When 6,000 participants begin to ascend the 1,311 stairs that make up the Columbia Center’s Big Climb on Sunday, Bellevue resident Shirley Lansing will be among the field.

Lansing, 80-years-old, enters the event as the oldest woman in the field.

“Everyone’s making a big deal about it,” Lansing said from her home in Bellevue. “Let’s just hope I can make it. Mercy.”

The event, which benefits the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, will attract competitors from 19 different states to attempt to climb the 788 feet in vertical elevation – a whopping 1,311 stairs over 69 stories from the Fifth Avenue lobby to the 73rd floor observation deck in Seattle’s Columbia center.

Lansing decided to enter the Big Climb following the encouragement of a close friend, PJ Glassey, owner of the Seattle and Kirkland-based personal training facility X Gym.

“He thought it would be fun for an 80-year-old to do it,” Lansing said. “I decided that I thought I could do it. It’s for a very worthy cause.”

As for the training? Well, that’s been pretty simple.

“You just climb the stairs,” she said. “One step after another.”

Lansing, an avid skier who also summitted Mount Hood in the 1960s, says she isn’t nervous for the climb, her first competitive athletic event.

“I’m really not that nervous,” Lansing said. “I just pray that God will hold my hand all the way up. Which he has so far.”