Soh sets sights on more towering feats after three-peat

KUALA LUMPUR: Soh Wai Ching has set new goals after accomplishing his three-peat effort last week.

Last week, Wai Ching engraved his name in the Malaysia Book of Records with three new records on a stair climb machine at Technogym’s showroom in Bangsar.

He did the fastest time to climb the height of Petronas Twin Towers on a stair climb machine (451.9m) – 16:16 (with the benchmark set at under 25 minutes) and also clocked the fastest vertical kilometre climb on a stair climb machine – 35:37 (with the benchmark set at under 45 minutes).

He also managed to pull off the longest vertical climb distance on a stair climb machine in one hour – 1.694km (with the benchmark set at a minimum of 1.61km).

For the comparison, Wai Ching has virtually climbed twice the height of Burj Khalifa, which lays at 828m and is currently the tallest building in the world.

The 26-year-old, who is Asia’s top tower runner, said he wanted to climb the Petronas Twin Towers next in June.

“If all goes well, hopefully I aim to climb the Petronas Twin Towers in June and set new world records. I have discussed with the management and waiting for the dates to be fixed,” he said.

Wai Ching admitted that breaking three records on the machine was not an easy feat.

“Stair climbing on the machine is much tougher compared to the actual stairs due to the fact that I need to step on every step of the machine. There are only three available steps, so it is very challenging to do double steps when there is a change on the pace,” he said.

“But I took it as a challenge. The good thing about the stair climb machine is that you do it in a much controlled environment.

“It was tougher compared to the sport that we do normally (tower running) as I have to peak three times for the three records.

“I did better for the first two records than what I was targeted. I took the risk to start at a much faster step per minute as I strongly believe that I will be able to nail it.

“When it comes to the final record, it was the most challenging one as I need to climb a one-mile height in an hour and that’s about 500 floors.”