‘I Didn’t Know I Was Going to Kilimanjaro When I Started Hiking’: How This Banker Reached Everest

At 8,849 metres above sea level, there is little room for anything except the next step.

On 21 May 2026, as Shradha Gupta stood on the summit of Mount Everest, the world below seemed to disappear. Around her stretched a landscape of snow, ice and distant ridgelines, while the summit itself offered barely enough space to stand. 

After years of balancing boardrooms, client calls and a demanding banking career with early-morning workouts and long weekends in the mountains, the 41-year-old banker from Delhi had finally reached the highest point on Earth.

“I didn’t know I was going to Kilimanjaro when I started hiking. When I started Kilimanjaro, I had no idea that I was going to be at Everest,” she tells The Better India.

Perhaps that is what makes her journey remarkable. Everest was not a childhood ambition mapped out over decades. Just three years before standing on its summit, Shradha had only recently rediscovered something she had loved as a child: mountains.

Today, she has climbed five major summits across three continents, including four of the Seven Summits — Kilimanjaro in Africa, Elbrus in Europe and Aconcagua in South America — along with Manaslu and Everest in the Himalayas. But for Shradha, the story begins long before the summit photographs.

It begins with a glass table, a long recovery, and a realisation that life had been passing by.

The accident that made her look back

Shradha has spent two decades in banking. Originally from Delhi, she left India at 17 to study engineering in Singapore and eventually joined DBS Bank, beginning her career on the trading floor. She spent 11 years in Singapore before moving to Dubai with the same bank in 2017. Today, she leads corporate business for the Middle East.

For years, work had naturally occupied much of her life. Then, in 2020, an accident at home changed the way she looked at it.

A glass table caused a severe forehead injury that required reconstructive surgery. The bone had broken, muscles had torn, and her doctors had to piece everything together layer by layer. Her recovery took around 18 months.

“The first one to two months was really bad. I couldn’t even walk properly because it affected my balance, and it used to hurt all the time,” she recalls.

The experience left her thinking about how close she had come to losing the life she knew. It also made her wonder about everything she had postponed.

“I think for me it ended up just being a life-changing experience,” she adds.

“I started thinking about how life had taken over, how work had taken over, and you just keep going year by year, and you forget about the things that are important to you and the ones that give you joy.”

One of those things had always been mountains.

Growing up in Delhi, Shradha remembers her parents packing the family into their car during school holidays and heading towards the hills. Nainital, Mussoorie, Pithoragarh, Sangla Valley and other parts of Himachal Pradesh were part of her childhood.

She had even climbed Mount Fuji with her parents as a teenager and later hiked in Malaysia while studying in Singapore. But a long gap passed before she returned to the mountains.

That changed in February 2022.

From weekend hikes to a much bigger dream

A friend invited Shradha on a hike in Dubai with a group of women. Until then, she had associated Dubai with skyscrapers, not mountains.

“I didn’t even know that I could hike in Dubai,” she says. “I had no idea that there were mountains like two hours away.”

After that first hike, she kept returning, heading almost every weekend towards the mountains around Ras Al Khaimah and Fujairah. The hikes became her place to switch off, move and feel like herself again.

Then came an old bucket-list dream: Mount Kilimanjaro.

With her 40th birthday approaching, Shradha decided she did not want to keep waiting.

“I don’t know how long my body and mind are going to support me. So, if I have to do this, then let’s just do it. There’s no point waiting anymore.”

There was one practical problem. Kilimanjaro could take seven to nine days, and Shradha had never been unavailable for that long in her corporate career. She leads a business dealing with large corporate clients, so being disconnected was unfamiliar territory.

Eventually, she found an expedition during the Eid break, giving her a week away from work. In June 2023, she set off.

It was also her first expedition with strangers: five women, including three Indians, an Algerian and an Egyptian, along with one husband and their British expedition leader.

The mountain gave them something in common.

“You’re there for each other, supporting, talking about your life stories, and sharing food together.”

More importantly, Kilimanjaro showed Shradha that she could actually do this.

“I learnt that I could climb when I almost thought it was impossible,” she shares.

One summit kept leading to another

After Kilimanjaro, Shradha travelled to Everest Base Camp in October 2023. It was there, while watching the sunrise from Kala Patthar, that the thought first appeared.

She looked at Everest as the sunlight emerged behind it and thought, “One day, I want to stand on top of that mountain.”

It was not yet a plan, but the idea never took a back seat. 

Her next test was Mount Elbrus, Europe’s highest mountain, in June 2024. If Kilimanjaro had tested her at altitude and Everest Base Camp had tested her endurance over a longer journey, Elbrus introduced her to technical climbing on ice and snow.

