Stair Climb to the Top

Another entry in the fun and wacky race series. I thought it would be interesting to see how long it would take me to climb 75 floors, around 1500 steps of the highest building West of the Mississippi. The web sight said it took on average 30 to 45 minutes. How bad could that be? That's around a 5k, a kind of slow and easy 5k.




Okay, that's a pretty tall building.


Looks even taller from right below it.

I was running in the 40-49 year old men's division. I was the baby in the bunch, one of the few perks of summiting that mid-life peak.
We were sent up in twos with 8 second gaps. I thought it would get crowded or difficult to pass, but I only passed 5 people, one from my age group the other four were from the 30-39 women's division which started around 15 minutes before us. And I was only passed by 3 or 4 climbers in my age group.

After 10 flights of stairs, I was going too fast and started to try to pace myself. After another 20 flights of stairs, I thought I was going to die and couldn't really figure out how this whole pacing thing was going to work out. I was half-way up, 37 floors or something, in lots of pain, coming up with different methods of climbing the stairs, skipping steps using the handrail more and less and moving along pretty fast and the only pacing concept I could come up with was just not to stop. I figured I'd start pushing it a little the last 10 or 15 flights, but at floor 70 I went back to the just don't stop theory as I started feeling like I was going to hurl and even got a little dizzy.

I made it. I was heaving, gasping for air. My lungs were burning. I looked down at my watch and it was 17 minutes and something seconds. The overall winners finnish in under 10 minutes and I heard one guy say his earlier time was 11:55. (Yes, he ran in the elite division in the morning and had just finished with the 40-49, and was in shape enough to talk about it. I didn't say anything to anyone for a good 20 minutes.)

The only training I had done for this was running the steps in Santa Monica on Wednesday, which may have helped or may have made my legs sore. Now I'm curious as to how fast I could have done it had I trained or at least got a decent night's sleep the night before.