Originally I chose to participate in Climbing for Change in support of my uncle who had been diagnosed with cancer. I saw an ad for the run on Instagram, saw that you had to raise money for a charity of your choice, and thought it was a great opportunity.

I will admit I underestimated the difficulty of the challenge for sure: Tyler and I have always been very athletic, playing sports together and against each other, but this was a different beast. I had experience going on long hikes growing up, summiting some peaks throughout Alberta, but Kilimanjaro sounded intense and difficult.

On the day of the run, I worked in the morning, so we ended up starting at 4pm . . . which led to us running pretty much straight through the night, with the exception of a small nap we took in our cars. But whenever we thought, “hey, this is pretty brutal,” I would remember why I was doing it. We had both raised a decent amount of money for the Alberta Cancer Foundation, so we both had it in our heads that we needed to finish, not only for ourselves but for the people who donated to the cause and for the people who would benefit from those donations. We thought this was hard—but we realized we had no clue what individuals with cancer were dealing with, so we had to finish for them.

Going into the challenge, we had expected to smash it out quickly. After the first few laps, we realized this was no joke. We’re both young and athletic, but without more in-depth training in the weeks prior to the event, this easily became one of the difficult and humbling experiences both of us had ever had.

We are both eager and excited to participate again in 2025, and look forward to getting some other friends out as well to lighten the load a little!