Yorba Linda's Mark Trahanovsky went to Jacksonville, Florida, and all he came back with was a lousy t-shirt.
Oh, yeah: and a world record.
He was part of the “Epic Climb” team that over the weekend past set the 24-hour stair climbing relay record at Jacksonville's tallest building, the 42-story Bank of America Tower downtown.
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“We entered the stairs at 6 p.m. Friday night, January 3, and 24 hours later we
had climbed 5,880 floors total, which is 123,480 stairs or an amazing 2 1/2 times the height of Mount Everest,” Trahanovsky tells the Weekly.
And he wasn't even panting! Christ, I need a hit from the oxy tank just going from my couch to the fridge.
Trahanovsky, Kristin Frey of Schaumburg, IL, Kacie Fischer Cleveland of Ponte Verda Beach, FL, or PJ Glassey of Seattle would climb the stairs non-stop for 30 minutes before turning over the climbing to a teammate, giving each member 90 minutes to rest between climbs. This was done non-stop for 24 hours.
Witnesses were poised at the top and bottom of the stairs to video the climb for submission to Guinness World Records.
While we would only accomplish such a climbing feat for the glory–and, let's face it, stair-climber groupies–Epic Climb did their climbing on behalf of the American Lung Association. Cleveland came up with the idea to raise awareness for the charity's Fight for Air Climb Jacksonville scheduled next month.
Trahanovsky says he hopes the feat will also “encourage others to exercise and be active, especially those who have just made a New Year's resolution to do so.”
Of course, resolutions to quit smoking, lose 10 lbs. and/or call your grandma more often are much easier to accomplish than scaling Everest 2.5 times in a day.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.