Well we did it. “We” being my team “Couchsurfers Combating Climate Change“. The team consisted of Alex, Rodney, Darrel, Neesa, Esther, Jan and myself. We’re all active members of the Couchsurfing community.

It took me 18 mins and 01 secs to ascend 144 flights, 1776 steps. Then there were the additional 9 flights to get to the exit (painful!). My goal was to do it under 20 mins and I achieved that, so I’m happy. I would have liked to do it under 15 mins as one of my sponsors Garry promised to double his donation if I did it under 15. It knew I was in trouble when after the first 20 or 30 steps I had a stomach cramp, and it stayed with me the rest of the way.

The long, and I mean long, wait (nearly 1.5 hrs) between check-in and the start of the climb did not help at all.

We even had a cheersquad - Nadja, Charles, Jose, Natalia and then later Maria. How cool was that?

At the top it was equally chaotic, there was hardly any space to breath because of all the climbers there. However we managed to find some time to appreciate the view, as well as walk up to the next deck where it was a lot more quieter and the view was spectacular! Shame we weren’t allowed to take any electronic devices (such as my camera) up with us. Toronto from up at the height and lit up at night time is gorgeous.

Once we returned to Earth (and it only took just over a minute, no fair!) there were more queues to wait in. There was the shirt queue and the photos queue. We got our shirts with our times written on the back of them, but we didn’t get our photos because it was taking them a long time to get through printing all the photos. Apparently we can access them through the WWF website and request for them to be posted out to us. I hope so.

Anyways, all the training helped and I wonder what I could have achieved had I begun training earlier (instead of two weeks before the event). Oh well, now I can tell people that I actually climbed the CN Tower!

Great effort from the team too - we all did it under 20 mins, and we collectively raised just over $1500 CAD for the WWF. GO TEAM C4 GO!

Here are the pics from my own camera: