Upwardly Mobile : Office Workers’ Climb to the Top Involves 1,360 Skyscraper Steps

It can take years to climb the corporate ladder.

Brett Munger and Carlos Ariaga are hoping it will only take minutes to climb the corporate stairs, however.

They are among 150 office workers who plan to stay after work today to race up the steps of the tallest skyscraper in Los Angeles.

Competitors will climb to the 68th floor of the 73-story First Interstate World Center, the corn cob-like tower that since 1989 has been the tallest building west of the Mississippi.

Paramedics will be standing by as competitors puff their way up the 1,360 steps. Race monitors will be stationed every few floors to watch for medical emergencies--and to make certain that no one ducks out to catch a ride on one of the tower’s express elevators. They make the 1,000-foot trip from bottom to top in about a minute.

The 6:30 p.m. stair climb will help launch a two-day festival sponsored by the Ketchum-Downtown YMCA to promote community pride and boost morale among office workers. Each runner has paid a $25 entry fee; the winner will receive an engraved silver platter.

The climb will be a race for the “upwardly mobile,” said Linda Cassidy. She is a YMCA administrator who has helped organize the event and will send runners up the stairs at 30-second intervals.

It will be a race for crazy people, according to Tim High. He is a tower security guard who has seen contestants’ ashen faces after they check out the steep stairwell.

Executives may be able to claw their way to the top, as the saying goes. But exhausted racers may have to crawl their way up.

That could be true, said Munger, 27, an acquisitions officer with a real estate investment firm.

On Wednesday night, Munger arranged to make an after-hours practice climb at the tower staircase. On Thursday morning, he called his 12-minute ascent “hell.”

“You get to the 40th floor and you think, ‘God, I’ve got 30 more to go!’ ” said Munger, who lives in Manhattan Beach and works out by running in sand at the beach.

“They have security intercoms about every five floors. The guards could hear me panting and they cheered me on. They kept saying, ‘Keep going! Keep going!’ At the top, they asked me through the speaker if I was OK.”

Ariaga, 33, an administrative assistant for an accounting company, said he “took it as a joke” when he first heard about the unusual race. He took it seriously when his boss dropped a race sign-up sheet on his desk, however.

He has been training for the past three weeks on an exercise machine called the Climb Max at the Downtown Y. A fitness trainer has adjusted the device to simulate the stairwell’s eight-inch steps.

Based on his daily workouts, Ariaga, who lives in East Los Angeles, figures he will make it to the top in about eight minutes.

Besides using Stairmaster machines, other competitors have prepared themselves by riding bicycles and running.

Tony Hopkins, 32, security chief at a Los Angeles holding company, said he has practiced his two-steps-at-a-time technique at a downtown office building where the stairwells are not locked.

“That building has 24 flights, so I run it three times,” said Hopkins, of Hawthorne.

Philip Sanderson, 24, who last year won a 52-floor high-rise stairway race sponsored by a liquor company, has been practicing for today’s contest by running up and down 200 steps at a bluff over the Santa Monica beach. He’s shooting for a seven-minute finish.

“Things start to get blurry at about the 30th floor,” said Sanderson, who finished last year’s race in 5 minutes, 38 seconds. “The oxygen is going to your legs, not to your eyes or head.”

Sanderson said he doesn’t mind that today’s race stops short of reaching the uppermost stories of the First Interstate tower. The stairwell becomes narrow at that point and top-floor offices are too crowded to accommodate all the runners, according to tower manager Kim Palmer.

At the time of last year’s race, Sanderson was working as an investment banker in a downtown skyscraper. These days, he works at his Venice home as a producer of a European TV show that reports business opportunities in Russia--in the steppes, perhaps.

He enjoys the corporate foot race. But not the corporate rat race.