10 lessons I learned climbing a 1,000 stairs a day for a year

If you had asked me a year ago about running, I would have told you, “I’m not built for running! I tried it many times, but my knees hurt too much.” I truly believed that about myself.

October 7 changed that. We woke up to constant missile attacks and had to stay in our homes near our bomb shelters. After a few days of confinement, listening to the horrible news in a loop, and not being able to do much, I felt I was going crazy. So I stepped into our staircase, the only place considered almost as safe as a bomb shelter, and started climbing the stairs. I didn’t know that stepping onto that staircase was the beginning of a stair-climbing journey that would change me.

That first time, I hardly managed to climb our four-story building five times before I lost my breath. I climbed 350 stairs and felt like I gave it all. I had no idea how far from “giving it all” I was.

When, Nir, my daughter’s partner, texted us that his unit was entering the war zone in Gaza. I couldn’t protect him, but I felt I had to do something to let him know we were with him. I knew Nir loved extreme, Ironman-like challenges, so without thinking about it, I texted Nir that I was taking a stair-climbing challenge until he safely returned home from the war. The short message said, “A thousand stairs a day until you’re back home.”

I thought the war would end in a few weeks, but I didn’t really understand what I was getting into. The weeks turned into months, and I was changing with each stair I climbed. By the time Nir returned from the war, I couldn’t stop climbing the stairs; they had become part of me. Climbing the stairs became my passion. I kept pushing my limit on the stairs, and each time I thought I had found it, I discovered there was a new one.

This is my attempt to capture the lessons the stairs taught me as they transformed me from someone who “couldn’t run” into a “Tower Runner” accomplishing Marathon and ultramarathon-level challenges. I believe those lessons hold truths that can help us break down our challenges into small steps that make the impossible possible. After all, if I could become an endurance athlete, anything is possible 🙂

Lesson 1: There’s no such thing as a 1,000 stairs

This might be the most trivial yet impactful lesson the staircase taught me: There is no such thing as 1,000 stairs. There is only a single stair that I need to climb repeatedly. It doesn’t matter how tall the staircase is.

Climbing the staircase taught me that if, for some reason, a goal still feels daunting or impossible, it simply means that I haven’t broken the goal into a staircase with multiple floors yet. More importantly, I haven’t identified the daily stairs (habits) I need to climb each day to reach the goal.

All staircases are built of nothing more than a set of stairs that we, or any two-year-old, for that matter, can climb.

Ask yourself: What goal looks impossible to me these days? If I had to draw a virtual staircase with three floors that lead me from my present to my goal, what would each of those floors be?

Lesson 2: The first step is the hardest

When I started climbing stairs, each day was a struggle. I had to fight to get out of bed, often in the dark, put on my shoes, and go to the staircase. I was sure it would become easier if I kept on, but to my surprise, I discovered it didn’t.

The crazy thing was that I felt incredible every day when I finished climbing the stairs. I was bursting with energy and creativity. Covered in sweat, my heart beating, I felt the best I had ever felt in my life. But, to my surprise, knowing I would feel amazing after the climb didn’t make it easier the following morning. Instead of making me jump out of bed to climb, knowing I would feel amazing thirty minutes later, my brain kept its act. Each morning became a struggle.

I learned that the hardest part isn’t running a thousand stairs each day; it’s climbing that first step of that day. Here is the thing: As soon as I climbed that first step, there was no chance I would not complete the thousand stairs. Running a thousand stairs came down to climbing a single step each morning.

I realized climbing that first stair was the secret to any change I wanted. It didn’t matter if I wanted to paint more, write more, spend more quality time with my children, or have more focused time at work. The principle was always the same. The hardest part isn’t the doing. It’s starting. And the secret to starting is finding that easy, frictionless action that helps us break through the resistance of inertia and step into the zone of activity and creativity we crave.

Ask yourself: What is something I know is really good for me but for some reason I avoid doing? What is the tiniest, easiest action I can take that would trigger me into action?

Lesson 3: I can always take one more step

David Goggins is an ultra-endurance athlete and former Navy SEAL known for his extreme physical and mental toughness. Goggins participated in crazy back-to-back ultra marathons, and anytime he felt he had reached his limit, he asked himself his power question: “Can I take another step?” And if the answer was “Yes,” he felt obliged to take that one more step. The secret of this question lies in the truth that no matter what we tell ourselves, in 99.999 percent of cases, we can take that one extra step.

I never thought the question “Can I take another step?” would have such a literal meaning in life. At least not until I met Nir and his twin brother Guy. Goggins was their role model, and they tried to live by his standards. Being twins meant they could push each other to the extremes, which included completing Goggins’ crazy challenges, like the 4x4x48 challenge: running 4 miles every 4 hours for 48 hours straight. Which they did, not once but twice!

