Saturday, December 3, 2011

Vertical marathon at the swissotel

It has been all over my Facebook page for a couple of weeks and a lot of people are still wondering what I am on about, so here is the story of the vertical marathon:

Last April, we were heading to Borneo to climb the Mt Kinabalu. In order to train before climbing thousands of steps, I had started to climb the stairs of our residence.  Doing so, someone had mentioned to me the existence of the vertical marathon of the Swissotel, a climb of the 73 storeys of stairs of the famous Singapore hotel.
The training was useful as we had a good time on Mt Kinabalu and I kept the idea of the vertical marathon on one side of my mind.
So when time came, I registered for the race and R decided to join me.
On Sunday the 21st of November, after a good night of French food and wine and before flying off to London, at 9.00am, we completed the climb!
We were split by sexe and age categories, which made us a 30-39 type. R was going first, then he was supposed to come down, get the bag and I would have gone second. As you can guess, despite being the last women of the 30-39 group to go, R didn't make it down on time and I had to climb with the bag...(which probably slown me down by a good 10 minutes:-)
From stat to finish, level 1 to 73, it took R 12', me 19' and the winner 7'...
R was in the top 20% and I was about half of my list!
Surprisingly, muscles did't hurt at all, breathing was ok, but the heart rate went off the chart! (I also had a bit of a stomach issue potentially linked to the garlic butter of the snails of the night before...:-)

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