Stupid Thing #4 - CN Tower Climb

Ashifa speculated this morning that the CN Tower Climb might be the stupidest of the stupid things we're doing this year. I don't know, does it seem stupid to want to climb this.....


So, the CN Tower is 553 meters (1815') tall, and for a long time was the widely touted "world's tallest freestanding structure". It has recently been eclipsed by the Burj Dubai skyscraper. We were headed to the observation deck, 447 m (1465') up. A stairway runs the entire way up, presumably for maintenance and to rescue tourists should the many elevators fail. Twice a year, there are charity climbs where thousands of people find it fun to sweat all over these stairs.

So, early this morning (before we could interfere too much with the tourists paying $40 to go up in the elevators), about 5000 people did the climb in support of the World Wildlife Fund-Canada. Ashifa had a class to get to at 9:00, so we intended to get there early. Registration opened at 6 a.m. We were incapable of making it there that early, but we got there about 7:00 and the lines had already started. They've done this event many times, so they're a fairly well-oiled machine, but it still took us about an hour and a half from arrival to starting the climb.

Our cheesy souvenir photo. They took this right before
we started up. We look surprisingly happy and not nervous. :-)

The climb is "hands-free", meaning you can take almost nothing with you - no cameras, no cell phones, no water bottles. So we don't have any pictures of the actual climb. The stairwell is actually fairly roomy - you could get two adults side-by-side easily and there was room at each landing for a few climbers at a time to take a little time-out. The stairwell is separated by mesh from an "atrium" that runs all the way up to the top, so the climb wasn't claustrophic at all. The temperature was also pretty cool, which helped. That's probably the reason these charity climbs are in April and October. There are 144 flights, each with 12 stairs, for a total of 1776 stairs. They had a paramedic stationed every 10 or 12 flights. Most of them were reading or BlackBerrying and looked completely bored. I suppose that's a good thing.

Your reward for completing the climb is a t-shirt on which they write your finishing time. My goal was to have a time that was respectable enough that I could wear the t-shirt in public. :-) I estimated that would be about half an hour, but I could live with 35 minutes. Most of the people we saw carrying around their t-shirts had done it in 20-something minutes (the fastest people do it in 9 or 10!).

Ashifa took off right away and I didn't see her after the first flight. I've found recently that I run much better horizontally than vertically. I can run 5k with no problem, but I still get winded going up the stairs in the subway station! I set off at a reasonable pace (there was not even any pretense that I would "run" - very few people did, actually) and was kind of surprised how fast the flights flew by. They have each flight numbered, which is nice. I spent lots of time occupying my mind doing division to figure out where the quarter-way point, third-way point, etc. were. For awhile I was trying to determine the pattern of paramedic spacing. But it seemed completely random, though, so I gave up. They had posters at each landing drawn by local school kids that combined wildlife artwork and cheerful "keep climbing" slogans. I'm sure someone thought they were funny when they put one that said "Almost There!" on the first landing.

I had to stop about every 10 or 12 landings for a quick stretch and to try to remember how to breathe. Somewhere around two-thirds of the way up, I thought it would be fun to try to determine my heart rate. I tried to take my pulse, but it was too fast to count! Up toward the top, I realized that the longer I stopped, the more nauseous I felt. I had done the first half in right around 15 minutes, so I think I pushed a little too hard to try to get done in 30 minutes. So I decided just to slow down and keep moving, and I did the last 25 flights or so without stopping. After you punch your timecard at the end of the official 144 flights, there are a few bonus flights to get you up to the observation deck, but at that point you're just happy you're done. I arrived to a cheering crowd, including an already-well-rested Ashifa, who had finished a studly 9 minutes earlier!

We spent a little bit of time looking around the observation deck at the Toronto morning and walking on the surprisingly scary glass floor, then headed down in the elevator to get our t-shirts and get Ashifa to class (an hour late).

I ended up finishing in exactly 33 minutes and Ashifa did it in 24:30. Not bad for a couple first-timers! The climb is actually really fun. It's definitely a challenge, but not nearly as bad as you'd expect. We may do the United Way climb in October with my work colleagues. We should be able to do a little better by then!