Racing up 50 sets of stairs for asthma-research funds

There was Joseph Bucci, 55, from Yardley, who trained by running up the 28 floors of his Philadelphia office building twice a day, three times a week.

There was Kim Trainor-Gigantino, 50, a Pitman teacher, who trained only by running up and down the 15 steps at her home in Mount Ephraim.

And there were a dozen Philadelphia firefighters, including a marathon runner, who competed wearing 40 pounds of gear - boots and coats and helmets.

Yesterday, they were among the 155 people from 8 to 66 years old who walked and ran up the 1,088 steps of the 50 stories of the Bell Atlantic Tower on Arch Street between 17th and 18th Streets in Center City.

This first Climb the Tower was sponsored by the American Lung Association of the Mid-Atlantic to raise $50,000 for asthma research. A spokeswoman said the total, from entry fees and pledges, would not be calculated over the weekend.

Stairwell racing has been a national trend, more than two decades old in some cities.

On Feb. 6, the Empire State Building Run-Up in Manhattan covered 86 stories.

On Feb. 10, the Climb for a Cure raced up 50 stories of the IDS Tower in Minneapolis.

And on Feb. 25, the Hustle Up the Hancock offered the challenge of 94 floors of the John Hancock Center in Chicago.

An especially poignant entry in Philadelphia yesterday was that of the family of Mark and Sue Noble of Fort Washington.

There were Sue, 34, an administrator at a personal-care home, and Mark, 42, operator of a Philadelphia courier firm. There were two of their children, Matt, 10, a fourth grader at Fort Washington Elementary School, and Zach, 8, a second grader there.

There was Sue's brother, Dan Clites, 32, operator of a window-tinting business in West Philadelphia. And his girlfriend, Kate Wright, 26, a freelance writer, five months pregnant.

All were wearing T-shirts, the backs of which read 1088 Steps 4 Grandma.

Although Mark climbed slowly on a sprained ankle - "I took the turtle approach," recalling the fable of the tortoise and the hare - all made it to the 50th floor.

And there they were welcomed by Sue and Dan's mother, Sally Clites, 60, of Elliottsburg, Perry County, the grandma of the T-shirts - diagnosed on Jan. 9 of last year with Stage 4 of what she called "nonsmoker's cancer."

Retired as her town's postmaster and without a hint of cancer in all her days, she said that, last year, "I was coughing and coughing." She went to her physician, and "eventually they X-rayed my chest, and that's when they saw the tumor on my left lung."

"It had metastasized to the bones and the lymph nodes," she said, "but it's not gone to the major organs."

The 155 people who ran the steps also ran the gamut, from the last finisher, who took 33 minutes and 55 seconds to make it, to the winner, with a time of 6:43.

He was Ted Vaccarella, 31, of Rockville Centre on Long Island, a middle-school physical-education teacher.

The top female racer, with a time of 8:46, was Kristina Butcher, 28, a bookkeeper who lives in Chestnut Hill and who said she was training for a triathlon by running eight miles five times a week.

Although she has raced up the Empire State Building, too, she prefers road races.

Running up stairwells, she said, is "not natural."