When you watch the video from the start of last February's Empire State Building Run-Up, an 86-story stair race, one man stands out. Thomas Dold, a 28-year-old German wearing Bib No. 1, is already a few inches ahead when the starting horn blasts. His shins are canting into a run, and with his left arm he's pushing at the chest of a runner to that side of him. A split second later, his right arm juts up to block more runners.
All around Dold, the racers are wincing, for what's coming is harsh. There are 1,576 steps ahead of them, 10 to 12 minutes of suffering. And before that, less than 10 yards from the start, there's a door to get through. It's standard size, 36 inches wide, and everyone, Dold especially, wants to be the first one there. The jockeying is desperate. In 2009, Suzy Walsham, an Australian, was shoved into the wall next to the door. "The impact was so great," she says, "that I initially thought I had broken my nose and lost teeth." She fell and was trampled before she rose and ran on to victory. "I get super nervous and anxious whenever I start" at the Empire State Building, says Walsham, who has won the women's division three times and will be one of about 650 competitors at this year's race, which takes place Feb. 6. "I really dread the start."
What the racers may dread even more, however, is the sight of Thomas Dold dashing up the stairs two at a time, yanking along on the railings. Dold has won Empire State (known as Esbru among the stair-racing community) a record seven consecutive times. He is the only person in the world who makes a living at stair racing (his sponsors include a German health care company), which makes him the lord of an obscure but nonetheless codified sport. According to the World Cup rankings on towerrunning.com, Dold finished 2012 in first place, with 1,158 points, 157 more than the runner-up, Piotr Lobodzinski of Poland. Four hundred of those points came from his victory at Esbru, tower racing's unofficial world championships, and its oldest contest, dating to 1978. Another 156 stair races, held in 25 nations, generate World Cup points as well.
Dold also sits atop the Vertical World Circuit, a championship tour of eight celebrated races -- among them, Esbru -- and he is a minor celebrity on YouTube. In one clip, you can see a smiling Dold sprinting stadium steps at a photo shoot for a print ad. In another video, from the Corrida Vertical, a 28-story dash in São Paulo, the announcer cracks, "A shortcut to win the race is break Dold's legs . . . or giving him some sleeping pills." Dold wins and, as he crosses the finish line, still running, peels off his plain white race jersey to reveal a sleek undershirt emblazoned with his Web address, run2sky.com.
In New York last year, Dold may have gotten away with a false start; the video is fairly incriminating. "I was moving before the start," he told me recently. But then, he said, he caught himself and stopped. So he was actually at a disadvantage, he said, "moving backward when the others are moving forward."
In interviews, Dold is chipper and exudes supreme confidence. "I can run backward faster than most people can run forward," he boasts. (He is in fact one of the world's premier backward runners, having completed a heels-first mile in 5:46, a world record.) At times, he lapses into the third person, like a major-sports star, or Donald Trump. "It's all about beating Dold," he told a German reporter not long ago, summing up the stair-racing world. "That's the goal for hundreds of participants."
Most of the important stair races happen in Europe and Asia. A tiny cadre of die-hards -- roughly a dozen men and three or four women -- travel the globe chasing minuscule cash prizes. The largest single prize, in Taipei, is less than $7,000. Esbru offers no prize money. The race sites are often architecturally significant: the Messeturm tower in Basel; the Palazzo Lombardia in Milan; the Swissôtel in Singapore, designed by I. M. Pei. "There's something very elemental about climbing an iconic building," says Sproule Love, a New Yorker who has finished third at the Empire State Building three times. "You can survey the area and see how far you have come."
Still, the stair racers don't experience architecture so much as stairwells. I assumed their races are characterized by a mind-numbing sameness, but Walsham assured me I was wrong. "Some stairwells turn to the left," she said. "Some turn to the right. Sometimes the stairs are shallow, sometimes they're steep. And the number of floors always varies."
Walsham, who works in Singapore as a manager for a computer-security firm, spent about $12,000 traveling to races last year. In the United States, a small contingent of stair climbers are shelling out similar sums to get to the 100 or so American races offered each year. When I went to Los Angeles recently, for the 51-story Climb for Life race, I met Daniel Dill, who flew in from Texas, happy to pay the $50 entry fee and the requisite $100 donation to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation for a race that would take him less than 13 minutes. Dill, a large man dressed in articulated-toe sneakers, brought with him a special warm-up tool, an Elevation Training Mask. It was designed for Mixed Martial Arts fighters, he said. "It's supposed to stimulate red blood cells and open up the lungs."
Nearby was Zivadin Zivkovic, who came up from San Diego, more than two hours away. The drive was old hat for Zivkovic: twice a week he commutes to Los Angeles to train with the nation's premier stair-climbing squad, West Coast Labels, which doubles as a quasi family. Its 50 members call one another "step siblings" and shower one another with high-stepping affection on a Facebook group, Stair Race Training Buds. At races, members will sometimes brace and push injured teammates up the stairs as they falter. After races, the step sibs like to go out for cigars.
That sense of hard-won camaraderie must be the draw, because running in an unventilated stairwell may be the least pleasant form of recreation ever conceived. The lungs are so taxed that "climbers' cough" is a well-known affliction. Every climb is a redline endeavor, with the heart rate often topping 180 beats a minute.
But stair racing also has the appeal of newness. Most endurance sports are by now highly evolved, their training regimens a matter of science: if your goal is to become a world-class marathoner, for example, you will almost certainly run between 110 and 130 miles per week. Stair racing is guesswork, comparatively, and there is room for all sorts of experimentation -- Dill's face mask, say, or choreography. One stair-climbing devotee, Stan Schwarz, a computer-systems administrator, publishes detailed charts enumerating the stair counts and riser heights for each racecourse. Flights that have an odd number of steps present special challenges, for good stair racers go two steps at a time, and in one recent Facebook thread a correspondent calling himself Stair Climblunatic bravely contemplated a building with 23-step staircases. "I'll be doing a triple step on every flight," Lunatic said.
At bottom, though, stair climbing's appeal may lie mostly in its simplicity. It is suffering distilled, and its practitioners embrace the agony with an almost religious ardor. On Stair Race Training Buds, there is a lyrical video of the elite stair climber Justin Stewart wending his way up the glass-encased stairwell of an eight-story parking garage at night. The stairway is bathed in amber light, and as we watch Stewart's lonely labors from a distance -- from across a desolate stretch of asphalt -- we see a monk in devotion.
On Facebook, there is also a photo of Schwarz lying facedown in a stairwell, almost dead from exhaustion, and an earnest post from one Nelson Quong: "Up at 4 a.m. to go climb the college stairs, then to the gym for an hour of intense physical therapy, then some weight training. Since meeting my wonderful step sibs, this never feels like a lonely workout."
Last March, I entered my first stair race. My father had just died of pulmonary fibrosis. The American Lung Association was staging a fund-raiser, a 34-story Tackle the Tower race, in my dad's hometown, Hartford, so my brother, Tim, and I put together a memorial team. We are both cross-country ski racers, and Tim, in fact, is one of the two top racers competing for the Manhattan Nordic Ski Club: the other is his training partner and best friend Sproule Love.
Love, 41, is a professional stair racer; last year, West Coast Labels paid him $500 for travel expenses. In other words, we had ringers, which meant we had a chance to defeat the Northeast's pre-eminent stair squad, a multistate team called the Tower Masters.
One star of Tower Masters is Alex Workman, a 36-year-old engineer based in Schenectady, N.Y., who arrived at the Hartford racecourse early to measure the riser height of the stairs (6.8 inches). Workman sometimes climbs with a metronome clipped to his shirt to regulate the pacing of his strides. When we met him in the elevator, he was exceedingly perky. But the vibe was tense -- he was familiar with Love and my brother. Last year on his blog, Climbing to the Top, he titled one entry "Schooled by Sproule" after a race at One Penn Plaza. A later entry, about another New York stair race, one at which my brother set a course record, was headed "Schooled by Sproule's Friend at 30 Rock."
After chatting briefly with Workman, we moved to a stairwell, and Love told me about his training, which takes place in his 40-story Manhattan apartment building. He used to climb with his young son, Mazin, strapped to his chest. "We started when Maz was 14 months old," Love said, "and at first he was cooperative. He'd sing; he'd sleep; he'd point to things on the stairs, to ask questions." For a few golden months, Mazin burbled, "Go, Baba, go," from his pouch. But then, Love said, "he got impatient, and one day, he just told me, 'I'm done, Baba.' " Love replaced him with sandbags. Carrying the weight upstairs, he said, is "miserable, masochistic."
But it paid off for Love, who works as a mortgage loan analyst. He won the Hartford race. Workman finished second and my brother third, and I managed to take seventh, out of more than 550 runners. Our team won, beating the Tower Masters -- who were at less than full strength -- as well as dozens of ad hoc squads, among them the Freeshipping.com All Stars. (Team finishes were determined by cumulative times.) Later, after the awards ceremony, as Love and I rode our bikes away in the rain, we were all but singing with joy. "It feels good!" Love exulted. "It feels good!"
In our giddiness, we began to dream of another upset. We wondered: Could Thomas Dold be beaten at Esbru 2013?
There are reasons to think so. In Taipei last summer, at a steep 91-story race, a onetime Australian mountain-running champion named Mark Bourne nipped Dold by four seconds. Dold would later say about that race: "I'd been training for a marathon. I'd been running long distances, rather than stairs." Nonetheless, Taipei offers evidence of Dold's vulnerability -- as even last year's Esbru victory does. His winning time at the Empire State Building was his slowest ever: 10:28, almost a minute off the course record of 9:33.
