It’s around the 30th floor of the Empire State Building when I realize that the name “run-up” is, in fact, a misnomer.
You don’t run this race. You may start off that way, but then you walk it, you pull yourself up each successive flight, and you hope you still have enough left after 1,000 stairs to do 576 more.
In short, you survive it.
Be honest: when was the last time you walked, much less ran, up several flights of stairs? I’m willing to bet it’s been a while. This is understandable. Modern technology has rendered such conveyance obsolete in all but the most extreme circumstances.
But go ahead and try it. At even a casual pace, your heart will struggle to keep up; start jogging, and it will soon feel like it may explode in your chest. This makes sense: the powerhouse muscles in your thighs are working overtime to move you upward at a 65-degree angle. (For reference, the Boston marathon’s notoriously punishing Heartbreak Hill is a pedestrian 4.5 degrees.) Push hard enough and you’ll feel them start to tighten. Push a little harder and they will freeze up altogether. Congratulations: you’ve hit your lactic acid threshold. You’re stuck in place until your body can clear some of that out. Hope you brought some reading material.
So, why do it? Why put yourself through such punishment when you could press a button and get to the same place in a fraction of the time? Everyone who toed the starting line last Thursday wound up there for different reasons. There are those who wanted to prove something. People who just like to compete. A woman who lost her leg in the Boston marathon bombing; a Golden Globe-nominated actor; a man who has done Ironmans and scaled the seven summits, despite having to overcome cancer twice and having only one lung.
It’s all enough to make my own reason feel embarrassingly inadequate – really, all I’ve got is a send-up of Mallory’s (possibly fictional) assessment of Everest: because it’s there.
What follows is an account of the run-up: my own experience, as well as a view through the eyes of competitors from various walks of life and at different stages of their running careers, each triumphant in their own way.
•••
A few quick facts about running up a skyscraper stairwell:
- It’s uncomfortably warm, because there’s very little air circulation.
- It’s dry and dusty, because they are generally opened only for fire drills and events such as this.
- Despite knowing you can always keep moving either up or down (or out into one of the handful of floors where a monitor stands watch), it can become dizzyingly claustrophobic.
- It’s a lonely ascent, because there are no crowds to cheer you on.
So, yeah – it’s not an ideal running environment. But it never occurred to me just how extreme a race it would be.
Suzy Walsham, 43, Singapore – 12:11
Darren Wilson, 42, Adelaide, Australia – 10:43
One thing bears mentioning about elite tower runners: apart from their ability to seemingly leap tall buildings in a single bound, they are what most of us would call normal people. Darren is a firefighter; Suzy works for an accounting firm. Perhaps the Superman analogy, then, is appropriate.
Darren’s origin story dates to his honeymoon. He and his wife (who at the time was about 12 weeks pregnant) were in New York City, and while visiting the Empire State Building they had waited several hours and were told at the 70th floor it would be probably another hour to get to the observation deck – unless they took the stairs.
“So I grabbed her hand and pulled her up the stairs,” Darren recalls. “And while we were in the stairwell I said, ‘You know, I think there’s a race here, maybe one day I can come and do this.”
He had always run regularly to stay in shape for refereeing Aussie rules football. For tower running he started small, with a climb in Adelaide, but was soon a regular on the circuit. After several years of falling just short, he won last year’s Empire State Building run-up.
Suzy, meanwhile, is probably the sport’s greatest current athlete. She has been the Tower Running World Association’s top-ranked female every year since 2012, and was also No 1 in 2009. Her win at the Empire State Building this year made her the winningest runner in the event’s history, her eighth title.
She was a 1500-meter finalist in the 2006 Commonwealth Games; she injured herself, and at the age of 33, she figured she would run regularly just to stay fit. Then she heard about a run up a 72-story hotel in Singapore, a few months after moving there for work. “It was more about taking a holiday,” she explains – first prize was a trip to New York City, to do the Empire State Building run-up. (Some holiday!) She won the race, flew to New York, and won that race too.
Suzy took time off in 2010 while she was pregnant, and came back only five months after giving birth to have “the worst race of my life”. It only made her hungrier. The above results speak to that resolve, as do her 15 wins in 16 races last year.
She is also 43 years old, an age at which most top athletes are if not retired, then strongly considering it. Still she runs, in her estimation, hundreds of thousands of stairs each year, and doesn’t say when she thinks she’ll be ready to give it up.
