Photography by Terry Farmer
Springfield, Ill., native Justin Stewart does not take the elevator. He races up the stairs—two at a time, in fact—to the top of the nation’s tallest skyscrapers. And in his sport of stair climbing, he’s king.
• Back in 2011, one of my buddies called me up and said, “Hey, let’s get our high-school cross-country team together and do a stair climb in Springfield.” I had never heard of it. But if you know me, you know I don’t half-ass my training before a race. I go 100 percent. I started doing some climbs, and I looked at my watch and thought I might be good. I wound up winning the race, and it snowballed from there.
• We have the Hilton Springfield hotel downtown. It’s 32 floors, 532 steps. That’s where I do a lot of my stair-climbing training. If I’m getting ready for a longer race, like a 103-story building, I’m doing a lot of longer, slower intervals. But if I’m doing a sprint-climb race of like 30 to 40 floors, I do a lot of quick intervals.
• You get up from the bottom to the top any way you can.
• In November 2013, I set a Guinness World Record for the most vertical feet stair-climbed in 12 hours. From 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., I climbed the Hilton Springfield stairs as long as I could. I did take a couple breaks, but for most of the time, I was climbing. I climbed up and took the elevator down. The elevator ride is 45 seconds, so you don’t get much of a breather.
• The longest climb I’ve done is the Sears Tower, which is now called the Willis Tower. I’ve done that every year since 2011. That’s 103 floors. It’s the tallest, longest stair climb in North America. The stair-climb season is in full swing from January to March. There are tons of stair climbs in Chicago. There’s another one in the John Hancock Center, which is 94 floors. I’ve won those races multiple times.
• The more competitive racers take two steps at a time. If you’re taking one step at a time, it’s slowing you down. If you tried to take three steps, it would take the momentum out of your stride. A lot of times, you use the handrail to propel yourself up and save your legs.
• There is a race in St. Louis. The Master the Met stair climb is at One Metropolitan Square on Broadway. It’s a 42-floor race every year in March. I’ve done it twice and won both times, and I set a course record. This year, they added an hour climb. You go up as many times as you can in an hour. You take the elevator down and go right back up and take the stairs.
• All the races are up the steps. We don’t run down the steps. That can be dangerous.
• Two years ago, I was doing a race at the Hilton Springfield, and I tripped on the very last step before the finish line and banged my knee on the last step pretty bad. That put me out of racing for four to five months of rehabilitation.
• One of the wildest moments I ever had during a race was two years ago, when we were doing the Willis Tower climb. A small group, including myself, were the first people to go up the building. We came around this corner into another stairwell, and we pretty much ran into a door that was completely shut and locked. We were banging on the door and finally a volunteer on the other side opened it up, after what felt like an eternity.
• A lot of the top athletes push their bodies to the max, so they’re completely exhausted at the top of the building. The last 10 floors, you’re giving it everything you’ve got.
• I’ve done close to 28 stair climbs since ’07, and I’ve won 23 of those.
• I don’t use a StairMaster a whole lot. I find it really boring.
