Kili Entry 4 - The Pregnant Lady

Over there, I did not care or even want to summit. For me, nature is more powerful than us. In hindsight, I was scared of her, the mountain, and I just didn’t want to disrespect it. We cannot treat nature as something to conquer, to plant a flag on top of a mountain felt very egoistical to me. Tiny little human. It doesn’t anymore, because the mountain will prove to you just how much you cannot fuck around with it. You’ll have earned your summit, with a lot of endurance and suffering.

Halfway through, my breakthrough was that the only way I can justify self-inflicting pain as a choice would be child birth. With the rise of endurance sport, I wonder if people just ask why? I guess when you give life it is a little bit the same type of suffering for something beautiful. For me the mountain is a woman. I talked to her a few times during the expedition, in my head, trying to connect.

On the last day down, Michael, one of our guides, told me over there they call it “the pregnant lady”. The summit looks like the belly of a pregnant woman. From sea level, Kili looks like Fuji, a cone. But it is not, when you get to the top there is an enormous plateau, and the peak being a mountain on a mountain.

I kept telling him when doing the summit push, that’s what giving birth must feel like. Out of body experience where your brain seems to erase the memory of any pain. I thought that coincidence was funny, and that I was not actually being crazy, there was a reasoning to this madness.

I kinda dig it. A lot.