To the rest of the elites, then, I say: good luck playing for second.
•••
“Two steps, use the handrails, don’t go out too hard.”
Darren’s advice echoes in my ears as I begin. The first 10 to 15 floors are slow going – which is good, because I’ll need every last bit of energy later on. Because of the pacing, there are also far fewer opportunities to take a spill, one of my worries coming in.
I’m at about three and a half minutes after the first 20 floors, almost right on pace. Things are (groan) looking up.
Roseann Sdoia, 42, Boston, Massachusetts – 58:51
Using your legs is a fundamental aspect of being human, yet today it feels like a minor act of defiance in a world that treats it as something of an inconvenience. So what happens when you can no longer call on one of those legs to do what comes to most of us as second nature?
It’s a monumentally difficult transition, as Roseann can tell you.
She lost her right leg while standing along the sidelines of the 2013 Boston marathon; she was running away from the first bomb and, ultimately, toward the second when it went off. For the run-up, she’s joined by her fiance, Mike Materia, the firefighter who rescued her and who will do it in his full firefighter’s uniform.
“There’s so much of having to relearn the knee process that’s not connected to the brain that makes it a lot more difficult: swinging, loading the toe, everything,” Roseann explains about her prosthetic, an above-the-knee model with a microprocessor in the knee. “Going up stairs, going down stairs, stepping on to a curb, stepping through a doorway that has a threshold – you have to think of everything. I don’t think it’ll ever be natural.”
Listening to Roseann, it strikes me how little most of us consider the miracle that is the human leg. To further emphasize this, Jason Karavidas, of the Challenged Athletes Foundation (CAF) – which works with Roseann and people like her to support their athletic endeavors – runs through the numerous prosthetics most of the athletes he works with own: a walking leg, a running leg, a cycling leg ... and this is before you get into the intricacies of above- and below-the-knee equipment. Your legs manage all these functions without your so much as having to think about it. Think about that.
Roseann had run regularly before losing her leg; she has had to ease back into it, first run-walking a 5K in 2014. To train for this race, Roseann used the stairs at the Bunker Hill monument in Boston. She knows the exact number of steps (294), and there is no elevator to take her back down to the bottom. She peaked at four round trips, the Friday before the race.
Still, she says, it required such exertion – studies have shown amputees expend 20% to 35% more energy than other people – that motivation can be difficult to summon. “There are times, not even just going out for a walk or run but going out for an errand, and I think, I just don’t want to do this anymore,” Roseann says. “My leg is 10 pounds, and it’s like dragging around 10 pounds of dead weight.”
All of this prompts the question: why? “I think it will make me mentally stronger,” she explains. “This has been good to get me back into a routine of training, of being active, and gaining that mental control over doing physical things again.”
I was standing on a train platform with a clear view of the building at about the time Roseann finished. I tried to put myself in her place. That kind of pain, that kind of satisfaction – it was unknowable to me. But I imagine it was one of the proudest moments of her life.
•••
There is mercifully a water station at around the 60th floor. I say around because this portion of the race is a blur of utter exhaustion. I’ve done countless distance races before, but I’ve never been so out of breath in my life. I start counting down the flights in my mind. Time starts to move a bit faster.
Arthur Gonzalez, 69, Brooklyn, New York – 22:05
The oldest competitor in the field, Arthur Gonzalez, is pushing 70, has run 31 New York City marathons, and still has no qualms about pushing his body to extremes. He’s also no stranger to the run-up, having already completed it seven times.
Arthur started running in 1979, and has gone 38 years without a serious running-related injury. However, he suffered nine broken ribs a few years ago after falling off a bike, and has a titanium plate in his neck from a surgical procedure last year. I need to know what would possess him to continue performing such extreme undertakings.
“The simple answer is: I like to do the races,” says Arthur, who retired as a chief US bankruptcy judge in 2012. “Most of the running like this is just the challenge to do it, and the enjoyment I get out of competing.”
Running is an intensely personal activity – few things better underscore the links between mind and body. And yet there are shared experiences that can arouse a host of emotions in their recounting.
