This is the start of the third day since we came off the mountain. I’m finally starting to feel semi-normal. The first two days, I had trouble getting out of bed. I hadn’t really slept in two weeks, and getting out of the shower–well, I finally exited when the plastic deck chair used started to lose integrity.
On the mountain, I just pushed through everyday. The pain didn’t really register until I stopped. With that pain comes the significance of my effort. My nose is peeling. My lip is split and still painful, especially when it touches toothpaste. I have a persistent tickle cough from the exploding dust on the mountain. But the muscle and joint pain is starting to subside.
For the first two days I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. My wrists felt almost fused. It seemed like someone had hit me across the back of the shoulders with a baseball bat. I pushed at a quarter speed, looking like someone with a delicate, brand new spinal cord injury; a state I still remember being in. It felt like the residual of a marathon: tons of early-season intervals and being sick to the point that my face was puffy, my mind was foggy, and all I wanted to do was sleep.
In the fall of 2009, Chris Waddell attempted to summit Kilimanjaro.Sounds like a basic goal, until you consider that this star athlete andparalympian sought to conquer the 19,340-foot-high mountain without the useof his legs. Waddell's aim was to become the first paraplegic tosummit Kilimanjaro, the tallest freestanding mountain in theworld, unassisted. While he did summit successfully, he did not do so completely unassisted. But he did reach the ultimate goal of bringing attention to his cause, . He wrote a series of dispatches on this expedition for .