'Was Not Expected to be Vulnerable': Stroke Survivor Fastest Woman to Ascend and Descend Mt Kilimanjaro

On the Lemosho route, one of Kilimanjaro’s most demanding trails, popular for its steep gradients, rocky terrain and rapidly changing weather — and where it is said that even the fittest have difficulty navigating — Chennai-based Jayashree Vijay Mohan completed it after surviving a stroke. The results for her were equally rewarding, as she not only earned one Guinness World Record but two. She achieved the record for the fastest descent (CIH) – Female in 10 hours 26 minutes, and also for the fastest ascent (CIH) – Female, completing it in 5 days 6 hours 50 minutes.

Mohan, 36, suffered a stroke in 2021, when life came to a standstill for her. Her left side was paralysed, after which she had to undergo training for balance impairment. Within four years, despite having no previous climbing experience, she gathered the courage to climb Kilimanjaro. "I live by a principle I return to every single day: Avolo daan. Accept and move forward," she says.

Before taking it on in September 2025, the Nandi Hills climb became her rehearsal ground for physical training — all of which, she says, was of no use when she actually went on to summit. We spoke to her recently. Edited excerpts from the interview follow.

Before taking on it in September 2025, the Nandi Hills climb became her rehearsal ground for the physical training - all of which she says was of no use when she actually went on to the summit; we discuss recently. Edited excerpts of the interview.

How were the months of medical rehabilitation - the physical therapy, the 40+ injections, the structured training - the incident that changed life and your outlook back then?

The stroke did not just take something from my body. It took something from my sense of self. I remember lying there thinking, this is not how my story is supposed to go. And then rehabilitation began, physiotherapy sessions that left me exhausted in ways I had never experienced before. Not the good kind of exhaustion that follows a hard climb, but the kind that makes you question everything. I had to relearn holding a spoon, climbing a staircase, and finding the right word mid-sentence.

An image of a crushed piece of paper stayed with me. You can try to smooth it, but the creases remain. That is what I felt like. And for a long time, I kept trying to erase those creases instead of accepting them. Slowly, I realised that fighting my new reality was draining every bit of energy I needed to actually heal. Acceptance, I discovered, is not surrender. The moment I stopped mourning who I was before, I could finally start becoming who I was meant to be after.

So, how did the high altitudes come to your mind after that? Was there a moment during rehabilitation when the idea of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro happened?

One day, I came across something I had read, a simple idea about how capability is not fixed, that it bends and stretches in directions we have not yet tried. That thought planted something in me.

Mount Kilimanjaro entered my mind not as a challenge to prove something to the world, but as a conversation I needed to have with myself. I did not want the stroke to be the last defining chapter. I wanted to write a new one, one where I found out who I could become on the other side of everything I had been through. The idea settled into my heart not as defiance but as a quiet, stubborn possibility.

How did your training plan look after the stroke under such medical conditions?

Post-stroke training was slower, more deliberate and medically supervised at every stage. Balance drills became as important as cardio. Breathing exercises I would once have considered secondary became central to every session. Recovery periods were longer. The margin for overexertion was narrower. But the most significant difference was this: I had to train my brain alongside my body. Neurological recovery does not follow a predictable schedule. Some days, the coordination was there. Some days it simply was not. Learning to work with that uncertainty, rather than against it, was its own kind of discipline.

On Kilimanjaro, as you completed the fastest ascent in 5 days and 6.5 hours and the fastest descent in 10.26 hours, how was the experience, and what were the key challenges?

Physically, the fatigue hit differently from anything I had trained for. My balance was constantly being tested, especially as tiredness accumulated. The descent was the part that demanded the most from me, because going downhill at speed requires a level of coordination that becomes extraordinarily difficult when your body is already running on empty.

But the greater challenge was mental. There were moments when I had to make a very deliberate choice to simplify everything. Stop thinking about the record. Stop thinking about the distance remaining. Just think about the next step. And then the one after that. When I reached the summit, I expected to feel something enormous. What I felt instead was quiet. A deep, grounding stillness. As if the mountain had heard everything I had carried up to it and simply said, yes, you are here. That was enough.

If the summit was not about speed but about redefining resilience, what did this climb ultimately give back to you?

It gave me back trust in myself. Not the trust I had before the stroke, which was built on a version of myself that no longer existed. This was something more honest. A trust in the person I had become through the injections, the physiotherapy, and the slow, unglamorous work of rebuilding. I did not reach that summit despite my constraints. I reached it because learning to live with those constraints had made me more deliberate, more focused and more present than I had ever been.

Women, we believe, are often expected to be quietly resilient. Did you ever feel pressure to appear strong instead of vulnerable?

Always. That pressure is very real, and it is rarely spoken out loud, which makes it harder to name and harder to resist. After the stroke, there were moments when I felt the weight of expectation to appear composed, to frame everything as a triumph, to not let people see how frightened or broken I sometimes felt, because admitting that felt like letting everyone down. But I have come to believe that performing strength is one of the most exhausting things a person can do. I still struggle with balance on certain days. I still lose words mid-thought sometimes. Hiding those realities does not make me stronger. It just makes me lonelier.

Do you ever worry that narratives around records overshadow the deeper story of healing and vice versa, actually?

Yes. That worry sits with me sometimes. Records are easy to headline. They are clean, numerical and shareable. Healing is slow and nonlinear and full of moments that do not photograph well. It happens in hospital corridors and in the middle of the night. I hope that when people hear about the Guinness titles, they pause long enough to ask what came before them, because the records are milestones, but they are not the story.

What does your next summit look like, physically or metaphorically?

Contribution. I want to sit across from stroke survivors and tell them the truth — not the polished version, but the real one. I want to work with neurological recovery initiatives and speak about what it means to make decisions under constraint, to find clarity not despite limitation but through it.

There may be more mountains. I hope there are. Every summit I have ever stood on began right there, in that moment of acceptance, before a single step was taken. That is where the next one will begin, too.