We are delighted to announce that earlier this year Stephen Baldwin (pictured left) completed his first challenge to raise funds for Lost Chord UK, by successfully climbing all 5,199 metres of Mount Kenya.
“I completely underestimated how challenging the climb would be. It was the toughest challenge I’ve done to date from a mental and physical perspective for a number of reasons. For a start, we aimed to complete the journey in just 4 days, as opposed to the suggested 5 and – with poor weather forecasts and our initial pickup time shifting back half a day due to us running on ‘Kenyan time’ – we had just 2.5 days to summit and descend!! With such little time to complete the trek we had limited capacity to acclimatise. Across the 2.5 days all four in the group struggled with altitude sickness at different points… pressure headaches, nausea and dizziness – it was horrific.
On summit morning, we rose at 2am to begin our climb; again, I had failed to prepare myself for the mental battle of walking in complete darkness for 4 hours with limited conversation as the group struggled for breath every 10 steps, or so. But my word, the sense of accomplishment we felt at the top was unrivalled. What’s more, we had a short 10 minute window where the clouds broke and we got the most incredible view (as well as 10 minutes of warm sun to warm up the bones!) An incredible 2.5 days where we took 125k steps, climbed 748 ‘floors’ and walked over 93km. Twende mzungus! Onto the next challenge…”
Stephen and his dad will be doing Snowdon on 22nd March, Scafell Pike on 1st June and Ben Nevis on 15th June over father’s day weekend.
He also aims to take on 3 marathons over the August bank holiday or early September. What a legend! Everyone at Lost Chord UK is extremely grateful for Stephen’s amazing fundraising efforts, which will help the charity to provide vital music therapy sessions throughout the UK.
