Over the weekend I participated in the Singapore Vertical Marathon. As I had a complimentary hotel stay at the Fairmont, me and the missus decided to check in over the weekend, I'll be able to get up a little later the next day then since Swissotel is just next door. We got an extra room for the nieces and nephews and aunt. Since it was the nephew's birthday as well we have dinner at Prego's the Italian Restaurant. The food was great dessert was good and the staff at Prego even gave us a free cake with a candle to celebrate the Birthday.
A Complimentary Birthday Cake from Prego's
Since there was time still and we were here at Raffles City, did some shopping, was at Robinsons and saw a nice shirt, found my size and the sales lady asked if it's my Birthday, we told her, no just buying as a Christmas present. The next thing you know she says she'll add a tie to go with the shirt at no extra cost. Well I'm not sure if every shirt comes with a tie or not but it was a nice surprise Actually we were just there to collect Christmas Wrappers.
Finally back to the hotel room to rest up for the night, set my alarm as well as the hotel clock alarm and lucky thing I did that as for some reason my watch alarm did not go off and I was woken the next morning by the hotel clock alarm. I got up changed and dressed in my running attire and headed down to the Swissotel.
The Swissotel The Stamford Singapore Vertical Marathon has been a yearly event since 1987, this year they had over 1500 participants their largest number to date. Participants are divided into age groups and there is an Open category where you get to compete for a place to the USA to compete in their own vertical run. It's a run up the Swissotel which is the tallest Hotel in Asia. It's a race up 73 floors and all 1336 steps to the top of the building.
All participants had to register on the day to collect our timing chip and race number tag. There was already a queue when I was there. Joined in and got my tag and chip, tied that on and did some warms ups. Everyone was there. The oldest participant was 81 and the youngest was 16, even spiderman was there, here he is Spiderman and Friends.
Incidentally Spiderman is over 50 and still very lively, everyone wanted a photo with him. The race started at around 8am, the participants were sent off depending on the age group and in waves of 6 people each time. There was an interval of 30secs to 1 min between each wave.
When my age group came it was almost 9am. I happen to be standing in one of the early details and was off at around 9am. The run took us into the Swissotel stair well. It's not a straight ascend up, halfway through or almost 2/3 through we had to switch to another stair well and you go up in a different direction. It was really gruelling, by the 10th floor everyone was walking in my detail, I was just counting down the floors, from 10th to 20th to 25th to 50th to 60 to 68th to 70th and finally 72nd, one more last flight of winding stairs and I reached the top.
It really was a relief to reach the top, almost fell down when you are climbing up the stairs and then suddenly you run straight the muscles were geared for climb, almost lost my balance there. Well I am so glad I reached teh top, my timing was not the most fantastic but I managed to do it within 20 mins. A good start. The view was really good only thing was it was really sunny and the sun was getting in my eyes, No wI understood why some people wore sunglasses, I was thinking at first why they would do that when you were running INSIDE the building ! Guess they have done it before.
Some views from the top.
After the climb we got to stay on the roof for a while to cool down catch our breath and get our medals and drinks before heading down, more stairs to climb down to the Equinox where we took the lift back down.
The only thing that spoilt the whole event was there was some printing glitch for the certificate printing and in the end somehow a range of number beginning with 31xx were not printed. I was in that range of numbers. In the end had to wait like 3 hrs before they finally found what happen and had to reprint again.
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