I finally gotten Mount Kinabalu out of my system, the painful way, within the short span of two days. My group started on the Mesilau trail on Sunday, putting up a night at Laban Rata before tackling the summit on Monday morning at 2.45 a.m.

I found out for myself that I hyperventilate when I exert myself at over 3000 meters above sea level, but despite that I managed to make it to 200 meters of the peak, stopping at the 8.5 km marker of the summit trail. By this time, the sun was already up and if there’s one good thing to highlight about this trip is that the weather was excellent! There was no rain at all!

This makes up for the disappointment in 2008 where we made a u-turn half way up the summit attempt due to heavy rain, which turned the entire mountain like a giant waterfall. Like in 2008, we took the Timpohon route down and it still maintained it’s knee killing properties with the big steps and crazy amount of gravel.

In any case, I’ve enough of climbing mountains and will be sticking to running on tarmac instead.