Day Seven - Asia

This morning I got up 7:00, put on my shorts and t-shirt and began ascending the tallest structure on earth. The Burj Khalifa ("Caliph's Tower") in Dubai has accumulated just about every superlative possible for a man-made structure and is taller by a good measure than any other building, structure or tower, supported or not. It has the fastest elevators, the highest swimming pool, the highest bar, the highest residence, the most potential occupants (30,000 apparently) and so on. It's 828 metres to the top of the spire, or 153 cycles up and down my stairs. That's 4131 steps each way. The top floor is quite a bit lower than 828m as there is a long pointy spire at the top, but I've generally been using the stated highest point of a building for my calculations.
It took me just under two hours. I kept the pace modest to be gentler on my knees and this seems to have worked as they feel fine now.
So that's the tallest skyscraper on each continent in seven days... An odd little achievement.
Speaking of odd little achievements, last night Lorraine and I went to a Weakerthans concert that promised to feature one of their four albums. They have been performing an album a night at a different venue every night. Last night though the lead singer, John K Samson, declared that they would play through every song on all four of their albums in one marathon session. And so they did. 49 songs and three and a half hours later they were through. It was an incredible experience and, as I say, kind of an odd little achievement. It's got nothing otherwise to do with my stair climbing project, but it was much on my mind as I climbed this morning.

Day Six - Australia

60 times from the basement to the top floor (and 60 times back down) took me to the equivalent of the top of the tallest skyscraper in the Southern Hemisphere and the tallest residential building in the world, "Q1" on Australia's Gold Coast.
My knees are much happier today. It was probably the beer last night.

Day Five - South America

I had planned to run Q1 (Australia, 60 cycles) today, but my knees were a bit sore and time was tighter than anticipated so I made do with the Parque Central Torre Est (Caracas, Venezuela, 221 metres, 41 cycles) instead. It was a good run and I only felt a slight tingle in my knees afterwards. Nothing that a little beer won't cure.
Tomorrow it'll have to be Q1 then and the Burj Khalifa to top it all off on Sunday.

Day Four - North America

It was the second tallest building in my seven skyscrapers in seven days series today, the Willis (formerly Sears) Tower in Chicago. It's 442 metres tall, which had me running up and down my 27 steps 82 times. Whew. I don't remember it being quite this hard before. And the Burj Khalifa is almost double that...

Day Three - Europe

The "Moscow Tower" of the confusingly named "City of Capitals" skyscraper complex in Moscow is the tallest building in Europe right now. Perhaps the name sounds better in Russian. It is 302 metres tall, which translates into 56 up-and-down stair runs, or 1516 steps each way, which is easily a more impressive number.

Day Two - Antarctica

Google "tallest building in Antarctica" and this is what you'll find. They're the "LDB Bays" at the McMurdo Sound research station. I could not find any references to height, so by looking at the size of other objects around I guessed them to be around 12 metres or so tall, or two stair cycles for me. They probably don't contain stairs, but we'll pretend they do since we're doing quite a bit of pretending anyway... I needed a quick one like this yesterday because I had meetings, work and activities scheduled from 7:00 am to past midnight. Consequently I didn't even get this blog post up until today. There we have it - two "skyscrapers" down, five to go...

Day One - Africa

Ok, here we go. In the next seven days I'm going to climb the equivalent height on my stairs of the tallest skyscraper on each continent, as defined by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. One continent per day. "Serious climbers" have their "Seven Summits"; well, I have my "Seven Skyscrapers"...;-)

First up is Africa's tallest, the Carlton Centre Office Tower in Johannesburg - 223 metres for 41 climbing cycles.