Ran 10,000 stairs and walked thirteen miles in the awful heat and humidity this weekend

Monday 8/10/26

I'd say that this summer has had the worst weather of my life. What one feels outside isn't just "weather." It's a result of what we're doing to the planet. The weather feels unnatural because it isn't natural. This is beyond, "It's summer." It's frying the earth.

The Bunker Hill Monument hasn't been open in days. Even though I had been hard at it on Saturday on the fitness front, I saw that the website for the Monument didn't say the Monument was closed. This was after ten o'clock, which is when it opens. So, me being me, I hustled over to Charlestown, to discover that the Monument was closed regardless of it technically being listed as open on the site.

I've been seeing these testimonials from people--dossiers of complaint--about the heat and humidity, in which they say they can't go outside for five minutes without sweating, and that their kids don't end up staying outside for more than twenty minutes and when they come in they want to take a bath despite not ever normally wanting to take a bath on account that they feel so gross.

The dew point has been over seventy degrees every day of late. It doesn't dip below that number even in the middle of the night, when I am awake, because it's the start of the day for me. Sometimes the dew point is higher than the temperature. The dew point is king. It's potentially more impactful than temperature. The air oppresses. It has a physicality to it that it feels like you have to shoulder aside as you move.

After running only 2000 stairs at City Hall on Friday, I wanted to do better on Saturday. It wasn't pretty, but I pieced together 5000 stairs. I had to take breaks. This isn't how it's supposed to work. The way it's supposed to work is I turn up at City Hall, I run up and down those stairs fifty times without stopping taking them two-at-a-time, and there's 5000 stairs in about an hour.

The heat and humidity change that, though. Obviously I don't like to take breaks, but the truth is that this is a crazy thing to try to be doing at all in weather like this. Crazy if this isn't your regular workout, I mean. If it is, then it's just that much harder. The body temperature heats up. You're cooking, and not in that good, "Wow! He's really cooking!" kind of way. Take a break for a few minutes, and your body starts to cool down some as you sit there with your sweat making a puddle at your feet.

Then you have that soaked shirt clinging to your skin. It's awful. Flush against you. Your shirt is heavy and not like a shirt anymore, but now it's cooler, so, unpleasant as that is, it's helping to reduce that temperature, and you get back at, before you heat up quickly again, take another break before too long.

The whole time you're doing this, after having heated up, you're thinking, "I don't want to be doing this" and "This is awful." It feels much less like working out and far more like punishment. And like a battle.

There's no water out there. When I come back from these stair-running workouts, whether they're at City Hall or in Charlestown, my thirst is such that I don't think I'm being dramatic in calling it borderline painful. I'm ravenous for water. I probably end up drinking five liters over the rest of the day, sometimes more. My absence of available water while I do these workouts stand in the sharpest contrast to those people who go nowhere--even when they're doing nothing--with their giant fancy water bottle that makes the water stay cold for a longtime.

Who would you bet is healthier, though? People will think it's a crackpot theory, but I believe the preponderance of those water bottles speaks to the lack of standards people have for themselves. How they baby themselves without doing anything rather than making a point to go out and try hard. I'll drink when I get back. I don't need to make a show of it. I swear, those giant water bottles aren't that dissimilar from New Yorker and Paris Review tote bags.

You know what makes you less well? Being weak. We baby and weaken ourselves constantly, in all areas. Being weak in mind and body sends a message that you can't keep going down the ladder rather than up it. Weakness begets weakness, excuses beget excuses. I drink my water. I bet I drink more than most people by a goodly amount. But I don't act like I'm helpless without a giant water bottle by my side, because I'm not, no matter if I'm running many thousands of stairs.

But like I said, this is just my personal theory. (Correct though it is.)

Be hardy. Hardiness is now a virtually non-existent quality in humans.

Having ran 5000 stairs at City Hall on Saturday in the extreme heat and humidity, I then walked ten miles in the extreme heat and humidity. Also did my 100 push-ups.

All of this was done by just after noon. I had already worked for seven hours before getting started, fitness-wise.

A water fountain up on Bunker Hill, or Breed's Hill, if we want to be technical, would be nice/welcomed, as I said, as well as one near the City Hall steps. But there not being one doesn't change anything. The stairs have to be ran and stairs don't run themselves, water or no water.

It was somewhere in the process of walking those ten miles that I saw on the website that the Monument wasn't listed as closed, causing me to think, "If you get over there fast, perhaps you can do the double, and get in five Monument circuits as well." The double is rare--thousands of stairs at City Hall (or wherever), followed by thousands of stairs in the Bunker Hill Monument.

Maybe they thought it was so obvious that the Monument would be closed that the park service people didn't think it needed to be officially stated or there was no urgency to change the website considering. People were showing up, though. Families with kids. They were there to climb.

Sitting on top of the hill was a man with mental problems. A helicopter was passing overhead, and he was swearing at it at the top of his lungs. I wouldn't presume, of course, to know this man's story, which could have entailed so many things. He wasn't "acting out," or being colorful. He was screaming expletives about government waste, and why were they doing this.

