Stair climber Keith Dowell, Lawrence, and his dog Spank race up a set of stairs west of Memorial Stadium on the campus of Kansas University in this Jan. 30, 2009 file photo. Dowell is set to compete in the Vertical

When Keith Dowell walks around a city for the first time, he focuses on buildings — more specifically, the stairs in buildings.

“I’m always checking buildings out,” said Dowell, a competitive stair-runner. “And hotels. I think when I stay in hotels now, I don’t look for the fanciest hotel, I look for the tallest one.”

As Dowell was saying this, on a recent Monday afternoon, he was lounging in the computer room of the tidy Lawrence home he shares with Spank, his 13-month-old Boxer dog. Dowell is a likable, excitable man with a slight build, a head of spiky silver hair, and an English accent that adds a splash of pleasantness to everything he says.

When he feels especially passionate about a subject, he leans forward and adds an obscenity or three — only for emphasis.

For example, as he was counting the days until his upcoming race in New York City — he is one of 300 or so runners who today will attempt to scale the stairs of the very tall, very imposing Empire State Building — Dowell described the sport of stair running like this: “It (bleepin’) kicks your (bleep)!”

As it happens, Dowell’s rise to stair-runner extraordinaire — he is among the top 10 nationally in the 50-60 age group — happened by accident. Growing up a “little fat (bleeper)” in Northern England, he did not devote much time to athletics.

As he puts it, “I used to just play with the girls.”

He did a little boxing in his 20s, moved to the United States with a girlfriend when he was in his 30s, broke up with the girlfriend, started a construction company, took up running, and has since become a well-known member of the Lawrence running community.

One day last winter, in search of a road race to pencil onto his calendar, he came across a Web site advertising the Vertical Dash for Diabetes in Kansas City. He finished third of 80 or 90 runners and had the thought, “Hey, I’m pretty (bleepin’) good at this!”

Since then, he has ascended staircases in various major cities, including Los Angeles, Miami, Kansas City and St. Louis.

Finding his space

Being a competitive stair-climber in Lawrence is kind of like being a professional shrimp boat captain in Des Moines, Iowa.

At one point or another, Dowell has climbed the stairs at the old Riverfront Mall on New Hampshire Street, various Kansas University buildings and Haskell Stadium, but has found each to be generally insufficient. He thought he’d found a worthwhile set of stairs in the form of the Memorial Stadium bleachers, but a member of the KU football staff kicked him out on suspicion of being a spy.

This proved a bit confusing to Dowell, who replied: “I’m just running up and down here, and then I’m going to leave!”

So Dowell hopped into his truck one day a few months back and headed to Kansas City, Mo.

There, he found a perfect spot: the Hyatt Regency at Crown Center.

“I can park for free, walk along this glass walkway that takes you right there,” said Dowell, who trains there once or twice a week and can reach the top of the building in just over four minutes.

“And there’s so many people there that nobody knows who’s supposed to be there. So I dress kind of half-decent, I go in the stairwell, and I take my coat off and put my water thing down, and then I have the stairwell to myself. Forty-one stories!”

Spending so much time climbing stairs has made Dowell a bit of a connoisseur of stairwells. For instance, he can tell you which are particularly crowded and which are particularly dusty.

“The best stairwell is the Wachovia tower in Miami. On the landings, they had air conditioning. It was really fancy. A very nice stairwell,” he says.

Several steps above

In today’s Empire State Building Run-Up, Dowell’s competition includes some of the world’s most accomplished stair-climbers. Among them: Thomas Dold, a 24-year-old German who, in addition to winning the Empire State Building Run each of the past three years, holds the world record for running a mile backward.

The New York City race is unlike any stair-run in which Dowell has competed. During traditional competitive stair climbs, runners wear a microchip and start the race in 10-second intervals to allay crowding in the stairwell. However, at the Empire State Building Run, runners all begin at the same time in the lobby, funneling through a three-foot-wide doorway.

As he sat at his computer, showing YouTube videos of previous Empire State Building races, Dowell spoke with a certain level of awe at the prospect of scaling such an iconic structure. Mostly, though, he took a philosophical approach to the challenge.

“It’s like a demon,” Dowell said. “Like a monster, and when you’ve run to the top, you’ve conquered it. I went to do the U.S. Bank Tower (in Los Angeles), and I looked up at that, and it’s just kind of frightening. I thought, ‘How are you going to get up there?’ Well, the Empire State building is even more spooky and eerie. If you ever look at the pictures, it’s just this big structure…”

He paused for a moment, shook his head, and then said, “It’s kind of like, ‘(bleep).’ You can’t really believe it.”