Firefighters fired up in race up Columbia Center stairs

A year is plenty of time to forget just how badly your legs burn and your lungs heave when you sprint up 69 flights of stairs.

"I've never had a workout hurt as much as this. My legs hurt, my lungs hurt, my back hurts, even my arms hurt. Pretty much everything hurts," said Kory Burgess, 27, of the Missoula Rural Fire Department, who was the first of 1,555 firefighters to reach the 73rd-floor observation deck of the Columbia Center on Sunday. "You kind of forget the pain throughout the year."

Last year, Burgess won the annual Scott Firefighter Stairclimb benefiting the local chapter of The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, ascending 1,311 steps in 10 minutes and 55.75 seconds. This year, his sixth time participating in the charitable event, Burgess finished in 11:01:35 — good enough to hold on to his title. Second and fourth places were also taken by Missoula firefighters, with a Spokane firefighter finishing third.

Burgess trains for the event by climbing the 10 flights of stairs in Missoula's tallest building 10 times, or by hiking nearby Mount Sentinel in full firefighting gear.

So will he take on the Columbia Center next year?

"I don't know. Ask me in a few months, when I forget the pain again," he said.

The food court of Seattle's tallest skyscraper, which usually hums with the lunchtime conversations of attorneys and business people, was turned into a giant locker room, with helmets, gear bags and oxygen tanks strewed in every corner. Firefighters from 256 different departments in the United States, Canada, Germany and New Zealand came to race in what's believed to be the largest individual firefighting competition in the world. The names of their cities — Denver, Sacramento, Boise, Kennewick — were emblazoned on patches and T-shirts.

Since the climb's inception in 1992, firefighters have raised $2.7 million for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

"We just hit the $500,000 mark for this year, but our volunteers will be counting for two or three weeks to come," said Mike McQuaid, an event spokesman.

The firefighters each wear 50 pounds of gear, including the face masks and respirators they don when battling blazes. Lined up outside the building's north stairwell on Fifth Avenue and staggered at 15-second intervals, the firefighters — 10 percent of them women — tapped their wrist bands to a sensor as they began the 788-foot climb, pausing on the 40th floor to swap out empty oxygen tanks for fresh ones.

On the 73rd floor, greeted by cheering volunteers and a team of medics, the firefighters tapped another sensor to record their finishing times. A constant drone of alarms, indicating that air supplies were running dangerously low, rang through the air. The smell of smoke, still clinging to their clothing from past fires they had extinguished, mingled with the scent of sweat. Some finishers stumbled and fell to the floor, while others peeled off their face masks and ripped open their jackets, beelining for the giant fans and water bottles in the cooling area.

"It's hot, you feel like you can't get enough air and your legs are burning the whole way," said Ben McCafferty, of the Bainbridge Island Fire Department. "I think floor 25 or so is the worst because you're no way near the halfway point but you're suffering plenty already."

McCafferty, 39, said he can't compete with the fastest guys, so instead focuses on raising as much money as he can — which this year topped $2,000 in pledges.

"You've got 375 minutes of firefighters; that's a constant six-hour procession, which is an amazing show of force for this cause," McCafferty said.

Georgia Sans Daniels, a 15-year veteran of the Graham Fire Department in Pierce County, was the top female finisher 11 times in the last 12 years. In 2008, the year she didn't win, she was in New Mexico celebrating her 40th birthday. This year, she was the only woman in the first "battalion" of 41 elite runners who began the climb, and finished in 14:51:90, again taking the women's title. She was 54th overall.

"Every year is like this — it's horrible, but you forget," she said. "When you're in the tower, you definitely think, 'I'm never doing this again.' "