Dubai: A stair-climbing marathon in Dubai on Saturday saw 220 people run, walk and crawl 64 floors up one of the city’s tallest towers.
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Piotr Lobodzinski |
But it was the global vertical marathon champion, Piotr Lobodzinski, who took home the Dh10,000 prize money in the men’s category of Vertical Run 2017 - Almas tower.
This year, the wiry-framed Polish athlete, 31, sprinted up some 1,600 stairs in eight minutes and five seconds, 20 seconds slower than he managed at last year’s event, now in its third year.
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Anna Celinska |
In the women’s category, Anna Celinska, a Russian expat, was the winner. She scaled the stairs in 10 minutes and 31 seconds.
Earlier, at the base of the 360-metre-tall Almas tower in Jumeirah Lakes Towers — once Dubai’s tallest tower until Burj Khalifa was built — teams of hopefuls in green shirts lined up by the fire escape.
Each participant wore a tracking bracelet on their ankle, similar to the tech used on the city’s Salik toll gates, to record their first step to the last.
Many participants wore baggy jogging shorts, while others opted for tight spandex. One man had opted instead to wear jeans, drawing winces and pained faces from organisers.
Plenty of the participants began the first step with a sprint, grabbing onto the staircase’s shuddering steel baluster for a little extra boost.
“It is very exciting, because you get to see different faces every year,” said Mark Anthony Garcia, a manager at Fidelity Fitness, the marathon’s organiser.
“Maybe half of the participants [this year] are new.”
Last year, the fitness manager and his team tried scaling the tower’s staircase themselves.
“I finished in 15 minutes. I died after. We all did,” he laughed, pointing to his team of instructors.
By elevator, the trip takes between three to four minutes.
At the base of the tower, a sweaty but triumphant-faced participant said that he had made the climb in about 14 minutes.
“For the first 20 floors, I was pretty much jogging,” said Scott Moat, who hails from the United States. He claimed that although he had prepared for the event, the steps were a little steeper than expected.
Then, after running out of breath, he switched between a walk and a run to cope the rest of the way.
“Towards like the 50th floor I thought ‘I’m almost there’ and I sort of motivated myself to get there, so I got a little faster.”
