Jeel Patel may occasionally get all out of breath, but the pint-sized five-year-old can be forgiven for she’s been doing some pretty, well, breathtaking stuff. Like hurtling headlong up a skyscraper, all 32 floors of it, in double-quick time. What’s got her seeking vertical velocity at such a young age is her embrace, along with dad Vimal Patel, of an extreme sport that’s gaining some traction in India. Welcome to the skyscraper dash, which manifests itself in fitness-minded folks, as young as five and as old as 81, sprinting up the stairs of skyscrapers (and sometimes twice over at that) simply for the unalloyed joy of dashing up one. “It was a lot of fun to do the dash,” says Jeel, her words tumbling out in nearly as much of a rush as she is when she’s running the ‘vertical marathon’. She raced up the World Trade Center (WTC), Bangalore, in 15 minutes flat. She’s now planning to tag along with Dad to Singapore, in late November, for the Swissotel tower run.
See You Later, Elevator
Running up skyscrapers? Well, there’s a new fad for you.
In real life, it may not seem as exciting as the opening sequence of Bond blockbuster Casino Royale where Daniel Craig chases down a hired gun—played incidentally by real-life free-running icon Sebastien Foucon, over rooftops and elevator shafts. But this kind of dash, also called tower run, is hugely popular abroad. It was introduced in India by Ajay Gupta, founder of Sports 365, which has organised runs in Bangalore and Mumbai--and is planning to bring it to Delhi, Hyderabad, Pune and Chennai early next year. “I lived in the US for 20 years, and when I returned to India, I missed the sports opportunity here,” says Gupta. “There were plenty of sports available for kids, but almost nothing for grown-ups.” He struck upon the idea of bringing the tower run to India, to get people out of their sedentary lifestyles.
The first run was organised at the WTC in Bangalore in 2014, followed up by the Kohinoor Square in Mumbai, one of the tallest buildings in India. There are three categories of entries: the plain-vanilla dash to the top; a 2 km run, followed by the dash up the stairs; and the Everest Challenge, where a team of five runs up and down in tandem, as many times as it takes to climb the equivalent of the Himalayan peak. At journey’s end, at the top, there’s typically a party unfolding, with music and healthy food. “But on one occasion, we ended with a beer-guzzling competition,” says Gupta laughing.
The universe of skyscraper dashers is quite varied. One of the more colourful characters to do the Mumbai run was Janardhan Bylahalli, 81, who climbed the 1,250 stairs of the 52-storied Kohinoor Square in 15 minutes and 22 seconds, to finish an admirable fifth. The octogenarian, who says age doesn’t cramp his fitness regimen, cycles 55 km a day, and has set himself the target of pedalling a cumulative distance of at least 3,84,000 km, the distance between the earth and the moon. “I’m now just 31,000 km short,” he says with a chuckle. At this frenetic pedal-pace, he should make it to the moon, so to speak, in a year-and-a-half.
Then there’s Asima Sultana, a 63-year-old housewife, who has done the Bangalore dash for two successive years now despite suffering from arthritis. “The exhilaration of reaching the finishing line and still being able to dance is a great kick,” she says. The number of senior citizens who enrol for the run has prompted Sports 365 to pre-screen entrants medically, as a precaution measure. “Sometimes, we even advise people not to take part,” says Ajay. “In any case, we have CPR kits on site, and supervisors patrolling every floor.” The number of participants is also limited (to 1,000) and staggered in groups of 50 in order to avoid stampedes.
For most participants, the adrenaline rush supplements the fitness challenge the sport inspires. For instance, IT professional Tanmay Gupta did the Bangalore dash along with wife and one-year-old Ekadra. “My wife and I enjoy being fit, but owing to the pregnancy, we had stepped off the treadmill. This was a nice way to get back in rhythm,” he says. Carrying the baby and running compounded the challenge, but after the first four floors, he coasted on just the momentum, he adds. Meanwhile, Charles Bower, an American who’s done tower runs back home, made a visit to India just to catch the Mumbai dash only because he “had to experience it in India...it was a lot of fun, less crowded too”.
For Jagmohan Bisht, a Pahadi who now lives in Bangalore, the dash is all in a day’s work: he is a running coach for sports accessory firm Reebok, in addition to being a software engineer. Running on the terai in Bangalore just didn’t do it for him, so he was happy for the chance to test his athleticism with the Bangalore dash. He’s won the Everest Challenge twice. As if all this wasn’t strenuous enough (fitness coach Bharat Sachdeva says it takes months to train for a dash), other adventure sports operators have taken the challenge up one notch. Major S.K. Yadav, founder of Wanderlust, says his adventure sports company organises corporate programmes where participants run up skyscrapers and rappel down. He reckons the skyscraper dash hasn’t yet picked up here the way it has in the US and Europe, where given the heightened awareness about fitness, the sport has a larger following.
That’s a challenge Sports 365’s Ajay is sure he’ll overcome. When he first conceptualised the skyscraper dash, his biggest challenge was to find a building tall enough for it—and then persuade the owners to allow strangers to run up and down the stairs! Now he’s determined to get more people to feel the buzz of this nascent sport by infusing a spirit of competition, making it tougher with each event. If the young Jeel Gupta’s enthusiasm proves infectious, that objective should be well met. Right now, however, the five-year-old has a bigger buzz on her radar: boarding a plane and jetting off to Singapore. Once there, of course, she’ll be rearing to do her breathtaking tower run, all 741 feet of it.
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