Hands up those who ran to  beat the closing lift doors on their way up to their fifth-floor office suite this morning? There was no such luxury for Australia’s Alice McNamara when she landed in New York to tackle the 34th annual Empire State Building Run-Up. We’re talking 86 floors of hell; 1576 stairs which send competitors 300m above Manhattan’s famous skyscraper-dominated cityscape.

and Hannah Every-Hall aced it at the World Cup last year.
The secret to winning the damn thing seems simple: don’ttrain specifically for the event. In fact, if you can, get involved with a sport as far removed from stair climbing as possible. Oh yeah, and only buy a pair of running shoes the day before the race, topping off your effortless prep. That was McNamara’s reality, which is why she couldn’t believe her eyes when she beat her 80-odd female rivals to the building’s summit in February, taking just 13 mins, 3 sec to complete the ascent. NcNamara’s no runner, rather an elite-level rower, claiming lightweight gold for Australia at recent World Championships and World Cups.

Aussies have made a habit of shaming the Yanks at their 1931-opened national monument of late, with McNamara following in the up-steps of Suzanne Walsham, who scored a pair of wins in 2007 and ’08. The race’s record, 9 mins, 33 seconds, set in 2003, is owned by an Aussie as well, professional cyclist Paul Crake. Here, McNamara fills Inside Sportin on how her punishing rowing training regime took her to the top – literally – of the world’s stair-climbing community.

STEPPING UP

“I’d never been to the States before the Empire State Building Run-Up. I was entered into the Eureka Tower climb with the rowing squad from the Victorian Institute of Sport last November to support the charity Whitelion, who focus on youth justice. The marketing people at the VIS had a team of four they needed to fill and one of the girls thought we rowers would do a good job of that. She entered four of us into the Eureka time trial team event and we won it! Initially the officials awarded the New York trip prize to a runner from Melbourne, but her time was 10 minutes, 49 seconds; my time was 10.24. So they rang me back and said ‘your time in the team event was quicker than the girl who ‘won’, so we’ll have to ring her and tell her she didn’t get the prize’ – which was five nights in New York and flights supplied by Travel Scene.

“I decided to try to enter the Empire State Building Run-Up. I applied to the New York Road Runners; they have a committee that determines who gets a start. I had to provide my sporting history to them, telling them if I was of a track and field persuasion or not. I had to tell them in 25 words or less why I thought I should be able to start. I told them I was a world-level rower from Australia in the lightweight women’s doubles, a two-time world champion in the lightweight women’s quads, that I placed fourth last year at the World Championships and that I won a World Cup in Lucerne last year in the lightweight doubles. I also told them, ‘After my first stair climb up the Eureka Tower, I loved it and my dream now is to run up the Empire State Building in New York.’”