Bunker Hill Monument stair-running achievement unlocked

Monday 6/9/25

I have a number of goals regarding the stairs in the Bunker Hill Monument for the rest of the year. I don't like to do something in the past that I can't do in the present and then don't replicate in the future. It makes me feel like I'm backsliding and that's a bad feeling for me to have because I always want to be improving.

I was able to cross off two of these Monument goals--well, it was really one, but I guess it counts as two--over the past week. My aim was to run ten stairs each of the five days the Monument was open--Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. As far as I know, I had never ran ten stairs four days in a row, and by Thursday I had done that. Which was one achievement.

Wednesday I was strong, Tuesday it was hot but I was fine, on Wednesday it had cooled down, but I struggled. I noticed I was making good time on Wednesday, and then picked up the pace for the last circuit and came in somewhere around sixty-one minutes. I didn't have a timer on, but was going by the time I noted when I stepped through the door and when I hit the bottom at the end. I then tried pretty hard on Thursday to do the ten circuits in less than sixty minutes and used the timer on my phone. I came up short--it took me sixty-one minutes and ten seconds. I was pushing that pace. It's going to take some doing to get under sixty minutes.

Anyway, Friday didn't go so great. Was definitely over seventy minutes and maybe closer to seventy-five. But that's okay. With circuits of the stairs--and especially this many--the key thing is to be in there doing them, and to keep moving. Ten is ten. On that same day, a woman asked me if I was a professional athlete, which along with the inquiries about whether I was special forces and if I was training for the military is one of the three best things anyone has ever said to me in the Monument.

On Saturday I did better--when I got to the bottom, a ranger I've known for years said, "You impressed a lot of people today" because what sometimes happens is they comment on what I'm doing after they're done--and then come Sunday it would have taken an injury, accident, or heart attack for me not to do the ten circuits and achieve my goal. Wasn't that hard again. On each of these days I also walked three miles and did 100 push-ups. I had ran ten circuits last weekend in the Monument as well, so it's really been ten circuits each of the last seven days it's been open.

No aches, no twinges, nothing. The same as if I'd sat on a couch the whole time.

I read that 150 minutes of exercise a week are important for the upkeep of good blood pressure. That's a fair amount.

I am sweating, I should think, as much as someone can from working out. My clothes after these ten circuits are drenched. It's not just my shirt--you could wring out my shorts. There is a trail of sweat on the stairs.

I have a lot of room for improvement. I've done other things better in the past. I need to stretch myself out more so that I'm running more stairs in the first portion of my ascent. I don't think I've ran more circuits in a similar amount of time. The total since May 15 stands at 145.

In all of the years I've been doing these circuits in the Monument, it's never become easy. That's one of the reasons the Monument is so valuable. There's a life lesson in that. But I've never been deterred, I've never begged out. I haven't tapered off. If anything, the opposite. And this I do for my work. So I can stay strong and do what I have to do, and withstand all that I've been put through, and beat these bigots. And get what I have to the world, so it can do what it can for the world. Up, down, up, down, up, down.

The Monument provides a feeling of accomplishment that no one other stairs I've known do. I have what may even be thought of as a special relationship with the Monument. My respect for it is extreme. I don't want to look back in these pages and read an account like this one, on a day when all I can do is stand at the bottom of the Monument unable to go to the top, or to go up these same stairs but the once, and very slowly, gripping the rail.

I won't do worse and I won't let myself do worse. People say, "That won't always be up to you," but I don't know that. That's not my attitude. I feel stronger, fitter, and healthier than at maybe any other point of my life. No one would have asked me twenty years ago if I was a professional athlete.

Yesterday in the cafe while I was reading I saw this quote from John Havlicek's wife, in which she said that if he'd been diagnosed with diabetes, he was someone who would then never eat a sweet again, that's the kind of discipline he has. "Hondo" was famous for his discipline. I thought that was interesting. I wasn't diagnosed with diabetes, and I just decided I'd never eat a sweet again. I think about all of the things I do. What kind of discipline do I have? How would that be classified?

Yesterday also marked 3248 days, or 464 weeks, without a drink, save that it also really doesn't, because I am almost certain I stopped drinking in May 2016, and now my yearly anniversary is practically in July because I miscounted along the way. But that was my fault, so I pay the price with this getting pushed back.

I'm sure it would seem odd to just about everyone how I track this, because other people would simply remember the day. I break things up. Each week, if I make it through the week--and I never assume the week before I earn the week--I like to note that, because it is a little bump. Anyone else in my situation would have been dead a long time ago. I have to find these ways to keep myself alive so I can keep going with what I'm trying to do. I've had to adapt in regards that would never occur to anyone else.

My sneakers had holes in them and the holes kept getting bigger, so I finally threw away that pair this morning (it's half past three right now). I am supposed to take today and tomorrow off from stairs with the Monument being closed and me making this big push to do 400 circuits in four months, but I feel like I am letting people down by not being there at City Hall.

I know that sounds silly. But I'm a fixture there, even if they are my back-up stairs, and so many people have said things to me, like it's reassuring and inspiring that there I am, year after year. If someone sees you running stairs somewhere, let alone often at that place, they're not going to assume you're running stairs somewhere else, too. I guess I don't want anyone to think I finally quit.

I don't quit.