How hard is it to climb Kilimanjaro?

The standard routes are trails. You need no ropes, no harness and no climbing moves, and a few rocky steps on some routes ask for a hand on the rock for balance, nothing more. If you can walk uphill for hours on a rough path, you have the skill the route needs.

A normal day on the mountain is five to eight hours on foot, slowly, with a daypack of water, layers and food. One such day is a good hike. The difficulty is the next morning, and the one after: you set off again on legs that have not fully recovered, sleeping in a tent or a hut, for most of a week.

That is the part training changes most. Hours on your feet at an easy pace, then two of those days back to back, with the pack you will carry.

The last climb leaves high camp around midnight, at about 4,700 m. It gains roughly 1,200 m to Uhuru Peak, 5,895 m, over six or seven hours in the dark, then descends a long way to a lower camp. Counted from midnight, it is about fifteen hours on foot.

It is slow, cold and tiring in a way a normal hike is not: you walk when your body wants to sleep, eating little, at the slowest pace of the whole trip.

Altitude is the part fitness does not decide. Being fit does not prevent altitude sickness, and you cannot train for thin air at home. What gives your body more time to adjust is the route: an itinerary with more nights on the mountain.

Heart or lung conditions, medication or previous altitude illness are questions for a doctor, before you book. On the mountain, the guide decides when to go on and when to turn round.

You start in warm forest and finish among cold rock and ice. Nights high on the mountain are below freezing, and summit night is the coldest stretch of all, because you move slowly in the dark and make little heat. Warm layers, a hat and good gloves matter as much as anything you train.

No climbing experience is needed. Walking experience is: the useful question is whether you have walked five or six hours in a day, and then done it again the next day. If you have not, that is what to build before you go, over months rather than weeks.

Start by finding out where you stand. The free vertical test turns one climb near home into metres per hour, and tells you what to train.

Walk more, slowly, uphill and downhill, with a light pack, and make the long days longer until two in a row feel ordinary. The Kilimanjaro training plan writes those weeks back from your trek date, and rewrites the next one when a week goes wrong.