Premium ContentMouse over Home then click on Premium Content for information.VIDEO: Trek Up the Tower tidbits, factoids and whattayaknows.
It's a Sunday morning in February, and the air is crisp. After a minute or two, the cold bites through your shoes, nipping your toes. The wind chill — below freezing — is enough to keep most folks inside.
But Ivan Marsh is running at Mahoney State Park.
He scales the park's 70-foot observation tower. Up. Down. Over and over. Today, he'll scale another set of stairs at the 2012 Trek Up the Tower.
It won't be so cold then. Trek Up the Tower is an indoor race at First National Bank in downtown Omaha. Everyone who signs up — a record 1,800 people this year — will race up 40 of the building's 45 stories. That's 633 feet. Or 870 steps.
The race's popularity is on the rise. Registration for this year's Trek reached capacity within two weeks.
It takes most people 10 to 11 minutes. Others surpass the 30-minute mark. Marsh, 37, finishes in about four and a half minutes. Every year, he wins. Five for five.
He couldn't recall his best time at the Trek or even more formal races. It's a rare but refreshing quality in an athlete, said Brian Wandzilak, a friend and fellow runner. Marsh and Wandzilak are both on Team Nebraska, a post-collegiate competitive running group.
"He couldn't tell me his PR (personal record)," Wandzilak said. "He just goes out and runs. There's something to be said for that. It's unique, not keeping track of everything."
(For the record, Marsh's fastest Trek time is 4 minutes, 24 seconds, set in 2009.)
Wandzilak said Marsh doesn't take himself too seriously. He's low-key. Good-natured. That doesn't mean he's not competitive though.
When he and Wandzilak compete in the same event, they talk and joke before the gun sounds and after the race finishes, too. But during, they push each other to run "blazing fast."
If Marsh hears someone closing in on his lead, he knows to kick it up a notch. Close competition spurred him to the top at one of the early Trek races. "He was right on my tail," Marsh said of the second-place finisher, "so I pulled away at the end and only won by a couple seconds."
He signed up for this year's sixth annual Trek Up the Tower to defend his title and, if all goes well, continue his streak. It's a rule of his. "If I win a race, I go back the next year and do it again," he said.
So, with few exceptions, he spends every day at Mahoney State Park running hills, then stairs, then hills again. He does maintenance and construction work in Ashland, where he lives, so Mahoney is his backyard.
The park's observation tower is roughly nine times shorter than the First National building. That's why he scales it 10 times.
His steps, taken two at a time, echo when they make contact with the metal staircase. The repetition is punctuated every so often with the sound of children's laughter. They're sledding down a hill nearby, the same hill Marsh scaled to reach the tower.
He runs 30 minutes before the climb so his legs are already burning. It makes the real Trek a little easier. "It's fun," Marsh said. Then a short pause. "In a painful way."
The Trek isn't necessarily painful for everyone, but it's certainly a challenge. Most don't participate to win. They sign up for bragging rights, to cross something off their bucket list.
Marsh runs it for fun, "because it just sounded unique." He usually runs trail races and ultra marathons. This summer, he'll travel to Colorado for a 50K race — that's roughly 31 miles. Sometimes he runs shorter distances. Last weekend he organized and competed in a 5K. He won that, too.
"He's one of the toughest runners I've seen," Wandzilak said. "If you told him to run a marathon tomorrow, he could do it. And he'd probably get a good time."
Some people have encouraged Marsh to compete in other stair-climbing competitions, like those at the Empire State Building and Sears Tower, now called the Willis Tower. Stretching more than 100 stories into the sky, both host popular vertical races. But Marsh said he "can't even imagine doing that."
Forty floors, he said, is plenty.
Contact the writer:
402-444-1071, katy.healey@owh.com
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