Step by step, foot in front of foot, Turner Britton climbed.

Higher and higher he went, through the rainforest, a tundra, an alpine desert and, finally, to Mount Kilimanjaro’s arctic summit.

After a nearly 14-hour day, the 65-year-old Cumming man had summited Africa’s tallest mountain, Tanzania’s 19,340-foot mammoth.

But the climb wasn’t finished yet.

“There’s a saying amongst alpiners: getting to the top is optional; getting down is mandatory,” Britton said. “That’s a mantra you can say to any alpine mountaineer and they will smile and say, ‘Yeah, that’s right.’

“A lot of it was one foot plodding along in front of the other, and it took long-term muscle endurance, especially going down. It was strenuous as heck.”

In early July, after eight months of training, Britton and his partner, Rita Grayson, completed their hike up the third-tallest mountain of the Seven Summits — the tallest mountains on each of earth’s seven continents.

The climb was somewhat of a natural progression – though not necessarily a direct evolution — for Britton.

Born in Atlanta but largely raised in the Knoxville, Tennessee, area, he was raised a hiker.

“Growing up, I had the Smokey Mountains in my backyard,” he said. “My dad loved to hike and camp and he really liked [hiking] in the winter because there were fewer people, so I got acclimated to the cold.

“When I was 15 or 16, my dad and I went out to Colorado to go fly fishing, and on the way there he said, ‘Oh, by the way, we’re going to get up at 3 a.m. and go climb this mountain.’ I thought he was kidding, but we woke up at 3 a.m. and, after stumbling around in the dark, we made it up. That was the first time I said, ‘Wow, this is pretty cool.’”

As the years went by, Britton never lost his fitness, though, as he said, “life happened.”

“I got married and had kids, and though I was always pretty fit, I kind of stopped climbing,” he said. “Fast forward to the 1990s, and I decided to climb Washington [State’s] Mount Rainier.

“After I summited Rainier, I went, ‘This is it. I want to do this more often.’ But again, life and work and kids got in the way. About 12 years ago, I said, ‘I’m going to do this again,’ and I’ve been to Bolivia, Argentina and other South American [mountains] since then.”

Britton’s climbs are no small feats for his body.

With two full joint replacements — a right hip in July 2010 and a knee in January 2016 — the almost-66-year-old is still going strong, but now with the help of Onelife Fitness trainers, who he said have helped transform his body like never before.

“I’ve been in a good conditioning state most of life — there were probably a couple of dozen years where I drank too much wine and didn’t have enough exercise, but, overall, I’ve been pretty healthy,” he said. “Finally, though, I said, ‘You know what? I want to change my body composition.’

“I had never hired a trainer before, but I went to Onelife and my trainers – Shelly and Carlos, though mainly Shelly — put a program together where I trained two times a week for 8 months. Though my weight was fine, the goal was to reduce weight while [gaining] more muscle mass and less fat, and now my body is different than it ever has been.”

In addition to gym training, Britton said Grayson and he would take almost every Friday and hike a local mountain, which wouThat plus Onelife’s step mill and full-body exercises got him where he is today.

And he’s not done yet.

“If I was 40 years old and had $115,000, I’d hike Everest,” Britton said, “but I’m not that young and I don’t have that money laying around, so I’m setting my sights on Mount Aconcagua in Argentina.

“Rita crushed Kilimanjaro but she’s more of a trekker, so in June we’re going to take the three-and-a-half days to summit Rainier, and if she likes it, we’ll go climb [the Alps] in Europe. We’ll still do long treks together, though, whether or not I’m able to climb another mountain. There are other things on the horizon we haven’t thought about, but that’s our two-year plan.”

Britton said it’s their goals and accomplishments that keep him going.

“I’m not here to be an inspiration, but if I set an example and can get other people to say, ‘That guy did it, I can, too,’ then why not?” he said. “The hardest part of anything is getting out of bed and getting your butt in the gym and then getting through that first little hump.

“It takes a little tenacity and you’ve got to set a goal, but it’ll help you accomplish what you want to do. Whether its walk the golf course rather than ride, you’ve got to have something tangible. It’s about motivation wrapped around a plan.”

Britton’s health checklist

Training

• Start with 25-30-pound weight packs then increase to 45 pounds, ultimately wearing the heavier weights for up to 4 hours on the step mill at a time
• Core conditioning: Planks and side planks, as well as other abdominal exercises using an incline bench. Take a 10-pound barbell and twist left and right like paddling the canoe
• Shoulder exercises: Use a cable machine, or dumbbells and cables because they are not in fixed position like a machine is. High reps and low weight are key to endurance.
• Leg exercises: Squat on a Bosu ball while doing shoulder exercises; the movement triggers the little muscles that are “so critical in everything”
• Step-ups: Take a kettlebell in hand and put the right leg up on step up and press kettle bell into the air then turn around and do it again

Diet

• Increase protein intake, which can include protein shakes if eating the amount of required protein is not feasible.
• Drop carbs like white bread, sugar and pasta.