Hearing Arthur recite a couple of his favorite runs is pure comfort: along the bike path below Fort Hamilton, near his home in Bay Ridge and where my family used to drive to visit my grandparents in Long Island; around Battery Park and up the Hudson river, where he used to do regular workday runs to clear his mind (sometimes at the behest of his clerks) and where I trained during lunchtime for my first marathon.
This is Arthur’s first run-up since his injuries; his goal, he says, is to get back to where he was before them, in the low 20s. The desire to claw back a bit of who he was is something all of us can relate to. That he’s still doing it at 69, he says, comes down to desire. “Other than getting older, there’s been no negative impact on my ability to compete,” he says.
•••
“What floor is this?” is about the only thought I can conjure by the time I’m nearing the 70th flight. Everything else is on automatic. I can’t tell you much else about these moments.
One additional thought does pop up though.
What the hell is the point of this?
Kristi Hakim, 50, Hillsborough, New Jersey – 21:14
I have a theory: when death has deigned to reach out and put his finger on the scale of your life, there is no better reminder that you are still alive than pushing yourself so hard that you can feel your blood straining against every last fiber of your body.
I run this theory by Kristi Hakim. She’s thoughtful and forthright, and a year removed from her breast cancer diagnosis. She demurs for a few beats, then agrees.
“When I have a good run and I feel really good ... you feel that euphoria, and sometimes it’s incredible how good I feel,” she says. “I enjoy it a lot. And when I couldn’t do it I was kind of going crazy.”
I’ve seen the effects of chemotherapy up close. It destroyed my grandmother and grandfather, and it so severely impacted my mother that she once confessed there were days she didn’t feel like living anymore. It is a devastating thing just to hear; to arrive at that conclusion is surely a hell of indescribable nature.
Kristi says she was lucky that her cancer was caught early enough that she never reached that point. She admits it was very difficult, experiencing all the attendant side effects. But after receiving her weekly chemo on Fridays, she was back teaching spinning class the following Wednesday and Friday mornings – against doctor’s orders, for 12 straight weeks.
“I just wanted to be as normal as I could,” says Kristi. “There were so many aspects of it that were so difficult, but I just kept charging through it. While I was doing it – you’re in survival mode. There were days I couldn’t get out of bed. Looking back, I was exhausted when I was done. So maybe I shouldn’t have done that, but ... that’s how I was best able to handle it.”
She did a fundraiser walk with her mother only four days after her first surgery, again in defiance of medical advice. She also ran in the River to Sea relay, a race that crosses most of New Jersey, while in the thick of chemo. “I just didn’t want to be held back,” she says.
I email with Kristi on Friday after the run-up to check in. She’s still coming down off the emotional high, even after waking up feeling good enough to teach a spin class, then do a 90-minute session later in the day for a Memorial Sloan Kettering fundraiser. Her reserves, it seems, are limitless.
•••
Ten flights from the top, I get a second wind. I wouldn’t call it a runner’s high. Honestly, I only recall two clear instances of what could qualify as a runner’s high in my life. Most of the time it just feels like my muscles have found some spare carbs in a long-forgotten corner of my body and started greedily feeding on them. It’s better than nothing, I guess.
Robert Fried, 55, Great Neck, New York – 17:46
Robert Fried has that lived-in gregariousness that’s so natural and all-consuming, it surely must have been taught to New York City children in elementary school. How else can they all have turned out this way?
Robert is also one hell of a runner. He did the 1982 New York City marathon, barely out of high school, in 2 hours and 38 minutes. The following spring he PR’ed in Boston, coming in at 2:35. He abruptly quit running soon after to focus on becoming a podiatrist, then came back in 2013 to throw down a 1:39 half in Long Island, on only a few months’ training. He went for 3:34 in the Philadelphia marathon a year later.
“I’ve got a lot of heart. You can’t teach that – that comes from within,” he says.
Then came the morning of 26 June 2016. Robert woke up in a Boston hotel room at 6am to a horrible ringing in his right ear. He was nervous but shook it off, at first thinking it might be related to the flight from New York. He jogged to the starting line of the BAA 10K; his hearing was deteriorating rapidly. By the time he finished, only 43 minutes and 47 seconds later, it was gone.
Just like that, Robert was completely deaf in one ear. The diagnosis: sudden idiopathic sensorineural hearing loss. And he was scared, confused and angry.
