Navratilova on Kilimanjaro

She HAD TO DESCEND. I can totally sympathize, being not so good at high altitudes myself. You either have the physiology for it or you don’t, and we now see that even one of the greatest athletes of the 20th century can be stymied by it.

I was thinking about Kilimanjaro recently, for the rather obvious reason that I was camped at the bottom of it one night in mid-November. And many of the safari guides have doubled at some point as Kilimanjaro guides, and they’ve all lost 1 or 2 clients killed by altitude there. It’s supposedly not at all a hard technical climb, but it’s high enough that it’s a great test of your lungs and your blood.