This is why, when I wanted to inspire Nir as he entered the battles in Gaza, I knew I had to take on a physical challenge that I thought was impossible. At the time, I hardly managed to climb 500 stairs, every other day, so committing to running 1,000 stairs, seven days a week, looked genuinely impossible for me.

Little did I know then how my definition of impossible would evolve and how those 1,000 stairs would stretch. If you told me a year ago I would be climbing the staircase for hours at a time, climbing thousands of stairs, I would think you were crazy. The staircase taught me the true power of Goggin’s question.

“Can I take another step?” became my go-to question whenever I felt I had reached my limit. And as Goggins promised, time and again, I discovered there was that one more step inside of me.

Ask yourself: Where am I stuck? What is the one step I can take to get unstuck? If you can’t see the next step, go smaller until you see it. There is always a next step!

Lesson 4: Goals are just random limits we put on ourselves

For the first couple of months, I ran 1,000 stairs a day. I finished each climb breathless and sweaty, sure that I was giving it all. Then, one day, as I was climbing, a thought came to me: “Why a 1,000? Why not 2,000?”

I had no good answer, so when I reached the 1,000 stair, I simply kept on — 1,100, 1,200, 1,3000 — and just like that, twenty minutes later, I was standing on our top floor, having just completed twice the number of stairs I thought I was capable of running.

I distinctly remember the shock I felt. What amazed me wasn’t the fact that “I broke my record” but that the last 100 stairs of the 2,000 stairs didn’t feel more difficult than anything I felt, every day, as I approached the 1,000 stairs mark. As a matter of fact, I felt I could go on!

That day changed everything for me. But to explain the lesson the staircase taught me that morning, I’ll have to give a somewhat weird example :-)

You know that feeling of getting caught outside of home when you’re desperate to go to the toilet? As you drive home, you can quite easily hold for those thirty minutes, but as soon as you park the car, you feel you can’t hold it anymore and run home like crazy.

The funny thing is that if the drive had been an hour or two long instead of thirty minutes, you would have managed to hold just as easily. It’s only when you feel you’re close to your destination that you release the hold of your willpower, and then it feels like, “I can’t go on!!!”

That day, as I finished running those 2,000 stairs, it hit me. The exhaustion I felt each day as I reached closer to my 1,000 stairs mark didn’t indicate that I reached my physical limit. Quite the contrary. It was the goal that I set in the first place that created the virtual limit. Each day, as I approached my goal post, my brain projected the distinct feeling of “that’s it we can’t go on!”

Goals are just random limits we put on ourselves. Don’t believe the feelings of exhaustion as you get closer to achieving them. It is an illusion.

Ask yourself: What random goal have I set for myself? Is my goalpost set on the edge of my current limits, or is it creating my limit?

Lesson 5: When there is a will, there is a (stair)way

“When there is a will, there is a way.” I have heard this saying a million times, but I don’t think I really understood it until I “heard” it from the stairs.

In the first few months, I ran daily on our building’s staircase. All I had to do was open the door, and the stairs just waited for me. But two months in, Sharon and I took a weekend off, and when we reached our B&B, I realized there wasn’t a single multi-story building in sight. I didn’t have a staircase to climb! I was frustrated but resigned to the constraint — or at least I thought so.

When the sun rose, my body woke up and “begged” for the stairs. Not knowing what to do, I wandered the village streets until I suddenly saw a “staircase” of 18 stairs leading to the village synagogue. I took out my phone and punched 1,000/18; a beautiful number displayed on my screen: 1,000/18=55.555555.

That morning I ran the staircase to the synagogue 56 times to complete my 1,000 daily stairs. From that day on, I always found a “staircase” wherever I was.

I remember camping in the desert; I could only see flat land for miles. But then I saw a football field nearby with makeshift stands of seven rows made from old phone polls and dirt. I hopped from row to row 146 times, completing my 1,000 “stairs.”

Or the time we were sailing in Greece and anchored for the night in the middle of the bay. I woke up, scanned the horizon, and saw a house on a distant cliff with stairs leading down to the shore. I rowed to that house with my SUP and discovered it had 33 stairs leading from that home to the shore. I climbed them 34 times that morning, returning to our boat before people woke up.

I discovered that when there is a will, there is a stairway!

Ask yourself: What am I telling myself I really want, but for some reason, I can’t find the way to do it? How badly do I want it?

Lesson 6: When you climb together, you can do the impossible

Five months into the war, Israel’s Memorial Day was approaching. An unfathomable 1,600 people have been murdered or fallen in battle since the war started, and I felt I had to find a way to honor them in the staircase.

What If I climbed 1,600 floors, one floor for each person? I did the math and realized it would be 28,800 stairs, taking me more than 12 hours of constant climbing. I was out of my league!

