MIAMISBURG, Ohio — An Ohio woman’s perseverance is what she hopes will take her to the top of one of the tallest mountains in the world.

What You Need To Know

  • Cheryl Dillin, a climber from the Dayton area, has been scaling mountains for nearly a decade 

  • She set her eyes on Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa, the tallest freestanding mountain in the world 

  • She's been training four days a week to prepare for the big climb in August 

Cheryl Dillin is getting ready to climb a mountain.

“I’m training so hard because I don’t want it to be hard, I don’t want the mountain to be hard,” said Dillin. 

Her journey started almost 10 years ago on vacation when she found out there was a way to make it to the top of a mountain.

“Somebody was like ‘yeah I climbed that,’ and I was like, ‘wait, what? you can climb that?’ and it seemed absolutely unattainable. So I decided I needed to try it too,” said Dillin. 

She says she was never an athletic person, so she got to work. She’s been training in the gym at least four times a week, to get up to what seemed impossible.

“Living in Ohio, we don’t exactly have a lot of mountains to climb so I would go out to Colorado and I would climb a couple of mountains out in Colorado, I would do some rock climbing or like gym climbing,” said Dillin. 

From then on she was hooked, climbing mountain after mountain, until she got to her highest climb in Russia.

“When I was on the mountain in Russia, I could see the top of the mountain, it was it was like right there, right at the tip, and I just wanted to run there and I could not make my feet go any faster, it just physically was not possible, that altitude is so strong that it takes about 50% of your oxygen away,” said Dillin. 

She says she pushed through to the top, and then wanted to go even higher. She wants to go to the highest freestanding mountain in the world, Mount Kilimanjaro, a 19,000 plus foot climb. It’s a mountain in Africa that can be so hard to climb that some have died trying to climb it.

However, it was something else that made Dillin rethink her plans, COVID. 

“I’m not worried about being over there on the mountain, but I was worried about my health. I didn’t want to get sick and then be stuck in a different country,” said Dillin. 

She hasn’t attempted it since the idea came about 2020, but she says all that’s about change.

“I just said, am I going to be on my deathbed and be sad that I never went back and conquer Kilimanjaro? and the answer was yes,” said Dillin. 

It was the motivation she needed to go back to the gym and train for an August climb up Kilimanjaro, but this time she’s doing fewer workouts as the time gets closer.

“I’m not training for the same things as these elite athletes are, but we have the same mental needs,” said Dillin. “They got to go really, really hard for an hour, like just as hard as your body can go. I have to reserve that for seven days,” she said. 

It’s a seven-day climb. To prove to herself, she can do it.

“If I make it, I’m happy,” said Dillin.