Racer Wins Empire Crown; Pretenders Left in the Dust : New York: 80-floor run in famed building is like rush hour in a dirty stairwell, complete with the bottlenecks.

The annual race to the top of the Empire State Building began Thursday like so many things here in Gotham, with a big crowd of anxious people rushing for a small doorway in a ritual of angling and jostling and cursing.

Once into the stairwell, scrambling up the 1,430 steps in a corridor only 40 inches wide, there were the other predictable woes: overcrowding, stale air, occasional impoliteness. “Nobody wanted to yield,” complained Darrin Eisman. “They held onto both the handrails and wouldn’t let me by.”

Still, it was Eisman who won. The 29-year-old research chemist from Golden, Colo., huffed and puffed up the 80 stories in 9 minutes and 37 seconds. “It was awful,” he commented at the finish line, commencing what would become a half-hour coughing jag. “The dust, the dust, my lungs are so full of dust.”

In its 17th year, the Empire State Building “Run Up” is true to this city of great events and tall deeds, of strange people and stranger undertakings. A hybrid of theatrics and aerobics, the race is part P.T. Barnum and part James Fixx. The runners start in the famous Art Deco lobby, but in a few quick feet, they must cram themselves into a dank, seldom-used stairway.

Each story in the building has two flights of stairs divided by a landing. It is hard to establish a running rhythm. The number of steps at each level varies; so does the length of the landing. Since no set of stairs goes clear to the top, competitors must change stairwells at the 20th and 65th floors.

It is a lung-busting jaunt, like some fevered dream of a marathon being run inside an M.C. Escher drawing. And somehow it is also glorious.

The run up now has 100 imitators worldwide. In Los Angeles, people charge up the First Interstate Bank building. In Cleveland, the Society Tower. In Orlando, the SunBank Center. In Detroit, the Renaissance Center, where they go up the stairs and down the elevator eight times for a “vertical mile.”

Eisman, a lithe figure decidedly unmolested by the sweet rolls and hoagy dogs of life, had previously won the 37-story race up the 1999 Broadway building in Denver. “I can tell you that 37 is certainly a lot less than 80,” he said.

Thursday’s winner among the women was the Australian schoolteacher Belinda Soszyn, 39, a sturdy stick of a person with legs like two iron bars. To get to New York, she had recently won the Sydney Tower Run Up. Her time here was 11 minutes and 57 seconds. “A bit of a sweat,” she said. “And I don’t usually sweat.”

There were 116 entrants in all, some of them serious runners and climbers but others off on a whimsical lark or a personal quest. Roger Hull, president of Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., does something like this once a year. “You need to prove you’re still alive, even if it kills you,” he said.

Chico Scimone, an 83-year-old orchestra conductor, lives on a farm in Sicily and makes his own wine and olive oil. He competes here to “test” if he has been living right. “I finish last, but I’m always first in my age category,” he said, pleased with a time of 23 minutes and 20 seconds.

Maureen Nally, a high school track coach, is someone who enters every oddball event she can find: the 8 1/2-mile Thanksgiving Day race up an extinct volcano on Maui; the Midnight Run through Central Park on New Year’s Eve; the dash up and back through the Lincoln Tunnel with a quick turnaround in Weehawken, N.J.

“This is your life,” she said. “You have to do these things.” Her favorite climb is the one up the CN Tower in Toronto, where the stairwell has a glass wall and the city skyline grows smaller as a runner ascends.

On the very clearest of days the Empire State Building has a wonderful view as well. The panorama from the top affords a look at not only New York, but four neighboring states.

Its stairwell, however, offers little that is pleasing to either the eye or the nose. “It smells like dust and body perspiration and people’s leftover lunches,” said Dr. Joseph Kenny of Franklin, Ind., who finished sixth.

The building itself is 102 stories high, and the run up usually ends at the 86th-floor observation deck. This year, because of construction, the finish line was on 80. The shorter distance created no changes in tactics. In fact, a run up does not have as many questions of strategy as of habits and manners.

For instance, is it wise to pay attention to what floor it is? “I never look at the numbers,” said Scimone, the 83-year-old. “I wait till I’m well up there. I saw 75, and I said, “Oh, that’s nice, almost there.’ ”

What is the etiquette for passing? “When you’re 60 flights up and you’re dragging and dying, believe me, you’re not thinking about moving over for someone who wants to get through,” said Stephen Maluk, who finished 48th.

Passing, nevertheless, is essential for the swift. To minimize commotion in the lobby, the race has only three heats started 86 seconds apart, first the women, then the faster men, then the slower men. The top men inevitably pass all the women on the way up. “Coming through,” they yell.

Understandably, not everyone is cheerful about moving aside. Eisman, the winner, not only had trouble getting by the women, he found it hard to engage them in the simplest of conversation.

“Do you know if any men are ahead of me?” he asked as he sped past. No one would answer. Finally, he caught up to a female acquaintance from Colorado. “Any men pass you yet?” he asked.

“No, there’s just one woman ahead,” she answered.

He was inspired.

“I can’t believe this,” he said later, holding a trophy replica of the historic building. “The Empire State Building. Pretty tall.”

And famous for being so. The building has been in 150 movies. King Kong scaled it much faster than Eisman, bothering with neither stairs nor elevators and cradling Fay Wray all the while.

The Empire State, located at 5th Avenue and 34th Street, was built in 1931 during a time of skyscraper one-upmanship. It needed to be taller than the Chrysler Building, which opened the year before. (Today, Chicago has the tallest building, the Sears Tower.)

Getting up--and down--has always had its challenges. Some might say the building was too tall for its own good.

A wayward, fog-lost B-25 bomber smashed into its 79th floor in July of 1945, killing 14 people. Migrating songbirds, drawn to the building’s lights through a mist, once crashed into the tower by the hundreds, raining down on pedestrians below. The suicidal made frequent use of the spectacular decks until tall wire mesh was installed with incurving steel spikes.

During a 1945 citywide strike of elevator operators, the tenants of the Empire State were in for particular grief. Workers on a few of the higher floors put down cots and simply holed up. Even then, some were nearly starved out. The enterprising owner of a luncheonette carried sandwiches and coffee up to famished stockbrokers on the 31st floor.

There is no record of how long it took him to ascend the stairwell, but news accounts were consistent about his tip. The climb was worth $75.