Most expedition operators want you to click "book" and stop thinking. Team Kilimanjaro has spent twenty-plus years making it possible to do the opposite — to plan your own route, train your own body, and arrive at the gate already half on the mountain. The tools below are the ones we use ourselves. We're opening them up for the same reason we put our route maps online: the people who want to know, want to know.
The mountain begins long before the trailhead — at the map.
You don't summit Kilimanjaro on the mountain. You summit it in the months before — at home, in the gym, on the trail near where you live.
John's own cyclical-ketogenic formula for getting expedition-ready without crashing your strength. Twelve days of careful deficit, nine days of deliberate metabolic reset — written for people who need to perform at altitude, not for people who need to fit a wedding dress.
live ↗ 💨Estimate yours from a recent 5 km, Cooper, or beep test. See where you stand against population averages for your age and sex, and read an honest verdict on what it means for a standard 7–8 day ascent, a compressed schedule, or a speed climb.
live ↗ 📉What dropping 5 kg actually saves you on Kilimanjaro — in real watts, real calories, real heart-rate reduction, real water-loss reduction, real descent impact on your knees. Route-specific physics, day by day.
live ↗ 🏋Periodised plans tuned to how you're climbing — a standard 7-day ascent asks different things of you than a 5-day push, and both look nothing like training for a speed climb up the mountain on the run.
on the horizon → 🫁Pre-trip protocols and on-mountain symptom tracking. What "go high, sleep low" actually means in days; what to watch for; when to descend regardless of how much you've paid.
on the horizon →What you carry, you carry. What you don't, you wish you had.
Route-specific, weight-aware, exportable to Trello via Blue Cat Importer for people who already live there. Includes the things you forget — spare laces, blister tape, a real warm hat — not just the things in the glossy brochures.
on the horizon → 🌦High-altitude-relevant forecasts, not the city forecast for Moshi. Wind at the crater rim, freezing levels, the actual conditions that decide whether tonight's summit attempt makes sense.
on the horizon → 🧭Wildlife, hazards, and what-to-do-if cards for the regions TK operates in — including the venomous-snake and scorpion briefings we already give clients in person near the Algerian border.
on the horizon →The bits visitors don't need to see. Internal tools, parked here so we can find them.
The operational view. Bookings, briefings, the daily moving parts.
coordinator tool → 📅Departures, guide assignments, route allocations.
coordinator tool → ✅The Trello/Blue Cat Importer workflow — the master client-prep checklist.
coordinator tool → 📡For guides to file situation reports from the mountain — straight to the Live Reports feed, where loved ones at home are watching for them.
coordinator tool ↗ ＋Anywhere you keep losing a URL, park it here.
placeholder →We trust clients to make their own informed decisions. The tools enable that; they don't replace it. Read, plan, train — then talk to us if you want a guide on the trail, or don't.
Every tool here exists because we use it ourselves — for our own training, our own route planning, our own coordination. Sharing it costs us nothing and helps you arrive sharper.
Summit rates on Kilimanjaro vary more by fitness and pre-acclimatisation than by route or operator. We can be the best operator in East Africa; the work is still yours to do.