By 
Hannah Otto pedaled her mountain bike 18 grueling miles at an average 12% gradient that kicks up to more than 40% in the last two miles where she scrambled over rocks with her bike strapped to her back to reach the top of Mount Kilimanjaro on Nov. 3.
But that was only half the battle for the Utah professional mountain biker. She still had to ride down to become the first known woman climb and descend the highest mountain in Africa and the highest free-standing mountain in the world at 19,341 feet in a single day.
Two miles from the bottom, she slid out in some mud. She felt a bone snap in her left leg. She saw her femur and her lower leg moving in opposite directions. She tried to stand several times, but fell to the ground, screaming in pain. There was no one else around.
“I said out loud, ‘I can’t believe I just broke my leg,’” Otto recounted to the Deseret News.
For the next 10 minutes, she lay on her back in 2 to 4 inches of water, staring at the sky. She had a decision to make.
“I was already grieving the fact that I had gotten so close, and I was imagining retelling this story to people saying, ‘You know, well, I would have made it, but — and I was so close, but’ — and it just occurred to me that I had the choice. I could decide how I ended the story,” she said.
“And so I crawled to my bike and I propped it up like a crutch and I put the dropper seat down and I wiggled my way on and I kicked off with one foot and I rode the next two miles with one leg to the finish.”
Every bump in the road sent excruciating pain through her dangling leg. She relied on prayers and willpower to keep pedaling.
‘Don’t touch me’
About 100 yards from the finish line, she saw more than 20 Tanzanians singing, dancing, clapping and celebrating her feat, unaware of her broken leg. Her husband, Clayton, was clapping alongside them with a huge smile on his face. She yelled his name several times, drawing a confused look. “I broke my leg,” she shouted.
Clayton ran over, but Otto told him not touch her for fear her ride wouldn’t count. He walked next to her, arms in the air until he could lift her off the bike after she crossed the line.
“I think this shows that a dream may just be the most powerful thing in the world,” she said.
For the record, Otto ascended and descended Kilimanjaro in 10 hours, 18 minutes, 51 seconds. It is one of the most extreme challenges on two wheels, navigating nearly 15,000 feet of elevation gain, steep and unstable terrain and rapidly thinning oxygen.
Canadian mountain biker Cory Wallace set the fastest known time of 8 hours, 55 minutes in 2022. No verified women’s time exists. Otto aimed to go up and down in under 12 hours.
Along the way, she helped raise more than $63,000 for World Bicycle Relief, which provides durable bikes to students, health workers and farmers in rural areas, as part of an effort called “Beyond the Summit.” The Intrepid Foundation, a nonprofit that helps travelers give back to the places they visit, backed the project.
Otto was quick to point out that her solo ride the top didn’t happen without the team around her, including 43 Tanzanians hired as guides, chefs and porters; one of them even carried a toilet up the mountain. She had each person sign her cycling jersey before she began the ascent.
“When I reached the summit, I held it up and cried. Because that moment, that achievement, that victory belonged to all of us and that was my way of allowing everyone to be there,” she posted on Instagram.
Heart rate up, power down
Otto’s attempt on Kilimanjaro came after months of planning and training, typically on the trails at Park City Mountain. She rode as many days as possible at 10,000 feet or higher. She also hit the gym, cranking the treadmill to the steepest incline and hiking with a sandbag.
She and her team spent a week acclimating to the mountain’s altitude and conditions before setting off at 3 a.m. on Nov. 3 in the pitch black. Her small light illuminated only the path directly in front of her. The monkeys howling in the rain forest were “quite scary,” creating an eerie start to the ascent.
Her mountain bike racing instincts gave way to easing off the gas as she climbed higher and the air grew thinner. At 15,500 feet elevation, it’s no longer possible to ride a bike as the gradient kicks up to more than 40%. Otto strapped her bike on her back for the final ascent, covering nearly three miles over a layer of snow. “That hike-a-bike is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she said.
Pushing too hard turned to stumbling because her foot wasn’t willing to lift high enough off the ground.
