climbing skyhigh

 lets backtrack to 2009 when brady first approached me with the idea of stair climbing...

chicago marathon 2009 - PR 3:14. fantastic!

It started off with a simple conversation in October 2009. So, you wanna do Hustle Up the Hancock? Its incredibly painful, worse than a 5k, youll hate every second of it. Ummm, I hate 5ks, why in the world would I wanna do stair climbing?!? Youre a great runner, youre tiny, you’ll be good at it. Youre not winning me over by telling me how much Im gonna hate it, this doesn’t sound appealing at all. Registration is the day after the NY marathon. Fine, let me get through the marathon and think about.

Somewhere along the course of 26.2 miles through the NY boroughs, I found myself hating the marathon and contemplating stairs, maybe it’d be something different? Maybe it’d be good for me to try something new? Running sucks right now. could stairs really be any worse than knowing my race is going downhill at the 3 mile mark? During that 3 hour and 26 minute ordeal, I consciously decided that I needed a break from running that I wanted to do stairs. something had pushed me to the edge and then someone slightly tapped me, shoving me over it. a week after NY, I was out, done for, my groin was pulled and running was out of the question, at least for about 10 weeks. For a few weeks, I moped around and cringed at the thought of not being able to run, id desperately try but only make it a few steps so id wait a few days and try again, but it just wasn’t gonna happen. Decided to try spinning and my new routine because Spin, stairs, spin, stairs, plyometrics, spin, stairs, tabata, spin, stairs. who had time for running anyways? my body was on intensity overload and loving every second of it. the intensity for some reason was addicting as was climbing in a dingy dusty stairwell for an hour. I found myself craving something new, something challenging and this hit the spot. Running started tempting me and finally crept its way back in so the routine changed run, spin, stairs, run, spin, stairs, tabata, tabata, plyometrics, box jumps, run, spin, stairs, run, spin, stairs, tabata. It was a never ending cycle.