Then came Aconcagua in January 2025, the highest mountain in South America and the highest peak outside Asia.

Each expedition, she says, became a way of introducing one new variable. Higher altitude. Longer duration. More technical terrain.

By then, Everest was no longer just a thought.

Before attempting it, though, Shradha wanted to test herself at 8,000 metres.

In September 2025, she climbed Manaslu, the 8th-highest mountain in the world, at 8,163 metres, with Elite Exped. It was her first 8,000er and a completely different world from the mountains she had climbed before.

There were fixed ropes, ladder crossings, crevasses, avalanches and the extreme conditions of what mountaineers call the “death zone”.

“Once you’re in the 8,000-metre degree, it’s a completely different world,” she says. “It is harsh, and almost every day it’s like you’re fighting for your life because you don’t know what’s going to go wrong.”

Manaslu confirmed that she was ready to attempt Everest. But it also showed her exactly how much preparation would be required.

Preparing for the mountain while holding down a career

Training for Everest became another full-time commitment layered on top of her actual job.

In Dubai, Shradha hikes whenever she can. During the summer, when temperatures can make outdoor training difficult, she uses Ski Dubai’s indoor slope. Her routine also includes weightlifting, incline treadmill sessions, StairMaster workouts, swimming and running.

At peak training, she was spending nearly two and a half to three hours exercising each day, split between mornings before work and evenings afterwards.

Her Everest coach, Mike McCastle, based in Las Vegas, USA, began working with her in January 2026.

“She began fit. She finished expedition-ready,” he says.

McCastle’s programme focused not just on cardiovascular fitness but on the demands of an expedition: loaded uphill movement, strength endurance, muscular durability, recovery and the ability to keep working after fatigue had accumulated.

For him, Shradha’s age was not the defining factor.

“I coach the athlete standing in front of me, not the number written beside their age,” he says.

What stood out instead was her consistency.

“She was balancing a demanding professional career, travel, stress and normal life alongside Everest preparation,” McCastle says. “Consistency does not mean executing a perfect programme for months. It means continuing to return to the process when life disrupts the programme.”

Everest asked for everything she had

The Everest expedition in 2026 did not go according to plan. With conflict in the Middle East creating uncertainty around air travel, Shradha left Dubai for Delhi in late March to complete her preparation without risking delays closer to the expedition.

On the mountain, she slipped on an ice wall in the Khumbu Icefall and injured her left shoulder, leaving her barely able to lift a one-litre bottle. With the route through Khumbu also delayed, she returned to Kathmandu for four days to recover before coming back to the mountain.

Then came the dreaded Khumbu cough. The relentless dry cough left her sleep-deprived and progressively weaker. By the time she began her summit push, she was dealing with injured ribs, illness and exhaustion.

“Nothing has tested me the way Everest has tested me,” she says. “I have never been this hurt, this injured and this sick on a climb as I was on Everest.”

Still, she kept moving, drawing on a lesson she had learnt on Kilimanjaro: break the biggest goal into smaller steps.

“My only responsibility today is to deal with today. We will deal with tomorrow when it comes.”

Her coach, Mike McCastle, saw the same resilience. “Mountains punish rigidity. Weather changes. Bodies change. Plans change,” he says. “Shradha experienced setbacks during both training and the expedition… But she kept recalibrating.”

When she finally reached the summit, there was happiness and gratitude, but the climb was not over. She still had to descend, with an exhausted body and little left in the tank.

She had to keep walking.

There is still another mountain somewhere

For Shradha’s family, watching her journey from weekend hikes to 8,000-metre peaks has been its own experience. While the early expeditions worried them less, Manaslu and Everest were different.

She stayed in touch with them through a satellite communicator, even as she remained aware of the risks. Before attempting the 8,000ers, she signed body-disposal forms, knowing that preparation cannot eliminate every danger.

“When you’re entering the world of 8,000ers, you are prepared to die,” she says. “I know the risks that I’m going through. Sure, I will fight till my last breath to survive, but sometimes it may be out of my control.”

Today, she is back between Dubai and Delhi, returning to the corporate life she has continued alongside the mountains. But three years after that first hike, Everest is behind her, and the journey still feels far from over.

For someone who once thought of mountains as family holiday destinations, there is perhaps no better way to look ahead than with the lesson that has carried her this far.

“Whatever your dream is, it doesn’t have to be mountains. It can be anything in life. Take that first step.”

She adds, “You may not be at your strongest. You may not be at your best. But if you want it bad enough, if you’re giving it everything that you’ve got, the world will come together to make it happen for you.”

And so, after Everest, there is still another first step waiting somewhere ahead.

All images courtsey of Shradha Gupta

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