This summer looked a little different for 11-year-old Olivia Trainor.
Trainor, a rising sixth-grader at Chenery Upper Elementary School, hiked Mount Kilimanjaro with her mother, Brittany Caruso, last month. The journey up the Tanzanian volcano, the highest peak in Africa, took nine days—seven up to the summit and two for the way down.
“I loved seeing the glaciers. It’s definitely a different space that I haven’t seen before,” Trainor said.
She and Caruso trained for five months to be physically prepared for the long days of hiking that summiting entailed.
Before school, they would wake up to run the bleacher steps at Harvard Stadium or run laps around Belmont Hill. The training was intense, especially for Trainor, who Caruso said wasn’t overly excited at first about the long trek ahead.
“[One time], halfway through the stairs, we took a break for some water, and she said, ‘As much as I don’t feel like doing this, I think more than anything, pushing myself through these training sessions is really going to help and prepare myself mentally for when we get on the mountain,’ and I thought that for an 11-year-old to say that was just pretty impressive,” Caruso said.
No amount of training, however, could prepare them for potential altitude sickness on the hike. Hikers go through five different climate zones to reach the summit, which stands at nearly 20,000 feet. From desert to arctic, Caruso and Trainor faced varying natural conditions head-on.
On day four of their journey, Trainor suffered from altitude sickness, which occurs when your body struggles to adjust to lower oxygen levels at higher elevations. She turned in early, in hopes of still being able to climb the Barranco Wall, an 843-foot rocky ridge on the southern slope of Mount Kilimanjaro, the following day.
“We didn’t know whether or not we were actually going to be able to finish,” Caruso said.
But with a smile on her face and a burst of newfound energy, Trainor scaled the formidable terrain and continued climbing.
The summit of Kilimanjaro came with a rush of satisfaction and pride for both Caruso and Trainor — and a match of Uno between Trainor and their guide, Edie. That day, Trainor began her descent fresh off a win from the card game and a new sense of fulfillment.
“I pushed myself out of my comfort zone that I never really had gone out of,” Trainor said.
For Caruso, seeing the summit of Kilimanjaro was second to hiking alongside her daughter. They didn’t see any other children making the trek, which can nearly be more of a mental test than a physical one at times.
Without internet or running water, the journey is anything but comfortable — but Caruso said it never seemed to phase her daughter.
“There were moments on the mountain that I was walking behind her, and just feeling so overwhelmed that tears started falling,” she said. “…It’s that mental fortitude, that mental perseverance, and at 11, to cultivate that, I think is spectacular.”
