Saturday, September 17, 2011

Introductions

Well I finally got my own personal blog set up.  A little bit about myself.  My name is Justin Stewart and I am a 24 year old athlete from Springfield IL.  I have been involved in running ever since I was in the 5th grade and haven't stop since.  Once I graduated from Eastern Illinois University, where I ran track and cross country for 4 years, I was searching for the next thing to challenge myself...and I found my answer in STAIR CLIMBING.

It was in January 2011 when I got a call from a good friend to put a team of our old high school cross country runners together to do a stair climbing event in my home town of Springfield, IL at the Hilton Hotel.  I instantly said sure why not and did some research on this event and stumbled upon a whole new world I never knew existed.  After researching, I was instantly hooked and started training seriously for the 32-floor Hilton American Lung Association Stair Climbing Event.  I went to the Hilton a couple times to do some training runs and began timing myself on each run-up.  I would check my times with past years result and thought to myself, we might have something here.  Soon enough race day came and who would have guessed, I won, and in a new course record.  This race was just the beginning and I believe it was the catalyst to a bright future in the world of competitive stair climbing, and now here I am a few months later competing with the best in the world.  It truly has opened many doors for me in meeting a great network of friends and traveling to places I never thought I'd be able to visit.

I am looking forward to making more posts soon on my training, races, workouts, and other misc. topics.

3 comments:

  1. Cat 5, 4, 3, 2 cyclists everywhere are glad you took up stair climbing. Frees up a podium spot.

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  2. Cool Justin, really enjoy reading this

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  3. I just read through your entire year - what a year! To think it was your 1st year in the sport puts it all into perspective. You were built for climbing stairs.

    I really hope to see a lot more videos from you. A weekly recap of what you've done during the week, where you were, who you met, what things you've learned would be SO helpful to the rest of us that are struggling with just getting into the top 100 stair climbers in the world.

    I've not seen you mention - your height, your weight - until one video you said you weighed 150 lbs. How tall are you?

    Thanks for taking the time to write up the review about all the different events you did this year. If you can find time to make some more videos - great stuff, I'll eat it up.

    Cheers,

    Vern

    (goupit.com)

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