I couldn’t believe it when I retested my VO2 after 3 months of training. I called my college professor to tell him, and he couldn’t believe it either. He told me to bring him the data. When he saw it, he scratched his head and said, “This should have taken at least two years of hard training. How did you do this?”

It all started back in 2006 when I signed up for the Columbia Tower skyscraper stair race in Seattle, Washington. I did the race with a buddy of mine who also wanted to explore this weird sport called “tower running.” I finished that 69-floor race (equivalent to 72 floors) in 12 minutes and 45 seconds, which was in the top 20%, but nothing spectacular. Chuck came in about 2 minutes behind me. We both thought it was really fun and really intense, so I wanted to pursue this sport and train for that race again in a year.

I also thought it would be a great sport for my gym because at the X Gym, we use a high-intensity methodology I invented that builds strength and endurance in just 21 minutes, twice a week. Experiencing this sport showed me that you need both strength and endurance, since it’s a vertical sport. Any sport that is working against gravity requires both strength and endurance.

If a marathon runner shows up for a vertical sport like a mountain run or a tower run, they do fine at first because they have great heart and lungs, but their legs give out about halfway up because they are trained for horizontal motion and lack the leg strength for vertical motion. Then a bodybuilder, on the other hand, has all the strength to go really fast for the first 10 floors, but then has to stop on the landing and puke because he has lousy endurance. This combination of strength and endurance made me want to get really good at it so I could form an X Gym team and likely dominate the sport, which would give me proof of concept for my methodology.

Chuck and I committed to training for this interesting sport. My degree in exercise science and extensive experimentation over the years in developing my X Gym methodology gave me the background to create an effective training routine for the energy systems this sport requires. We started by testing our VO2 max on my “New Leaf” gas exchange analyzer to get our baselines. My VO2 was 47 ml/kg/min, and Chuck’s was 44. Then we  committed to the following schedule for that first year:

Monday: Incline treadmill intervals at 4 mph on a 50% grade, 14 seconds on, 7 seconds off, for 7 cycles, with the last cycle being to complete muscle fatigue (CMF), where we went to the point of literally falling down and sliding off at the end (which we became quite skilled at). Total time: 3 minutes each.

Tuesday: Max effort seated rope machine pull to CMF. Total time: 1 minute at the beginning, but about 5 minutes by the end of that year.

Wednesday: Versa Climber for 4 minutes at 100% intensity, then 4 minutes rest (while the other guy did his 4 minutes), for 4 cycles. Total time 28 minutes.

Thursday: X Gym style 21-minute strength workout.

Friday: Seattle building 62 floor tower run as fast as we could, also experimenting with different climbing and rail techniques. Total time: about 10 minutes at the beginning to about 7 minutes by the end of the year.

Saturday: X Gym style 21-minute strength workout.

Note: all workouts were at an intensity that left us on the floor for at least 5 minutes, recovering from extreme misery and muscle burning. We went all out – nothing left in the tank. No pacing, no mercy. The endorphin high was highly addictive and kept us coming back for more.

Sunday: Rest

After three months of this training, we retested our VO2 max. Mine was 63, and Chuck’s was 61. I didn’t believe it, so I did a systems check, recalibration, and retested in a week. Same results. I still didn’t believe it, so I retested other X Gym members and got believable results. The machine seemed to be working great, so I called my university professor, who also didn’t believe it and told me to bring in the reports and data. He looked it over and said it looked legit. Then he asked how the heck I did this. I explained my insane routine, and his response was that this improvement should have taken 2-3 years of hard training, spending hours per week.

This got me really excited.

The next year (2007), my time at the race was 9:33, which put me in the top 100 of 3,000 people.

I trained hard for another year. My VO2 stayed the same, but my 2008 time was 8:30, which put me 6th overall out of 3,000 people.

Then I was approached by someone who explained that this was a worldwide sport. At that time, I thought the Columbia Tower race was the only one in the world, so this information blew my mind. I started traveling and racing all over the country, and over the next 8 years, I placed in the top 10 in the USA for 5 of those 8 years. Tower running is even bigger in other countries, but I still ended up reaching a world rank of 27th before I “retired” from the sport in 2016 at the age of 50.

I also formed X Gym teams, starting in 2008. We placed 3rd overall out of 300 teams that year. The next year we placed 2nd. Then we placed first for 7 consecutive years (and then stopped because 7 is my favorite number and I had proved my point). To date, no team has broken our team times.

For a deeper dive on tower running, often called “The Hardest Sport You Never Heard Of,” just go to the xgym.com homepage, scroll to the bottom, and type the word STAIR into the search box to learn more about it than you ever wanted to know.