Move over, Rocky. This Chester County man plans to run a marathon — and then some — entirely on the Art Museum steps.
Mark Gibson and his daughter Missy will scale the steps 414 times. That’s 27.6 miles, which represents the 27.6 million victims of human trafficking worldwide.
Rocky Balboa ran up the Art Museum steps just once on his famous citywide runs, and the accomplishment made the steps one of the city’s most iconic landmarks.
On Thursday, ultrarunner and Pottstown resident Mark Gibson and his 26-year-old daughter, Missy, will scale the steps 414 times — good for 27.6 miles.
At least, he’s pretty sure it’ll be 414 times. Gibson recently brought a tape measure to the steps to see just how long it would be, but with such a short distance, running a bit extra or a bit short on the top or the bottom could mean extra laps — or cut down a few. Gibson’s just going to keep going until they hit 27.6 miles, meant to represent the 27.6 million people who are trafficked for labor around the world.
Gibson is kicking off the ACT Challenge, a 90-day challenge raising awareness for human trafficking, led by Worthwhile and founder Dan Emr, who will be joining the Gibsons for half the run. Gibson has known Emr for years, since he taught Emr’s kids gymnastics, and the two have long been collaborators for various challenges — although Emr is a self-described “couch potato” compared to Gibson.
Gibson has done ultramarathons in a number of places, including the Grand Canyon, and ran six marathons in six days across Pennsylvania. And it runs in the family. Missy got into ultrarunning three years ago, and Gibson and his son even did a multistate skateboard trip from Washington to Ottawa. He picked the Art Museum steps to take on a different type of iconic running challenge.
“You go down there and spend an afternoon on the Rocky steps, it’s like a little mini United Nations,” Gibson said. “There are people from all over the world running up and down those steps, impersonating Rocky. It’s just a real special place.”
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Over the years, Gibson has run the steps hundreds of times — just never all at once. He expects each lap to take about 75 seconds. Unlike most of his past runs, where he’s going from place to place, Gibson expects this one to be “mind-numbingly repetitive,” especially since the ice cream truck near the bottom plays the same song over and over.
Counting the laps in sets of 10 helps the whole task feel less unwieldy and is much easier to keep track of than adding up every single one. Gibson is also experimenting with different songs and poems to keep his mind fresh.
He hopes the environment on the steps will also help provide a bit of different scenery.
“There’s so many people on the steps, weird stuff happening,” Gibson said. “This is the first time I’ve actually tried to do this distance, but I’ve been down there when there’s been wedding proposals going on. I was down there at one time when there was a full-on theater production, 30 people on the steps putting on a big theater production up and down there, there’s been motorcycles running up and down the steps, it’s just a crazy atmosphere.”
If you see Gibson and his daughter out on the steps Thursday, he invites you to join them for some — or maybe all — of their run.