27/06/2025
Tower Running: Yes, It’s a Sport, and This Malaysian Chinese is One of the Best
Soh Wai Ching Towerrunner runs up some of the tallest buildings in the world, like the Burj Khalifa, and he’s damn good at it. We've highlighted his story from competitive chess at college to winning gold medals at the niche "vertical running" sport.
From Cross-Country to Skyscrapers
Born in Kuala Lumpur in 1994, Soh grew up as the youngest in his family, first sharpening his competitive edge in chess tournaments before shifting focus to cross-country running in secondary school. By 18, he was competing at the university level while earning a Sports Science degree at the University of Malaya, collecting golds in the 5,000m and 10,000m races.
In 2017, a casual invitation to a stair climb at KL Tower unexpectedly changed the course of his athletic path. Training on the stairs of his own condo, Soh emerged as the best Malaysian finisher. “I didn’t even know tower running was a proper sport,” he recalled. But one race led to another, and before long, he was competing internationally, climbing staircases while learning to navigate the elite circuit of a sport that few Malaysians (or the rest of the world, for that matter) even knew existed.
Tower running, or vertical running, is exactly what it sounds like: a sprint up skyscraper stairwells, usually done solo and often under claustrophobic conditions. Each race presents different challenges—narrow steps, winding turns, unpredictable floor heights. The mental battle is as brutal as the physical one. Naysayers may chide tower running as just “climbing stairs,” despite the common knowledge that it is extremely exhausting to climb flights of stairs at one go, let alone a 104-floor building that requires methodical planning to scale.
Soh stresses that tower running demands more than cardiovascular fitness. Athletes must memorize stair layouts, maintain precise pacing without looking up, and count each step like a metronome. Every building is unique, requiring a finely tuned combination of physical endurance and technical strategy.
Governed by the Towerrunning World Association (TWA), the sport has developed a steady international following. Top-tier events are held in buildings like the Eiffel Tower, Shanghai Tower, and Taipei 101. But for all its difficulty and global reach, tower running remains niche, especially in Asia.
Source: https://radii.co/article/tower-running-soh-wai-ching
