www.Hypersmash.com Beating Lyme: april 2013

vrijdag 12 april 2013

tower running....



Now that I'm sleeping well again I've got loads of energy and motivation to take on challenges that seemed impossible a couple of years ago.

One of those challenges is tower running.

Tower running is a sport that involves running up the stairs of skyscrapers. 15 years ago I competed in my first tower race, 1267 steps of Sky City tower in Auckland, New Zealand. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life! The following year I did it again. This time I trained for it and managed to get 7th out of a field that had some of the best stair climbers in the world.



After that race I had plans of training hard and competing in the mecca of stair climbing, the Empire State Building run-up.

However over the 15 years that followed I gradually lost sight of all my sporting goals and ambitions.

Even before I got sick with Lyme disease I would never have thought that I could give tower running another go. It's a horrendously hard sport and I never thought I could recapture the fitness that I would need to be competitive.

But now life is different. I feel much, much fitter and mentally able to take on things that would have been too daunting a few years ago. This applies not only to sport but also to work, leaning languages, dealing with difficult people, etc.

So recently I started training for stair climbing. My first event will be a run up the Almere WTC tower. This is relatively short (30 stories) but definitely still hard enough for a first challenge.

Yesterday I ran up the 30 flights of stairs in our head office twice. I was fairly pleased with my fitness but of course it's nowhere near as good as it was 15 years ago.

But rather than feel disheartened I'm looking forward to the training and improvements in my fitness that are to come.......

My goal is to compete in some of the world cup stair climbing races and ultimately I want to compete in the Empire State run-up. And I want to be competitive, at least top ten in the big races.

It won't happen overnight, but lets see how it goes over the next year or two....