I was given to understand that there would be donuts.

There were no donuts. There were t-shirts and medals, but no donuts. They had donuts in previous years, but no mention of them this year.

Base 2 Space is an annual run up the Space Needle stairs to raise money for the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle. That’s a good charity, but my main motivation was running up the Space Needle. My belief is that you should generally go up things that can be gone up, at least if they’re interesting things. There’s another Seattle charity stair run that’s taller, but it’s just in a regular skyscraper. Base 2 Space is “Seattle’s Most Iconic Climb.”

I made it to the top, but there was some problem with the timekeeping. According to the follow-up email:

Our apologizes for the timing issues that arose during and after climb day. We have been working directly with the timing company to resolve these issues and ensure all times are accurate.

Despite their apologizes, I doubt if they can do anything about my time. What I think happened is that the chip reader didn’t register my time at the top until I’d been there for a while and happened to walk by it later. My official arrival time is 9:09 AM, but my first photo has a time stamp of 8:49 AM. So while my official time is 42:57, I think my real time was about 20 minutes. Which is still terrible. There were five runners over the age of 80 and four of them had better times than that. So I’m going to have to do it again next year, just to redeem myself.

And they’d better have donuts.