Since 2015, I have been trying to get selected for the Empire State Building Run-Up. I just learned that I’ve been accepted for the first time. I’ll be climbing 86 stories to the top.

Believe it or not, this is almost as exciting to me as getting picked for Jeopardy. My history with climbing stairs for fitness runs deep, and it goes back about as long as my love of Jeopardy. It certainly had a bigger impact on my life.

I wish I was a baller

Growing up, I yearned to be good at sports. I saw how it changed how peers and adults valued kids, especially boys. Unfortunately, I lacked a naturally athletic physique, instincts for gameplay, competitive drive, or a mentality of self-improvement: the things that tend to separate kids deemed “good at sports” from those who aren’t. I look back now and see that I had a fixed mindset. I could only see that I wasn’t as good, but I didn’t see that most of the reasons were under my control. I spent a lot of mental energy wishing for things to be different, feeling sorry for myself.

In my teen years, I stopped growing taller, and instead, found myself getting chubbier and needing ever larger clothes. I hit my peak weight at age 15. Probably around 255lbs. I don’t remember the trigger, but at some point, I decided it was time to change. I was pretty self-motivated to get into shape, and my dad also gave me a challenge that if I could get down to 200lbs, by Thanksgiving, Y2k, I would get some impressive sum of money.

I don’t recall having any coaching on how to lose weight, so I fumbled around a bit before discovering my tool of choice: the StairMaster FreeClimber 4600PT. I’m pretty sure I settled on it because of the “calories burned” read-out. For the time invested, nothing else came close in our tiny Lisle Park District gym.

One of my parents dropped me off at that gym multiple times per week, and I grinded away on that machine, watching ESPN and listening to the rock and rap music blasting over the PA.

I did not make the goal or get the prize. But I did lose more than 40lbs, and in the process, for the first time I can remember, I learned to grind through something physically difficult under my own willpower. I developed an entirely new personal philosophy of athletics. I stopped obsessing over how I compared to other people. Instead, I became intensely competitive with myself.

Becoming athletic for the first time unlocked a sense of adventurism and possibility that has stayed with me ever since. It led me to running races, playing rugby, teaching myself to skateboard, and learning to dive. It probably made me more tenacious in other ways, too.

The toll of teaching

Flashing forward past the end of high school, college at Iowa State, and grad school at Princeton, I moved to Baltimore for Teach For America in the best physical shape of my entire life. I weighed about 180lbs, ran a 5:45 mile, and had the athleticism to be decent at almost anything I decided to try. I remember doing my first spinning class on whim, and being able to keep up. It felt really good.

But teaching crushed me. After initially losing about 10lbs due to running myself ragged, I began packing on the weight. I stopped exercising and got in the habit of stress-eating. By the end of my 2nd year of teaching, I had put on an astounding 70lbs from my minimum weight and matched my all-time peak weight in the 250s. My clothes didn’t fit and I felt awful. I’d get winded climbing a flight of stairs. I literally felt like I was on the path to chronic illness. My physical decline was as much of a deal-breaker for my continued teaching career as the challenge of the job itself.

I needed to a complete change. I moved to NYC for another grad program, at NYU. I lived a short walk from campus and the world-class gym. I never got back to my pre-teaching weight, but I recovered a lot of my lost athleticism.

An old friend

After a year in Manhattan, I moved out to Brooklyn for cheaper housing. While wrapping up my research and coursework, I was also trying to launch a startup, and that put a serious cramp on gym time. I had to find a more efficient way to stay in shape.

I went searching for the machine that had got me back into shape as a teenager: the StairMaster FreeClimber 4600PT. I actually didn’t know the model of it at the time I decided to try to get one. StairMaster had retired the entire style of machine I had remembered using, switching from the pedal based design to an escalator-like stepmill, which was both bulkier and not as much to my liking. Also, the model I remembered using had a workout called Fat Burner Plus that was my favorite routine. It took some research to even identify the right unit in a confusing product lineup.

But I eventually figured out what I was looking for and found one on Craigslist. I drove my girlfriend’s (now wife!) car 60 mins to go get this thing in suburban New Jersey, and wrestled it into the trunk. Ever since, it has been one of my prized possessions. It occupied prime real estate in the living room of my first Brooklyn apartment. We had it hauled up to the bonus room in the 4th floor walk-up apartment I shared with Jen. It was painstakingly moved to our first house in Metuchen, to our temporary rental, and then back to our renovated home. At one point, I even dismantled it down to its individual parts to maintain it. I have spent a few hundred bucks on specialists to diagnose and repair broken parts.

The perfect race for me

According to my email history, the first time I tried to join the Empire State Building Run Up was 2015. At that point, I had been using my FreeClimber for years to stay in shape, and I was getting particularly intensive use out of while I was trying to lose weight for my wedding.

I remember hearing about the Run Up for the first time. Not only did it resonate with my personal history, but as someone who loves architecture and geography, I was excited by the opportunity to climb the world’s most iconic building.

The Run Up has very limited participation, and it prioritizes professional stair runners (yes, that’s a thing). They operate a lottery for non pros to try to join. You can submit a personal statement with your entry. I wrote a condensed version of this story: of how climbing stairs made me fit for the first time in my life. I thought for sure that if these statements were taken into account, mine had to be unique enough to be selected. Unfortunately, I was not selected.

I was rejected again in 2016 and 2017. I don’t see any announcement emails for the race for years after that. I’m guessing I unsubscribed from NYCRUNS at some point after moving to NJ in 2017. In 2023, I received a race announcement directly from the Run Up. I applied, and was rejected yet again.

Today, I finally got the response I was looking for.

Apparently, they were able to do something to enlarge the field of participants this time around, and I finally get to do it!

The timing couldn’t be better. My weight has been creeping up again, and it’s time to unleash my secret weapon.

Never down, always up!