At 9am on Friday 26 September, Ashley Giles and Heather Knight, the captains of two teams of players dressed in crisp, cricket whites, tossed up to attempt to break the world record for the highest altitude game of cricket.
This bizarre feat was taking place at 5,752m - a few metres shy of the summit of Kilimanjaro, Africa's tallest mountain and the world's tallest standalone mountain.
The Flicx pitch had been laid on a surface of dusty, sandy rubble, far more akin to the crater of the moon than an English village green.
The vast, surrounding glaciers, temperatures of minus 10 and the painful impact of depleted oxygen levels left none of us in any doubt that this was the culmination of a dangerous, yet awe-inspiring adventure.
We had been awake since 1am, we had been climbing since 2am and our heads felt like they were caving in. We had already shared tears of unrivalled jubilation at making it to the summit of this vast mass, and now it was time for business.
This is "Mt Kili Madness".
The brainchild of crazy hotel entrepreneur David Harper who, whilst one night lamenting in the pub that he would never play cricket at the highest level, decided it would be a genius idea to rally some mad souls to really play cricket "at the highest level".
Three charities were named as the beneficiaries of this crazy concept - Cancer Research UK, the Rwandan Cricket Stadium Foundation and Tusk - and we had launched ourselves at an event at the Kia Oval earlier in the summer.
Strangers became travelling companions that day. By the evening of September 26, those travelling companions had become friends for life.
With a wide range of reasons driving the 30 of us to sign up to the challenge, it was an eclectic group who set off from Machame Gate on Saturday 20 September. Apprehension was palpable as we took our first few steps in to the unknown.
Brazen monkeys tried to steal our lunch and legendary South African fast bowler, Makhaya Ntini, smashed a glass bottle of aftershave as he made some final adjustments to his rucksack!
We were off. After completing the first few hours of the rainforest section of the climb, our trekking poles had become our friends, conversations flowed at a lively pace and I'd had to drop my trousers after an attack of fire ants. No wonder we all became so close so quickly!
As the days unfolded, we passed through three more ecosystems: the heather zone, the moorlands, and the alpine desert before taking our first steps in to the arctic ecosystem, the final and most unrelenting of them all.
There is an oft-quoted sentiment about cherishing the journey as much, if not more, than the destination itself, and I understand the truth of that now. The diversity of the landscape, the purity of the air and the beauty of walking above the clouds created a journey more profoundly moving than anything I'd ever experienced.
The most humbling aspect of the journey was the overwhelming work ethic and spirit of our army of Tanzanian porters and guides, without whom we would certainly still be sitting on a rock somewhere a fifth of the way up, shivering, hungry and terrified! In all, we were flanked by about 150 of these local guys, 50 for each of our three groups.
Dressed in all manner of attire, transporting tents, litres of water, cricket equipment and portable toilets on their heads, these men were our guides, our providers and our protectors.
Kilimanjaro is their mountain. Some of them have conquered it as many as 150 times; pretty impressive when you consider the origins of its name. Kilimanjaro stems from two words: ‘kileme’, which to the Chagga tribe means impossible, and ‘jaro’, which means bird. So: impossible even for the birds to get to the top.
In all their journeys though, none of them had witnessed the craziness of trying to pull off a game of cricket and they became our crowd as the match got underway.
As balls were hit for six and as players floundered trying to run in their oxygen-deprived states, they whooped and hollered in disbelief from the boundary edge.
The air up there contains only half the oxygen that I breathe on a daily basis in Brighton. As such, dinner each night ended with our Head Guides pulling out their oximeters to monitor our blood and pulse readings.
One member of our group had to be rushed down the mountain with a critically low oxygenated blood reading of only 54%, whilst the majority of us managed to stabilise somewhere between 75-80% after the strategic altitude training of the six days prior to the match.
However, even as the stars shone down on us and the Milky Way glazed the night sky, moving at all was almost impossible during that final stage of the climb.
Putting one foot in front of the other was a monumental task and my head was swimming in a fog of nausea and dizziness. I was oblivious to the fact that Heather Knight was behind me in our single file, literally funnelling me in the right direction for those final few hundred metres; I had become so disorientated she feared I could drop off the edge at any time!
Thanks Trev - like the amazing mountain itself, you were rock solid and the best tent-mate I could have asked for.
Despite having trudged painfully through four hours of freezing temperatures and darkness, sunrise - when it came on day seven - was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
The horizon revealed itself and atop a bed of cotton-wool clouds and sheer peaks, we were on top of the world. We were going to make it. I cried.
Many of us had a deep personal motivation for summiting, beyond the prize of a world-record game of cricket. Yet when the cricket match started, our competitive instincts kicked in and we all immersed ourselves in this ridiculous final stage of our challenge.
You’re not meant to spend more than a few minutes at that level of altitude. Yet, by the end of the cricket match we'd been up there for two-and-a-half hours and our guides started to look on anxiously as time ticked - one of the head guides told us that we went beyond the limits.
Covered in dust, retching for air and dragging legs like 100kg weights, we broke a world record that day. Whilst it remains to be approved by the Guinness Book of Records, the umpires, scores and witnesses verified the match as a world record, breaking the previous record holders who played at Everest base camp, by 650 metres.
Short of playing with oxygen tanks on Everest’s flanks, it is hard to see how anyone will beat our record.
On the final night of the trip, we celebrated our achievement in the lush green coffee fields in the shadow of the great mountain. Reminiscence and laughter rung out late in to the night as our time together in this beautiful land drew to a close.
I write this having been back in the country for three days. Despite feeling utterly exhausted, despite the busy train journeys in to work and despite missing everyone who was on the trip, I still feel like I’m walking above the clouds with an overwhelming sense of wonder at what we went through and achieved on the mountain.
It's impossible to put in to words what the trip meant, but I’ll give it a quick go.
It might be cliched but it was a life-affirming experience for me when I needed it most. It was pure, it was joyful, it was painful. It gave me time for reflection, time to breathe more deeply and time to laugh and talk with some genuinely lovely people.
The trip also gave me the time and space to gather myself after the intensity of the last couple of years which resulted in losing my mum in January.
I’m so grateful for that as I haven't been able to find that space anywhere else. For the last few hours of the climb, I lost myself in thoughts of my mum and her strength spurred me on to put one foot in front of the other when I felt like I couldn’t.
After seven days of intense trekking, to set a new cricket world record at 5,752m was remarkable and quite literally breathtaking!
Cricket has once again given me an experience which I will forever treasure.
It was a total privilege to be part of such an incredible journey and I know I have formed some wonderful friendships for life. I will always be grateful to David and Catherine Harper for bringing this mad trip to life and to my fellow members of Kili Madness: thank you for being there with me on top of the world.
If you would like to make a donation to Mt Kili Madness, specifically to Cancer Research UK, my chosen charity, please click here: http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/ClareConnor1