condition and is now a wheelchair user.

Our Story Our journey to the top of Mt Kilimanjaro followed the Machame route a 6-day trek starting from the south west side of the mountain and approaches the summit via Barafu Camp and Stella Point. This trek is one of the most popular routes on Kilimanjaro due to its unspoilt and scenic approach to the summit.

At the beginning of the trek, we were all slightly nervous, but we had a great team around us including the local guides and porters, who had all made the trip many times.

The 6-day trek proved to be very challenging and required a lot of physical and mental strength as we climbed through the very different terrains each day. Each day started early with everyone up and packed ready for breakfast and for our guides to start taking down camp. The team was amazed at how much the porters carried for us, we cannot thank them all enough for their help and support.

Unfortunately, Dan was not able to complete the trip due to an injury and had to come back down on day 3. This was a blow for Dan but it was the right thing to do to avoid making his injury any worse. Elspeth suffered from altitude sickness during the trip. She did amazingly well and was able to make it half way up on summit night. She decided with the advice from our doctor to start descending early as the altitude sickness was getting worse the higher she went.

Words cannot describe the feeling of reaching the summit on the 5th day. We started out at 11pm with the plan to reach Uhura Peak as the sun was coming up. After a short break to rest at Stella Point and we all got ready for the final 45 min walk to the Summit. We had an opportunity to take photos before we started the next challenge, the decent back down. The final night at camp was one of amazement as no one could believe that they had reached the summit of Kilimanjaro and were now on the final decent to the gate. Everyone went to bed early after the gruelling 11-hour summit walk. The final day was a short 5 hr walk down to the gate where we celebrated with our guides/porters with a traditional song and dance.

We would like to thank everyone who has supported us with this challenge and donated to Muscular Dystrophy, we have been able to raise over £20,000. There is still time to donate via our team just giving link www.justgiving.com/fundraising/RBStarTrekkers www.justgiving.com/fundraising/RBStarTrekkers