This is held by an Australian Belinda Soszyn

This is held by an Australian, Belinda Soszyn.I had no idea of what time would be respectable. I just wanted to finish without the aid of paramedics and with blisters that would not prevent me from shopping the next day.The starting pistol fired and off we went, shoulder-barging each other out of the way in the huge crush, a desperate attempt to get to the small- framed door to the staircase Then it was stair crazy all the way. I had expected a nosebleed or a stitch but all I got was sore thumbs from swinging around the handrail from floor to floor. The Empire State Run is essentially a road race with handrails.Whizzing around the corners, I caught sight of the Manhattan skyline from a 360-degree perspective It was a curious and novel way of sightseeing The run is no great distance Only a fifth of a mile and 1,050ft up.

I run marathons and have run a few cross-country races - but vertical marathons, I had been told, require work on certain muscle groups. Presumably not the brain.Raising money for Save The Children and the Catherine Wyatt Fund (set up in memory of a university friend who died suddenly) was my main motivation, as well as going to New York and seeing it from a different perspective - on the run, without the use of yellow cabs or the subway.Arriving in the city, my training schedule continued with jogs around Central Park, down Broadway and Wall Street, past Macy's and right down to the Statue of Liberty - as well as workouts on the treadmill and step- up machine in the Manhattan Sheraton I also ran up and down the hotel's 26-storey stairs. By running up the world's third tallest building, I wanted to scale new heights of achievement for British athletics, as well as British holiday- makers to New York.The Empire State Building run takes you up 86 floors - a total of 1,576 40-inch wide, half-inch-high steps. The race begins in the lobby - on 36th Street and Fifth Avenue - and ends on the observatory dock on the 86th floor. My race began three months earlier, up and down the staircase in my home in Blackheath.

Practice facilities were rather low on the ground in London, but I did not let the lack of skyscrapers interfere with my training I ran up and down my 12-step staircase 500 times a day My neighbours were tolerant. My wife, Fiona, had mentioned in passing something about my suffering from a bladder infection.I then moved on to a local multi-storey car park, progressing on to the maintenance stairwell of Woolwich Tunnel. So I ran up the Empire State Building instead of using the lift. Every year 180 upwardly-mobile and perhaps mentally unbalanced athletes take part in the Empire State Run Up. It is the oldest of an ever-growing world-wide circuit of vertical marathons: Sydney, Moscow, Vienna, Munich, Toronto and Detroit all host their own vertical marathons and they are open to anyone keen to achieve something most people are too sensible to do. Brightly-lit stalls around the square's edge are piled high with nuts, dates and oranges to squeeze right then and there. Take a seat in one of the cafes alongside the throng, order a cafe au lait and watch a medieval world go by..