A week ago Saturday I finally made it to the Bisbee 1000. The 1000 is an annual stair climb race held in Bisbee, Arizona on the third Saturday of every October. Background information on the Bisbee 1000 can be found in my book, The Bisbee Stairs.
After its being on my “to do” list for several years, I finally made it to the 1000 but not as a participant, rather to sell copies of the Bisbee stair book. From my vantage point in front of the courthouse, I had clear view of the starting gate, the finish line, and where the course crosses itself. The course is more or less a figure eight across old Bisbee that loops back and crosses in front of the starting gate.
Although the course is only 4.5 miles long, it is much tougher than its distance implies. In addition to several steep uphills and downhills on the road, runners have to run up nine stairways for a total of 1094 steps; thus the name Bisbee 1000. A world class runner would be hard pressed to run the race in less than 30 minutes.
Pictures of many of those nine stairways can be found in previous posts on Bisbee in this blog. All of them plus many more are described in the book.
Here’s stairway number 5 on the course. This one has 151 steps. You run up this stairway right after running up the 75 steps of stairway number 4.
