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.
All of the stairways on the race course have been decorated by local artist Judy Perry.
If you are a serious runner or stair climber, you might want to consider adding the 1000 to your list. Even if you have no intention of doing or watching the Bisbee 1000, Bisbee is a great place to visit and explore anytime of the year. No town in this country has the concentration of stairways as Bisbee. And no small town in America is as interesting. It’s worth the trip.
Rather than tell you about the Bisbee 1000. Let me show you some pictures that I took while selling books.
Setup was still in progress and very few people were around when we arrived at 6:30 AM. If you look closely, you can see a 155 step stairway on the other side of the street.
Runners started trickling in at 7:00 AM to register.
It wasn’t long before runners started to fill up the plaza in front of the courthouse waiting for race time.
Even Superman decided to race this year.
A crew of firemen drove all the way from Los Angeles to run in full gear. One of the firemen told me that his gear weighed over 60 pounds.
As race time got closer, the runners started filling up the gate. This year there were over 1200 participants.
And finally the runners were off.
To avoid crowding on the stairways, the runners are sent out in waves, or corrals. Fortunately everyone has a timing chip to get a true time. Within moments of the last corral leaving, the top runners were crossing in front of the starting area to run the back half of the race.
It wasn’t too long before we had our first finisher. Yonus Mebrahtu of Flagstaff set a Bisbee 1000 record by finishing at 27:45 minutes with a pace of 6:11 per mile.
As Yonas was crossing the finish line, most of the runners were still short of the hallway mark as they were coming down from High Road. To reach High Road they had to run up three stairways from Main Street for a total of 400 plus steps.
And here you can see runners coming down the back stretch behind the court house. The runner on the left has run up his last stairway and is almost to the finish line. The runners on the right still have two more stairways to climb.
In the meantime, I had to stay with the books.
Like all my trips to Bisbee, this one, too, was very worthwhile.
November 7, 2014 at 9:47 am
As always David your “Bisbee Stairs” is right up there with the rest.