97 Flights of Stairs? Are They Serious?

By Alicia Dorr in News on Feb 27, 2006 9:13PM

Totally debunking the idea that all Chicagoans are fat and lazy, a bunch of extremely fit runners bounded up every single story of the John Hancock building last weekend. That's 97 flights of stairs, which sounds as much like death and mayhem to us now as it did last year.

The annual Hustle up the Hancock event is for a good cause, namely the American Lung Association of Metropolitan Chicago. The $850,000 raised will go to lung disease research—something people who run up skyscrapers on the weekend probably aren't too affected by. And this year the record-breaking number of participants was 4,000.

The fastest stair-climbers this year were only seconds ahead of last years' winners. Of course, this year's fastest man and woman clocked in at 9.35 and 11.1 minutes, respectively. So, even if they were behind last year's winners they still would have been averaging about seven seconds per floor. We'll just let that sink in for awhile.