“I had an overnight loss of something that one day it was fine, and the next day I had completely lost it,” he says. “It’s a life-changer.”
Healthy bodies break down. It’s one of life’s inevitabilities. But there’s a difference between gradual erosion of form and function and the sudden, inexplicable decay of one whole half of a vital sense. Robert’s anger is justified. And seven months on, even though he’s three months out from a surgery that could salvage the sensation of hearing (cochlear implants do not “cure” hearing impairment or deafness, nor do they sound much like hearing as you or I understand it), it is still very raw.
“It’s been a very, very rough road the past seven months. Horrible,” Robert says. “I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.”
His other ear still rings nonstop, and he describes it as feeling like he has water in his ear; a fire alarm sounds on my end in the middle of our call, and he has to ask to make sure it’s not his good ear barking at him. “It’s forever,” he says, emotionally.
Yet he remains upbeat, and committed to running even as the hearing loss initially threw off his proprioception – his body’s understanding of its place in space. “At times I feel sorry for myself because my life is so different now – and it’s always going to be different. But I want to let people know you can overcome anything in life.”
I run into Robert just before the race. He’s as energetic in real life as he is on the phone. We speak briefly about strategy, then reconnect over text message after the race, where he again describes himself as “an old man with a lot of heart”. He adds:
“You’re now part of an elite club.”
•••
I cross the finish line, gasping a bit for air but otherwise surprisingly composed. The night is crisp and cold, the kind of winter evening that’s as refreshing to drink in as a glass of ice-cold water on a steamy day. It brings every last light for miles into sharp relief – the quintessential view of the city that never sleeps.
I expected to be in a world of pain, unable to catch a full breath of that air or stand to see that view. But not five minutes after the finish, I feel great. Ten minutes later I feel like I could go another 20 or 30 flights. I run back to the gym where I had changed before the race, then run up the stairs to the welcome desk.
Have I caught the bug? Or is this the fumes talking? Turns out I’m not the only one feeling this way.
Patrick Wilson, 43, New York City – 16:34
Full disclosure: I knew Patrick Wilson and I would be running in the same heat. I’d never knowingly raced against a celebrity before, so one of my goals going into the run-up was: beat Patrick Wilson.
Petty, I know. And, in the heat of the moment, wholly unimportant.
But first, you might be wondering: what does a man who has been nominated for two Tonys, a Golden Globe and an Emmy have to prove by doing this? Surely there are less strenuous pursuits for the purpose of staying fit.
“I look at this kind of thing, these kinds of races, like I do for a role: if it scares me a little, if it’s exciting, a little stupid, I’m usually down for it,” he explains. “I’m always fascinated by that, pushing your physical limits.”
That process similarly animated Patrick in his late 30s, when he took his recreational running habit and aimed it at the goal of completing a marathon before he turned 40. He of course hit his mark, though he admits it wasn’t smooth sailing. “When it’s over you feel horrible and you think it’s the worst thing you’ve ever done, then you wake up the next morning and think: when’s the next race?”
Despite this zeal, Patrick says he’s cautious about diving too deep into either a role or training for that next race. “You want to dig yourself into a role, but not so much that you lose control. You always have to be conscious of what you’re doing ... It’s finding that very small zone of pushing yourself as far as you can go, but not overdoing it.”
He tries to explain it in the context of the run-up: that he went out a bit too hard and found himself on his own, quickly losing the ability to pace himself and, worse, the will to continue in the face of 50 more flights. “And then you caught me and I thought, OK, I’m going to let him pass and I’ll pace myself off him.”
We start pushing each other along, as runners do. It’s mostly silence in the stairwell. At some point we introduce ourselves. In that moment we are just Patrick and Tom, thrown together in the middle of something neither of us is quite prepared for but which we have resolved to conquer together. Two people reduced to our basest functions: audible grunts, heaving breaths of exhaustion, brief motivational exchanges.
Sure, this is a man who inhabits roles for a living. Maybe this was just another scene for him, another mark to hit. But I doubt it. And even if it were: so what? Is that not what we do every time we find ourselves in a similar situation? We are irrational creatures, human beings; confronted with daunting odds, we pick each other up, push each other past our limits, shout words of encouragement in the face of circumstances that would send any rational creature scurrying to safer ground. The survival instinct laid bare – fight or flight.
And it’s always a fight for us.
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