BEEFCAKE: Seattle Firefighters Cool down!

No, I have not seen the 2010 Firefighters Calendar yet, but I hope some of these guys are in it!
According to Seattle Times:

A year is plenty of time to forget just how badly your legs burn and your lungs heave when you sprint up 69 flights of stairs.

"I've never had a workout hurt as much as this. My legs hurt, my lungs hurt, my back hurts, even my arms hurt. Pretty much everything hurts," said Kory Burgess, 27, of the Missoula Rural Fire Department, who was the first of 1,555 firefighters to reach the 73rd-floor observation deck of the Columbia Center on Sunday. "You kind of forget the pain throughout the year."

Since the climb's inception in 1992, firefighters have raised $2.7 million for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

"We just hit the $500,000 mark for this year, but our volunteers will be counting for two or three weeks to come," said Mike McQuaid, an event spokesman.

The firefighters each wear 50 pounds of gear, including the face masks and respirators they don when battling blazes. Lined up outside the building's north stairwell on Fifth Avenue and staggered at 15-second intervals, the firefighters — 10 percent of them women — tapped their wrist bands to a sensor as they began the 788-foot climb, pausing on the 40th floor to swap out empty oxygen tanks for fresh ones.

On the 73rd floor, greeted by cheering volunteers and a team of medics, the firefighters tapped another sensor to record their finishing times. A constant drone of alarms, indicating that air supplies were running dangerously low, rang through the air. The smell of smoke, still clinging to their clothing from past fires they had extinguished, mingled with the scent of sweat. Some finishers stumbled and fell to the floor, while others peeled off their face masks and ripped open their jackets, beelining for the giant fans and water bottles in the cooling area.

"It's hot, you feel like you can't get enough air and your legs are burning the whole way," said Ben McCafferty, of the Bainbridge Island Fire Department.