“With a bike on your back, it just felt like with every step, the bike got heavier. And I found myself towards the end thinking, if I have to lift this bike one more time, if I have to move this bike one more time, it might just be the end,” Otto said.
“There was a scrambling section actually where I had to use my hands also to grab onto the rocks to pull myself up. And that’s around 18,000 feet. With a bike on your back, oxygen deprived, it almost felt like you were in another world. It’s like your whole body goes into a state of preservation, whether you want it to or not. It’s no longer listening to, hey, I need to go faster. It’s just surviving.”
Feeling like a ‘million bucks’
There can be hundreds of hikers on top of Kilimanjaro on any given day. Otto was grateful there were fewer than five when she reached the summit, letting out a yell as she touched the wooden sign on the peak. “So I had a really lucky experience getting to feel like I was on the roof of Africa nearly alone, which was really emotional and special. But that wasn’t the end. Then I had to turn around and come down,” she said.
Otto hiked down those first few steep miles and climbed back on her bike. She felt like a “million bucks.” She had just summited one of the Seven Summits — the highest peak on each of the world’s seven continents. She was on her way to becoming the first women to ride Kilimanjaro in a day.
“I felt like I was riding as the best version of myself, and I was also very aware of the danger still. I remember constantly thinking, ‘Don’t throw this all away. Just get to the bottom. A couple minutes doesn’t matter. Safety’s better,“ she said. ”So I was proceeding with caution, but mountain biking is mountain biking, and anything can happen at any moment. It can happen in a race, it can happen on Kilimanjaro, it can happen in your driveway."
Otto lost her wheel when she came around a corner on mostly dry dirt that turned wet and muddy. She stuck her foot out and did a Superman slide through the mud when her leg snapped.
“I had guides that were with me on the mountain, but for the integrity of the attempt, I had asked them to give me space,” she said. The closest was about 15 minutes behind her. “And I did know that he was coming, but 15 minutes feels like an eternity.”
That’s when she decided to one-leg it to the bottom.
A different person now
After finished the ride, her team whisked her to the near hospital where an X-ray confirmed a broken leg. Rather than have surgery in Tanzania, she opted to make the 30-hour trip back to Salt Lake City. Her team drove six hours to find a brace so she could fly home.
A CT scan and MRI confirmed two unstable fractures of the tibial plateau (bilateral condylar fractures) and an avulsed anterior cruciate ligament. In layman’s terms, she broke both sides of the top of the shinbone at the knee and pulled the ACL from its attachment to the bone.
Otto underwent surgery in Utah. She has two plates and “many” screws in her leg that will stay there. She has cast padding from ankle to hip wrapped in an Ace bandage. She can’t put weight on the leg for eight to 10 weeks. She’ll admittedly be “grumpy” without her bike for a while. Though sad, disappointed and afraid, she’s a “relentless optimist.” She believes everything happens for a reason and that she’ll be just fine. She anticipates racing again in 2027.
“Isn’t that one of the most interesting things about life? The juxtaposition of it all. The incredible highs and the unexpected lows. Feeling invincible one minute and incredibly vulnerable the next,” she wrote on Instagram.
“Going from doing something you never thought possible to struggling with things you never thought twice about. I really think the lows make the highs even better and after 30 hours of travel with a broken leg I’m laying here on my couch thinking about those days on the mountain, how I wouldn’t take any of them back, and how they really were some of the best days of my life.”
Over the past five years, record-setting climbs and fastest known times have become a big part of Otto’s cycling career. She set records on the world-famous, point-to-point mountain bike routes near Moab, Utah, known as the Whole Enchilada, the Kokopelli Trail and the White Rim. Last year, she set the record on Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii.
She learned something about herself on each ride, Mount Kilimanjaro included. She said she feels like a different person — more confident, more self-assured, more capable of overcoming adversity, more toughness to get through “darn near anything.”
“Honestly, I thought I bit off more than I could chew with this one, and that wasn’t even including the broken leg,” Otto said. “I got a little extra bang for my buck, and I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I’m not the same person who arrived at that mountain now.”
https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/utah-mountain-biker-conquers-kilimanjaro-043409309.html
