Indy's Fastest Fat Man

I forgot to mention that I competed in a pretty interesting event a couple weekends ago. There's 38 floor skyscraper downtown called the First America Building. Every February, there is a race to the top as a charity for Riley Children's Hospital (where Jen works). This year a friend from work convinced me to do it.

The race is run in a staggered fashion, with a person leaving the bottom every 30 seconds. You give them an estimated time when you sign up and the fastest people go first. That's supposed to eliminate any passing in the stairwell. I signed up for 6:30, so I started at number 147. My friend also put in 6:30 and he started at number 151.

Anyway, it was a very, very difficult event. It wasn't really like anything I've ever done before. My legs got tired, obviously, but I felt like my real limitation was just the lack of oxygen in the stairwell. I couldn't get my breath. To top it off, the air was really dry and cold. That resulted in some pretty severe throat irritation. I was spitting up some blood the rest of the day.

Anyway, by the time I got to the top I was exhausted. Unfortunately, the race ended in a small room. There were a lot of people packed in there, so once again there wasn't much oxygen. I couldn't get my breath back and I couldn't get my heart rate down. Nothing worrying or anything, it was just exhausting. Eventually an EMT asked me if I wanted to take a few puffs off their oxygen tank. That really helped.

On the elevator ride down my friend and I were trying to figure out who had the best time (I was also attempting not to puke in an elevator full of people). Judging by my condition, my friend was pretty sure he had one. We had a $10 bet going, so he was pretty happy.

I finally recovered once we got down to the bottom. We waited around for a while to see the inevitable results. What were they? Well, he ran a 6:30 just like he predicted. Me? I ran a 5:30, far better than I was hoping. I was so surprised that I didn't believe him at first. But sure enough, the results were in. That explained why I was so tired.

I ended up 50th overall out of 1300 people. To top it off, I placed first in the "over 200 pound" category. That's right, I'm the fastest fat man in Indianapolis. Oh yeah!