A Climb Like No Other
Local Man Conquers Empire State Building
Unlike most others his age, 74-year-old Silver Lake resident and business owner Daniel Moneypenny loves climbing stairs. So much so that he recently raced up the 1,576 stairs of the Empire State Building to its 86th Floor Observatory as part of the Empire State Building Run-Up (ESBRU) in New York City.
The 46th annual event in October included more than 1,000 elite and everyday runners as well as athletes with disabilities, with times ranging from 10 to 59 minutes. In his third ESBRU, Moneypenny achieved a personal best, 25:54, beating his 2023 and 2022 times of 26:50 and 29:17.
“I’m getting older and faster,” says the cancer and open-heart surgery survivor who trains year-round in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. “I’ve been doing steps for 22 years. For this event, I do between 7,000 and 9,000 steps a week at locations such as Kendall Lake, Everett Road Trail and Brandywine Falls. For wintertime training, I have tools for chopping the ice to ensure safe footing.”
Why the commitment to stair climbing?
“I’ve always enjoyed the hills and inclines that challenge runners during road races,” says Moneypenny, who ran the Boston and Cleveland marathons, hundreds of 10k races and cross country at the University of Akron under the GI bill after serving during the Vietnam War as an Army paratrooper stationed in Germany. There he belonged to the 12-person United States Army Prix LeClerc team, which competed in what is considered to be The Olympics of the Infantrymen.
“Once you’re trained up for an event, it’s all mental,” says Moneypenny, president/chief creative officer of his branding/ideation firm, Emaginit. “With the ESBRU, all I have to do is endure being extremely uncomfortable for about 25 minutes.”
And in case you’re wondering if Moneypenny plans to do ESBRU again next year, the answer is yes.
If you find endurance challenges appealing, contact ESBRU at esbru.com to enter its lottery. That’s right, the event is so popular that a lottery determines who gets to participate. What’s more, the entry fee is $175.
Runners can bypass the lottery and run with #TeamCAF after submitting a charity fundraising entry form found online at challengedathletes.org. CAF is short for Challenged Athletes Foundation and serves as the official charity partner of the ESBRU.
Correction: The photo in the print magazine version of this article featured a photo of the author misidentified as Daniel Moneypenny. Our apologies.
