Tower 42 - 'the aftermath' - by Andy Symonds
Andy Symonds - runner-up at VR
Well I’ve now recovered and almost forgotten how much this event hurt. I have to say that being more used to multi-hour events, this one was a bit of a shock and a lot painful. Dizziness kicked in at about floor ten, legs tripled in weight as blood turned to lactic by about floor twenty.
By the finish I’d breathed so hard that it felt that I needed a replacement throat and air-passage.
Stair running is intense. It’s a short blast of pain endurance. In the events I go for “normally”, very rarely do I get into such extreme oxygen debt and such high levels of lactic acid, and it told. Retrospectively I probably went off a bit hard thinking, “well it’s only the equivalent to about a mile on the flat (time-wise), so it’s pretty much a sprint”, but what I didn’t really gauge properly was how much more painful stairs are than flat tarmac. Chatting to Matthias (the German winner of the event) I asked him, half joking, “do you actually train for this sort of thing”, the, less jokingly, reply was along the lines of, “this is all I do”. He then went on to tell me about his sessions of three x 55 flights in Frankfurt once a week and I realised that people actually enjoy this sport..!
Matthias Jahn at the top
Personally I’ll be sticking to the fells and look forward to my next race with a view, but in future I’ll certainly have a little more respect for the staircase…
The above is taken from Andy’s blog over at www.saabsalomonoutdoorteam.com
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Reuters video here, but we think that they have got the results wrong!
