Stairs and fitness plus assorted life odds and ends

Monday 3/23/26

I've been lacking on the fitness front and for this I am sorry which I can say because I will do better.

Ran five circuits of stairs in the Bunker Hill Monument on Wednesday and Thursday with the accompanying 100 push-ups and three miles walked each of those days. No stairs on Friday or Saturday but the same amount of push-ups and I walked six miles Friday and nine Saturday.

I was actually waiting in line at the Monument on Saturday but there were also all these people behind me and the thing was going to be clogged and I just wasn't in the mood to interact with fifty out of shape people too dumb to know and too entitled to care anyway that they're going up the wrong side.

Yesterday wasn't much better--150 push-ups, six miles walked, and five circuits in the Monument. I was first in so I didn't have to wait, but again there were a lot of people. I don't know what was wrong with me because I was actually coughing later when I got back to Boston. Not sick coughing, but coughing because of exertion. That definitely shouldn't be happening. (Though one time I coughed stuff up, so maybe it was something else.) I was reminded of when I'd return to Chicago back at Christmas in 2010 and earlier and would play pick-up hockey at the outdoor rink in town. Always came back coughing. I wasn't in good shape during those years, though, and was drinking, plus there was the cold air. Anyway, I'll get it sorted.

There were a number of times yesterday where I had to stop completely because the people going up in front of me had and there were people coming down the other side. I hate just standing there. We can all fit, but people use this as an excuse to take another break. Sometimes I say something, yesterday I didn't.

This was a strange stair-running session, though, because it still took me thirty minutes and not more and I don't know how that was possible with the stops and I wasn't setting some blistering pace otherwise. One might think you know what you're getting with stairs if you run them a lot, but you can't take anything for granted. A stairs lesson.

You can run them for all these days in a row and a day somewhere in the middle will be this different experience. There's this maybe somewhat odd trend of the last couple years where my second time up is better than my first. On the first I feel almost like I'm nervous. Bodily, I mean. But like you do when you're anxious. Something else to work on.

I'll tell you who did great--these two girls, ten or eleven-years-old, who came up behind me on my first circuit. They didn't stop at all and they had this really brisk pace and were even talking some as they went.

What's wrong with me, exactly, stair-wise? Where's my drive? Fifteen circuits in a week isn't the goal, that's for sure. Doesn't matter, of course, that it's more than someone else would do. What matters is what I should do.

The weather probably has something to do with it. Still feels like winter. Light winter at times, but winter all the same. The temperatures will be in the thirties or low forties when I go over to Charlestown, it can be windy, and I have on the sweatpants, T-shirt, sweatshirt, fleece, beanie. More clothes than you want to run stairs in.

I could shed the top two layers before I run the stairs, but as I'm just ramping back up again after the closures I don't know how many circuits I'm going to do and I'd feel silly taking the stuff off to just run five. And, if I'm going to only run five, then I might as well keep the stuff on and have it be a little harder because of that.

Some weather where it's low fifties and gray would be nice. Go with the shorts, T-shirt, sweatshirt, sweatband. I start my days at midnight, one, two, whatever it is that day, and if it was open I could pop on over to the Monument and have at it. I feel fresh.

Sometimes I feel less so when I've been up working for ten, twelve, thirteen hours and it's time to go to Charlestown. But I don't like this. It sounds like I'm making excuses. I can decide to be as fresh as I wish to be, so that's on me.

I had awful nightmares last night. A Molly one, and then this epic three-parter after I'd woken up and gone back to sleep. The kind that scars you out in your waking life. Thursday was the anniversary of Molly being gone and putting her plan into motion. March 19, 2012.

Shut the heat off the other day. Should have done that earlier to save money.

Carried a woman's suitcase up the Monument for her one of the days last week. Why did someone have a suitcase in the Monument? Well, if you have one with you--like, let's say you're making a final stop in Boston (close enough) at the Monument before you head to the airport to go back home--you can't leave it at the bottom for security reasons. I'd carry the suitcase regardless, but in this context it's also something that helps with the workout. Adds an element. I made sure not to stop and not have it touch the ground at any point as a challenge to myself. It was one of those suitcases you could take as a carry-on, I think, so it wasn't that big.