But then a thought came to me. What if I wasn’t climbing the stairs alone? I called Nir and his twin brother Guy and asked, “Would you come with me tomorrow morning, and together we will climb 1,600 floors in memory of the fallen?” They smiled from ear to ear and agreed immediately :-)

As the sun rose on Memorial Day, we snuck into a 25-story building and started climbing. Climbing 1,600 floors meant each of us had to climb 533 floors, which would take us hours. We climbed our first stair at 7:00 AM, and it was 11:00 AM as we were climbing our last stairs when the sirens started,

But it wasn’t a missile alarm siren for once. It was the special “memorial siren” Israel sounds each Memorial Day in honor of the fallen. And when that alarm sounds, everything stops. Cars on the highway stop, and drivers get out of their cars to stand and honor the fallen.

And so, in our last round of climbing, we found ourselves standing in silence on the staircase, contemplating 1,600 lost souls and the countless lives on both sides, consumed by the endless fight for the survival of our tiny country.

As the siren winded down, we climbed those last few stairs, and I thought that if you climb together, you can truly accomplish the impossible.

Ask yourself: What impossible goal would become possible if I weren’t alone?

Lesson 7: It ain’t your limit until you reach it

It happened a few months into my stair-climbing journey. I entered the staircase, intent on running 1,000 stairs. But after a few minutes on the climb, a thought sounded: “It ain’t your limit until you reach it.” I ignored the thought and kept climbing.

But the thought refused to go away: “It ain’t your limit until you reach it”, and now it was accompanied with an image. I “saw” an athlete being carried by her fellow runner to the marathon finish line, unable to walk. That image finally drove it home. Ah, I get it. The only way for me to know my limit on the staircase was to keep climbing until I wasn’t physically able to go on.

The thought was daunting, but at the same time, there was so much “beauty” and truth to it that I couldn’t resist it. At that moment, I decided to climb until I couldn’t climb anymore.

At this point, it’s important to lay the baseline for my definition of possible until that morning. Running my daily 1,000 stairs took 15 repetitions of my building’s staircase and around 20 minutes. The most I ran until that morning was 2,000 stairs, which took 30 repetitions of our staircase and 40 minutes.

I kept climbing… 2,000 stairs, 3,000 stairs. One hour into the climb, I opened the door, and from the staircase, I asked Nir, knowing he’s an endurance athlete, “Is it OK that I go on? Do I need to drink or eat anything special?” Nir simply signaled that he had it covered. I kept running, and into the staircase arrived my first ever bottle of isotonic water and pita bread slices full of peanut butter and gelly. I was officially initiated into the endurance diet club :-)

I kept climbing, and it struck me as I reached 70 repetitions of our staircase. I will dedicate this run to the 132 kidnapped hostages in Gaza by climbing our staircase 132 times”. More than 9,000 sairs!!! That should get me to my limit.

Two hours passed, then three hours passed. I was reaching my limit. My whole body hurt. I could hardly lift my feet. I was dragging myself from the rail when I finally climbed the staircase for the 132nd time. Somehow, I did it. The same person who “wasn’t built for running” just finished climbing the staircase for over 3.5 hours, climbing more than 9,000 stairs. I discovered my limit. Or so I thought.

Ask yourself: What is my limit? What is the proof I have for that?

Lesson 8: Goals become easier when shared

Humans were not the fastest or strongest species. As we evolved, our greatest advantage was our ability to cooperate. At the heart of our ability to cooperate was our ability to trust each other, knowing that we would act as we said we would!

The staircase taught me the power of that ancient human bond and how to harness the group’s wired expectations of me to ensure I reach my goal. I learned that committing to other people and sharing my goals, struggles, and progress with them was often the difference between reaching my goal and failing to do it.

Each day, as I finished climbing, I would send two updates. The first message went to Nir to update our daily stairs count. “Wednesday 1,000 (247,000) ✅”. The second message went to a group of fellow friends. This WhatsApp group was started in 2022 to encourage us to exercise daily. Each day, people who exercised simply texted, “I Did it.”

I can’t count the times my brain was messing with me, “telling” me why I should skip a day when the only thing that drove me to the staircase was the knowledge that Nir and my group of friends “waited” for my daily update.

Some superhumans can indeed find the internal motivation to keep on by themselves. But the truth is that most of us find it almost impossible to keep a streak of any activity without some form of external commitment.

Ask yourself: What habit or goal can make a real difference in my life? What person or group can I commit to and share my struggles and progress with?

Lesson 9: I GET to climb the stairs

James Lawrence is an endurance icon. He completed fifty Ironman races in fifty days (that’s no typo). I remember watching a documentary about him; one quote really stuck with me. In his 27th consecutive race, James completes the whole race alongside a child named Dayton. Dayton has Cerebral Palsy and can’t walk, so James carries him through the whole Ironman race: first, in an inflatable boat while swimming, then in a special bike trailer while biking, and finally, in a stroller while running.