I felt pity for him. Of course, you don't make eye contact, you don't stare, because you don't want to set someone off further, which can happen if they see someone looking right at them, as if they were a grotesque object. People can also be dangerous. I just kind of carry on as I otherwise would. I'm aware, too, in case that person needed help in a precise moment, and if they did, reservations as to my own safety would be set aside. I wouldn't not help someone who needed help. That's not something I have in me.

About twenty yards away from this man, sitting on the top step of the Connecticut gate stairs--more on them in a moment--was a couple, in their thirties, I'd say. They were both staring at the man and laughing. This was funny to them. He was a comical spectacle.

That's how people are. They're trash. Morally they're trash. They are so stupid. They don't know anything. They don't know how to behave. What's appropriate. They have no knowledge in their heads. They're just mindless simpletons amused over the simplest things, or things that they shouldn't find amusing at all, like this poor soul up on the hill.

There's so much sickness in this world. And so much mental illness. It isn't like this duo were well, I'm sure. But how can you not understand something like this? How can you need the likes of this man, behaving as he was, explained to you? "He's not well. He's suffering from mental illness. This isn't some performance, it's not for your amusement, you're cruel to be staring and laughing at him, and you're even stupider than you are cruel."

It's similar to a child--a very young child, like a toddler--who sees someone with a disability and, not knowing any better, not knowing that this thing they're seeing is a thing, never mind the thing that it is, laughs and points. The parent--though less of them these days than perhaps ever before--would then intercede, say, "That's wrong, don't do that," and explain as best they could to the child. Teach the child a lesson. A person who isn't an evil person shouldn't have to be told more than once, during their most formative years, not to make fun of the afflicted.

But it's as if so many adults are at the mental level of that child who is to be taught this lesson early in life, despite the all of these years having passed since they were that toddler. But consider: we have David Sedaris, beloved mocker of the disabled (isn't it amazing that you can write those words and have them be true, and yet, one is allowed to be this way, there is no penalty, no "drawback," endless privilege and vast wealth, unlimited industry support and approval, and scarcely any objection?), and Joshua Boger, a man who thinks it's right for someone to mock the disabled and wrong for a person to think this is wrong to do (ditto).

A Sedaris, a Boger, those are your sickest people. Sicker than the man screaming at the helicopter in the sky because he can't help it, whereas evil people like Sedaris and Boger chose and choose to be this way.

The duo at the Connecticut gate the kind of people who'd have a conversation lasting several minutes about what they were seeing, as if at a total loss for how such a thing could be, and like they'd never seen anything like this before.

Personally, they're the ones I'd stare at, not this guy screaming at the helicopter. Stare at, and just shake my head.

My Saturday fitness efforts resulted in a heat rash. I get one in the same place--at the base of my shirt sleeve on the inner portion of my right arm--maybe once or twice a year when I push it hard in the summer. This is resolved with a dab of Cortisone cream, which stings going on.

The entire time I'm walking something like those ten miles, I'm working in my head. It's not some "blank space." I am taking in everything I see, yes, but the work is constant. I work on stories, I come up with ideas, I work on books. I think through entries I need to put up in this record about people in publishing. I go from one thing to another. It's intense. What I come up with in my head during such a walk, stays there. It doesn't just pass through. I have it now. Something a character says.

Or, in the case of a publishing entry, another example of just how evil someone like a John Freeman is, by dint of yet another connection with another evil person that is in bed with them. Another bit of tracery from the spider web of interconnected evil. It's so extensive. If you want to show people how bad these people are, how evil they are, how filthy they are, how bigoted they are, how corrupt they are, how detestable they are, and how rigged the entire system is as a result of it being filled with nothing save such people, you have to be "on."

You need to possess the understanding, to see all the devils in these details, and be able to present a lot of information clearly. It's an incredibly complex web of corruption and evil, rather than a case of "Here's an isolated case, here's another." That's one of the things I'm working on as I walk.

On Sunday I arose, worked for a half dozen hours, then set out again to run stairs at City Hall, knowing that the Monument would be closed. I ran 2000 stairs, then took a break, thinking once again, "I don't want to be doing this" and "This is awful," before running another 1000. 3000 stairs at City Hall is fine. Numbers-wise, it's equivalent to five circuits in the Monument, and is my fundamental unit. Typically the baseline. Do 3000 City Hall stairs or five Monument circuits and that's an honest effort and a decent workout. Nothing to sneeze at, you did your job, so to speak.

I wanted that symmetry, though, with the day before and to reach 10,000 stairs on such a hot and humid weekend. I went back here, changed my shirt, shorts, boxers, socks, then started walking to Charlestown, aiming to pick up the last 2000 stairs at the Connecticut gate. Such a grind, was also thinking mixing it up would help a bit, too.

I had developed, for what I think is the first time, an exercise-induced vasculitis, these sorts of banded rashes right above the top of the sock. It's because the blood vessels are inflamed. Didn't look great, but wasn't that bad of a case going by the photos I subsequently saw, and it's mostly faded away now as I write at quarter of four on this Monday morning. Simply the cost of doing extreme endurance workout business in this humidity.

Ran those final 2000 stairs no problem without stopping--you're a bit more shaded, as I mentioned--and also walked three miles and did 100 push-ups. Yesterday marked 3675 days, or 525 weeks, without a drink.