Monday, May 30, 2011

10 Hour Climb

On Sunday May 29th I finished my first 10 hour stair climb ever. What follows below is an explanation of what happened during the climb and how it went.

The day before I completed a hard gym workout as I didnt want my legs to be fresh for the long climb. The workout basically consisted of 12-16 minutes of straight circuit training with 2 minutes rest in between circuits. Lastly I completed 15 minutes of medium intensity cardio with stretching at the end.

On Sunday I woke up at 2:45 am and got ready to go to the Delta Hotel in Regina, Saskatchewan. I packed the following for the climb

1) 4 liters of gatorade (Split up in two 2.2 liter bottles
2) 10 small jars of banana baby food
3) 2 bottles of table syrup
4) Two Bananas
5) 2 containers of semi cooked oatmeal

Mostly the plan was to climb for two hours straight and then start pushing in baby food and table syrup every few laps. Solid food would be started at the 6th hour point as well.

I started right at 3:45 am. The pace I needed to set was a consistent tempo paced climb. Not too fast, but not to slow. I climb two steps at a time really thinking about explosive movement through the hips and pushing with the heels of the foot. I use a "v-step" movement which allows for more power as I climb.

I did time myself for every 12 laps to make sure I was on pace. I was a bit slower then previous climbs as my legs were not fresh and I havent been getting as good of a sleep as I wanted.

Th average pace I set for myself for 12 laps (260 floors) was around 1 hour and seven minutes. Usually I have been able to set 1 hour and 2 minutes for a 12 lap count.

I would climb to the top of the building, then take the elevator down. The elevator ride were interesting as 5 in the morning you can get into conversations with people just coming home from the bar or the local casino here.

The tough part about doing a climb like this is actually waiting for the elevator to return to the top floor. On this particular day there was a conference happening in the hotel, which at times made the elevator ride down very slow as there were numerous stops on the way down, a major factor when timing yourself for a climb like this.

The first two hours were pretty easy and nothing major happened. I began eating baby food and table syrup around 3 hours.

My body felt really good, although I was still feeling pretty tired from not having that much sleep. It took my body a full four hours to be fully functional.

By hour seven I started to eat solid food, oatmeal and bananas.

My stomach was a bit queezy around hour 7 and 8 with all the simple sugars and gatorade entering my system.

By hour 9, I pushed harder as I hit one hour and 7 minutes for 12 laps.

By far the hardest hour was hour 10. I hit the wall around 104 laps. It took all my mental fortitude to finish to 109 laps which was approx. 30,000 feet climbed, however I still finished fast at 1 hour and five minutes.

Check out my finishing total times below:



I will be resting for 2 weeks before attempting a full 12 hour climb.

Let me know if you have any questions and Ill be sure to get back to you as soon as possible.

Trevor Folgering
Founder
The Canada StairClimbing Association
1-877-51-CLIMB

1 comment:

  1. Wow, this is some motivation for me, I wish I can also do something like this and this post is surely push for me. Thank you for sharing this post here

    ReplyDelete