When the race is over, James talks about how it was the hardest thing he had ever done and says that he considered quitting many times during the race. But each time he wanted to quit he thought, “Dayton can’t ride his bicycle, and I GET to ride my bicycle.” So when he wanted to quit, he repeated this mantra over and over again: “I GET to ride my bicycle!” “I GET to run!” until they crossed the finish line together.

This quote never left me. I kept returning to it in times of struggle, but I truly understood it for the first time as I tested my physical limits on the staircase. I remember my legs wanting to quit and me shouting at my brain, “Today I GET to climb the stairs!!!”.

I would repeat that to myself and think about all the murdered victims of October 7 and fallen soldiers. I would think about the kidnapped hostages in Gaza’s tunnels, and I would keep reminding myself how lucky I was to be able to climb those stairs: “I GET to climb the stairs today!!!”

Ask yourself: What am I experiencing as a difficulty that is actually an incredible blessing?

Lesson 10: Doing something greater than yourself will take you beyond yourself

On June 8, 2024, I entered the staircase frustrated, angry, and mostly sad. The day before, I visited My friend Izi at his father’s Shiva. His father, Amiram Kuper, was murdered in Gaza at the age of 85 after spending eight months in hell. I had to do something in Amiram’s memory, but I didn’t know what.

So I entered the staircase, and after a thousand stairs or so, a thought came to me: “Eight months!!! They are in captivity for eight months!!! And every hour of those eight months feels like hell to them.” But then the thought continued: “One hour on the staircase for each month in captivity. This is how you’ll commemorate Izi’s father, Amiram.”

I had no idea how I would do it. The most I had run until that day was 4 hours, and that took beyond all of me. How would I climb the staircase twice that time? But by then, I had learned to trust the staircase when it called me.

One hour, two hours, then three hours passed. As I was climbing the staircase, each step became a prayer for the release of the hostages. But when I got close to the four-hour mark, I was depleted. I entered the staircase at 10 AM. It was now close to 2 PM, and I realized I had to go on for four more hours until 6 PM. “It’s impossible! “ I thought.

But then something unbelievable happened. My phone rang, and Sharon, my wife, was crying. She was in Greece, and she had no idea I was on the staircase running and praying for the hostages. “Did you hear?” she asked. “Did I hear what? Are you OK?” I asked, worried because she was crying. “They released four hostages alive!!!” I still have goosebumps when I write these lines.

I was crying myself. I told my wife about the challenge I took that morning in memory of Amiran. I told her I had just finished four hours of climbing and praying for the release of the hostages. I told her I was completely depleted until she called. She was worried four more hours was too much, but I told her I felt amazing!

Sharon’s phone call unlocked in me what endurance athletes call “the second wind.” It’s what happens, for example, after 30 kilometers or so in the Marathon, when runners “hit a wall,” and although their body can’t physically go on, their mind keeps them going. It’s that secret place in our souls that can power the body way after it stops.

Knowing my prayers were answered unlocked energy I didn’t know I had in me. I started leaping the stairs. It was the hardest thing I had ever done physically. But four hours later, at 6:00 PM, I climbed the last step and crossed my imaginary finish line. I just finished 8 hours of constant climbing, totaling 15,000 stairs.

In the Tower Running community, the equivalent of the Marathon is the vertical mile. Without planning or any special training, I just ran the equivalent of two marathons back to back. How can that be?

I know it wasn’t my prayers that released the hostages. It was the unbelievable courage of Arnon Zamora and his team! But I still believe that it was the belief that I was running for something greater than myself and praying for the hostages with each step that enabled me to go beyond myself.

Ask yourself: What and who am I waking up for? Does it inspire me to go beyond what I see as my limits?

Day 366

Sharon, my wife, and I love pottery. We do it together, and it’s a source of immense challenge and joy for us. Mastering the pottery wheel requires total concentration and countless repetitions. In many aspects, it is similar to climbing a staircase. There is no way to become an accomplished potter without repeatedly “climbing” that staircase.

In Japan, when you first learn to throw vessels on the pottery wheel, they give you two bowls. One is filled with dry rice grains, and the second is empty. Each time you complete a piece, you take one grain from the filled bowl and transform it into the empty one. When you finally finish transforming all the rice grains into the empty bowl, you’re told you now have to repeat the whole process because the filled bowl is now empty :-)

Japanese masters know that it’s never about the goal. It’s about the person we become while pursuing that goal. They live knowing they will never master their craft and that the only way to grow and evolve is to keep mastering it. For them, the journey is never over. There is always another step to climb.

Ask yourself: What goal is worth pursuing my whole life, knowing I will never reach it?

Now go and follow it ❤️

Dedicated to the kidnapped hostages who are still waiting for their release and to their families who are enduring the impossible. May you hug each other again soon.