Monday 6/17/24
Walked three miles today and did 100 push-ups today and five circuits inside of the Monument. The Monument is normally closed on Mondays--and Tuesdays--but because today is the actual anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill it was open, so I took advantage of that. The Monument stairs are the best of stairs.
It occurred to me this morning that I'm the person who has been to the top of the Monument the most times during its 181-year history, though I don't know how long I've been the record-holder. I've been doing these circuits, I believe, since 2016, the year I stopped drinking. There was a prolonged closure during COVID and for a while after, so I lost that time. But maybe back in 2016 I had the record. I don't know.
The symbolism of the Monument isn't lost on me. How could it be? Here was the scene of America's greatest Pyrrhic victory, at this place I come to in order to help myself endure what I'm going through so that I can ultimately get where I'm going, which means many things. In the world, above all. But also to a place like Rockport, with the Monument itself being made of granite from that very town's quarries. What are the chances of that? It's almost unbelievable, really, when you take it all together.
Anyway, as I was leaving today I heard one of the park rangers remark to a family after I had passed, "That guy comes every day and does twenty laps. He just keeps going up and down."
This wasn't the ranger I know. The twenty laps thing is very inaccurate. I've done twenty circuits once. I'd like to do it again. Part of the "problem," as such, is that I'm so consistent now. I'm not just talking about however many days in a row at this point that I've run stairs. I mean even when I've missed a day in the past, in recent years, it was just a day. And I've invested my fitness stock, you might say, in putting that daily time in, and that's superseded those huge single-day totals.
Five circuits is what my daily goal is, for the most part, when inside of the Monument. I'm not there every day, either. Obviously I've been at City Hall hundreds of times, and I've stuck with those stairs, and now I have the Connecticut gate stairs.
That's how he told the story, though. Twenty times, every day! I felt lazy hearing this, like I wasn't doing enough. The casual certainty with which the ranger told these people about the man who goes up and down the Monument every day made me think of that line in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
Which doesn't really make any sense. It's one of those lines that sounds good, though, I guess, if you're not parsing it that closely.
I do feel like five is a decent amount, but I have to get back to where I was. The going should be easier than it is for me right now and I should be going a little faster. It's just a matter of consistently doing it. Until recently the Monument wasn't open until one, and that was an inconvenient time for me. If possible, I prefer to do stairs in the morning, but only after I've worked a lot.
It would be good to do ten circuits in a single go in the near future.
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