That record was set in 2003 by an Australian cyclist named Paul Crake, who won Esbru five times. Crake, however, can no longer run -- a 2006 mountain-bike crash rendered him a paraplegic -- so who could beat Dold next week?
"A lot of guys could," says Rickey Gates, a professional mountain runner and onetime Esbru runner-up who writes for Trail Runner magazine. "I'm a hundred percent sure that if you offered a million-dollar purse at Esbru, the winning time would be in the low nines."
Who would win? Track runners? Three-thousand-meter specialists?
"No," Gates says. "They're probably too skinny. It's a sport that favors cyclists -- they've got the sheer quad strength and the high lactic threshold it takes. Cross-country ski racers would do well, too, but you'd have a hard time convincing a world-class skier to run up the Empire State Building in the middle of February. And really, there's no incentive for anyone to do Esbru. There's no prize money, and you have to train specifically for the race -- you have to run stairs. And the whole time you're thinking: Why am I doing this? To get my picture in the paper?"
Of the probable contestants at this year's Esbru, Gates himself looks like a favorite, as does Bourne. An Australian has won Esbru 11 times, making the country a kind of Kenya of stair racing.
I'm rooting for Love, though, and not just because he's a friend. No New Yorker has won the race since 1979, when Jim Rafferty prevailed, and this strikes me as sad, given that Esbru began as a stunt involving almost no one but New Yorkers. That first race was won by Gary Muhrcke, a retired New York City fireman. At the time, Muhrcke was receiving an annual tax-free disability pension of more than $11,000, because of a back injury. He was pilloried in the press -- The Times editorialized that he should give firehouse Dalmatians a course in jogging -- and he never entered Esbru again. But the race still bears the rough-and-tumble spirit of his era.
Consider the mass start. It is dangerous, and some voices within stair racing have pressed the New York Road Runners, which hosts Esbru, to start racers at intervals. The Road Runners club has made some concessions. It now pads the doorway, for instance, and last year began limiting the mass start to two heats. This year 21 top men will start en masse, as will 10 women. Everyone else will begin at intervals -- and will most likely feel lucky even making it into the race. The Road Runners received 1,955 applications for 650 spots.
For these runners, sharp elbows will probably be a part of the experience. The director of the race, Peter Ciaccia, seems to regard physical contact as part of the Esbru brand. When I asked him about Dold's starting-line skirmishing, he chuckled and said: "We call that the Thomas Dold wingspan. Yeah, there's gamesmanship to this race." Ciacca went on, "A lot of that goes on in the stairwell -- that's why stair racing is an extreme sport."
Even the Empire State stairs have some perverse charm. "It's grim in that stairwell," Love says fondly. "It's like the inside of a battleship. Everything is gunmetal gray. And the layout is crazy -- on the early floors you'll have only 8 or 10 steps before a turn. Later, there's 20." Almost every racer I spoke to described the course in hallowed tones. "It's Fenway Park," Love says. "It's Wrigley Field."
Love is a long shot. His best Esbru finish time, 10:51, came back in 2006, when he was 34. Since then, he has all but given up running outside the stairwell, a concession to plantar fasciitis (pushing off stair steps on a flat foot, however, causes him no pain). He stopped competing for five years. In late 2011, however, he left his job as an energy consultant. Sparsely employed over the next six months, he spent nearly all his waking hours circling Central Park on wheeled roller skis with my brother. He did stair workouts -- Mazin, then almost 2, watched from the family's apartment-door frame, slightly terrified by his dad's grimaces -- and he went on a winning streak. In one five-month stretch, he won five successive North American stair races. He broke the course record at the world's longest stair race, at Willis Tower in Chicago, climbing 103 stories in just over 13 minutes.
"He came back out of nowhere, at the age of 40," Alex Workman says, marveling. "Ten years from now, even if he fell off the face of the earth again, I'm sure people would still be talking about Sproule Love."
Then in February 2012, fit and race-ready, he tore a calf muscle en route to Esbru while jogging through Midtown. "The Empire State Building was in plain view," he says. "That was one of my lowest moments as an athlete." But in June, having planned his family's spring break strategically, he showed up in Frankfurt and finished a solid fourth at a European Championship qualifier. Now he gets another chance at Esbru.
On Feb. 6, Sproule Love will be among the chosen 21 elite men to start the 35th running of Esbru, along with Thomas Dold. "In '02," he says, "I got to the door first. I led the race for the first 50 stories. Then I blew up -- on the stairs, you can't recover. But you get smarter as you get older; you get a little bit wiser. This time, I'm going to start slow. I'll be the last one into the stairwell, probably. It's always a good idea to keep your powder dry."
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