Web Exclusive: West Ham keeper pulls out all the stops

Leaving Kenya and making the short flight to Tanzania meant a flying altitude of around twenty thousand feet. Twenty minutes before landing our pilot cheerfully announced if we looked out of our windows we could see Mount Kilimanjaro. Looking out of the window it was there, above the clouds, looking at us eye to eye. I had seen the pictures and the video footage, but this was massive. I cursed AMREF for their challenge.

I had felt an extra sense of pressure. I realised I was not an average punter trying to climb Kilimanjaro. I had been on television, radio, in newspapers and magazines trying to drum up sponsorship for the AMREF cause. I wasn’t just going home to my family and friends to tell them that I had failed. I had put myself under severe pressure.

Our party consisted of fifteen people and one leader split fairly evenly between experienced and novice climbers. I was firmly in the beginner category. We were met by an army of forty porters to carry anything and everything needed to complete the climb in relative comfort. This soon became thirty nine as we watched one of the porters slip under the bus they were travelling in and have his leg ran over. This was not the start we were looking for.

Related articles

• Hammers get tough over Green contract
• Rob Green: 21 days that changed my life
• Search the news archive for more stories

Our five day climb consisted of rising at around 6.30 each day for breakfast and hiking for five to eight hours. Starting at the base of the mountain the terrain changed from the warmth of the glades, through to the exposed areas of heath land, and finally the barren grounds of volcanic rock.

We were told in the briefing that no matter how fit you were, it was a lottery as to whether your body would adapt to altitude. I knew from experience that my body does not take too kindly to sea sickness. So I assumed that it would be the same for altitude sickness. I was right.

After a fairly uneventful first few days I woke on the third morning knowing I was in trouble. It was the sort of day where in a normal environment I would have gone back to bed for the day and not move too far away from the bathroom. Unfortunately for me this was not a normal day and I was stuck half way up a mountain and only facing one direction, up. The eight hour hike that followed was absolute torture. ‘Slowly, slowly’ was the cry from the porters as a warning not only to fight the urge to rush up the mountain too quick, but to say to the rest of the group that the tart of a footballer was flagging way behind after stopping for his fifth toilet stop of the morning.

In a strange way I was glad that I had got through that day as I knew whatever the summit day could throw at me, it couldn’t get much worse. I was wrong.

Come the final ascent, the group had realised that the previous five days had been purely preparation for the last push up the mountain. We had spent our evenings, playing poker in the dark and having a joke and a laugh. There wasn’t any of that on the final evening. Nerves had really kicked in. It had felt like a build up to a game for me. A weeks training and resting in preparation for a Saturday, the tension, the build up, and the waiting for it to arrive.

Our final climb started at midnight. Trudging off into the darkness away from the warmth of our sleeping bags and disappearing into the freezing night didn’t seem like a great idea at the time. The hike was to last around seven to eight hours, with at least being in pitch black. It was hell. Physically it was a struggle to breath and there was still another thousand metres to climb, it was cold enough to freeze my drinking tube within the first hour of the climb and then all of my water that I was carrying by a couple of hours. Mentally there was nothing I could do. There was no scenery to take my mind off it and so it was back to staring at the pair of boots of the person in front for the next seven hours.

It wasn’t long before people of other groups started to drop out, and I thought if someone in our group did the same, then they would drop like flies. But hey, we had come this far.

Just after dawn the group had reached Stella Point, one hundred metres below the peak. I was still twenty minutes behind, resting after each couple of steps. Stumbling my way up the side of the mountain. There was nothing else to think of but to where and when my next step would be. It was a slight conciliation knowing that whatever came at me this coming season would be nothing compared to this climb.

The last hundred metre climb between Stella Point and Uhuru Peak took me about forty five minutes. To a man and woman our team had conquered the 5,895m mountain. I cannot remember one celebration from anyone. I was so pleased to have done it but was in too much pain to think of anything else. A quick photo, and head back down. The views were stunning, but it was all too much, it was around minus fifteen-twenty degrees and the oxygen level was below fifty percent of that at sea level.

The group started the descent but a few people started to wobble, and I was one of them. Because of the lack of oxygen to the brain, combined with a lack of water, diarrhoea and vomiting for two days, and a general inability to adapt to altitude, my body gave up on me. With one of my last clear thoughts I decided to call for help, it wasn’t the time or the place to trip of the edge of a mountain.

With the aid of two porters, I was guided down step by step for four hours back to our camp. After two hours sleep I was checked over by one of the group doctors. Each day we were given a medical to see if we could continue. One of the tests checked the oxygen levels in our blood. If it was below 78 percent, then you were deemed unfit to continue. Mine was at 45 percent.

On my return flight home, looking up at Kilimanjaro looked a lot less daunting having just reached its peak, but there was no way I would ever return there. It was by far the most demanding thing I have ever done, much like the first leg of the trip had been mentally demanding. In a similar way, the people of Kibera and Dagoretti had been normal people living in extraordinary conditions, I had been part of an ordinary group of people doing something extraordinary. Apart from the frost bite still in the tips of my fingers, and losing a stone in weight, I survived unscathed. It was an experience I will never forget, and if I am lucky, did some good.