Exercising the chance to honor 9/11 firefighters who climbed into the burning towers

Morrison, Co.– Every Sept. 11 for the past 20-plus years, the Red Rocks Amphitheatre has hosted the nation’s biggest firefighter memorial stair climb.

Or one of the biggest, there’s a dispute about that. No matter; it’s big.

This year, some 3,000 people, including many firefighters (some of whom will wear 70-plus pounds of firefighting gear) are expected to climb the amphitheatre’s rows of seats nine times, which is equal to 110 stories, a number that’s a sad symbol of the 2001 attacks. As events go, it’s a spectacle, it raises money and it’s cool.

It’s also bananas.

Today, we hiked the Red Rocks seats trek exactly one time, and felt some altitude-amplified respiratory distress. Nine trips might’ve meant medical intervention.

When it’s not hosting 9/11 memorial stuff, or concerts (the venue’s primary purpose), the amphitheatre is essentially a Mountain Time Zone version of Venice Beach – with lots of beautiful people in a beautiful place watching other beautiful people exercising in ways that are beautiful and, yes, performative.

Here’s a by-the-numbers look at how the Red Rocks exercise show played out Saturday, Sept. 5:

• 6,435-feet – Elevation
• 100-feet – Elevation gain during one trip up the seats.
• 87 – Degrees, Fahrenheit, at 11:06 a.m.
• 70 – Rows of seats, from stage front to cheapest row.
• 61 – Age of a shirtless guy, Ali, who drew a small round of applause after he sprinted all 70 rows (see above) and hopped on the last one.
• 5 – The outrageously low caloric burn when an average human climbs a single flight of stairs.
• 3* – Possible size of a family of black-billed magpies, a breed of tuxedo black-and-white birds that live in the amphitheatre grounds.
• 1 – Heckler who yelled “that’s not even a full burpee” at a woman who was going up the rows by jumping, doing a push-up, and jumping again. She didn’t hear the heckler.
• 1 – Guy named “Beast” who ran forward while traveling up the stairs and backward going down, while mixing in the occasional crawl going both ways.

* It’s hard to tell one black-billed magpie from another, so it’s possible there are more or fewer than three.