Tuesday 4/30/24
Today I walked three miles, did 100 push-ups, and ran 3600 stairs.
Why the seemingly random number of stairs? Not that random, actually. I got up very late today. It was after five. That threw everything into disorder. It wasn't until half past twelve that was able to get out of here and do my workout. The Monument opens at 1, so I thought, perfect, I'll do my stairs in there.
I get to the Monument, I'm standing outside at 12:56 waiting for the door to open, everything felt very dead, like no one was inside the museum setting up shop, no ranger was hanging the flags outside, and then I realized the Monument is closed today. I didn't feel like going to City Hall from Charlestown, so I decided to run some of the stairs outside of the Monument.
Here's a thing that people often get wrong about stairs: They think they need a certain amount of them in order for a stair-running workout to be worthwhile. Not true. You can turn any amount of stairs into a great stair-running workout. Ten stairs, even.
Every set of stairs is different, as I've said before. (There is a life lesson in this.) Consequently, each set of stairs offers a different workout. This set had twenty-four stairs. I know how long it takes me to run 3000 stairs at City Hall, give or take, so I figured I'd run these stairs for that long. It actually ended up being a bit longer, maybe.
I went up and down seventy-five times. And you know what? I was actually more out of breath (but not out of breath--one knows what I mean) than when I run the set of fifty stairs at City Hall because 1. The incline was steeper and 2. There's less recovery time coming down. I was dripping. It was a very good good workout.
But there's a lesson there: stairs are always a great workout. They'll never let you down. So to speak. The key, if it's not that many stairs, is to keep going. Don't stop. Churn those legs. Hit the bottom and don't tarry and get your ass going right back up. A lack of some lofty number of stairs shouldn't be an excuse.