One of the rangers had his arm in a sling. This is the fellow who told me that they have my op-ed on stair running from the New York Daily News hanging in the ranger room. I asked him what had happened and he told me about getting hit by a man on a scooter in this pedestrian tunnel down by the USS Constitution and then having to go to the ER the next day because of the pain, then a specialist, and finally to someone who operated on his elbow. Missed quite a bit of work. (I know this man's injury history over the years fairly well, because he's told me about it. Like the time in the late 1980s when he set off in chase of a man who had stolen a woman's purse outside of the World Trade Center and how he crashed into something, and that time he was out running early in the early morning back when he was a hardcore runner and went into a wall.)

I said that at least the injury coincided with the snowstorms some, so that he didn't miss as much work as he might have. He told me how he decided to reread David Copperfield for the first time since he was twelve and how quickly he read it when he was laid up watching the snow fall. I was going to say something about it being published serially but didn't. I read Dickens at that age, too. I wonder how many kids in this country do now, or could. I would estimate that the number is zero.

Dickens, for me, was an entry level type of writer. There's a boyishness to some of his novels. A sense of mischief and play.Sporting fun. Look at The Pickwick Papers. Plus, I loved all things related to A Christmas Carol, so it made sense that I'd be an early reader of Dickens. He had range, though. A Tale of Two Cities and "The Signal-Man" are less in the sporting fun vein. I was much taken with Sydney Carton as a high school kid who listened to the Doors a lot and read Rimbaud.

My mother had her consultation with her oncologist on Tuesday, which follows from the annual mammogram she had back in November. All seems well. My sister's family was going away for spring break, so my mom went over there for dinner the other night to see the kids before they leave. Amelia was so excited. She was singing and then got up for the big day of travel at like three in the morning. Buddies are early risers!

Merrimack won the Hockey East tournament behind some hot goaltending and the conference managed to get three teams into the NCAA tournament. The math is the math, and if you win your tourney you're in, but in essence I think Hockey East was a one-team-in-the-big-tourney type of conference this year.

BC managed to go twenty-two minutes in their games against UConn on Friday night without a shot on net, with the Huskies tallying 16 of their own. It's almost impossible for that to happen and for the two teams to still end up in overtime at three goals a piece where UConn prevailed. Quite surprised BC got that far because they weren't good, which didn't improve my opinion of UConn either.

Bruins had a key road win in Detroit the other night. Could be the difference of them getting in the playoffs, should they get in.

Tough one for the Celtics last night. Bad shooting night for Brown--who has been demonstrative over the last several games, assuaging my concerns about that--and Tatum really showed his rustiness. There are going to be nights like that right now no matter who you are.

I got a new kind of tea--well, new to me and old to the world: lapsong souchong. I saw where someone described it as the tea equivalent of Islay whisky and I thought I would like it. The tea leaves are smoke-dried over a pinewood fire! That sounds good, doesn't it? Little things, right now. Just trying to keep going.

I was talking to my mother the other day on a walk and I let slip how there was this day back at Christmastime when I was going to kill myself. It kind of came up as I was describing this writing thing...it's not like she is surprised or doesn't understand. I live an unlivable life. I have nothing to live for.

I have no reason to believe it will change save to get worse. I do everything write, I hurt no one, I help people, and the thing I do I do at a level no one has ever done anything else, and I am not allowed to do anything with it, and even if I were, the world is what the world is right now and getting worse. I am not like anyone. There is no one for me. People are frightened of me in this world where people want others to be at or below their level.

We kept talking, but the change in her was apparent. She knows that no one could endure living like this, maybe even me. It's not some splashy bomb dropping. Things are what they are and have been.

I was describing this part in "Dead Thomas," or how I'd come to write it. The part about the clouds. The final bit in the part about the clouds. The direction part. I was thinking back in December that that day should and could be my last day, and I was writing in these pages, and what I wrote--and there's actually a long entry from back at Christmas that I haven't put up yet, which is kind of frozen in time, that I guess I'll be putting up with a clarifying note this month--gave me an idea with that part in the story, and because of that journal entry I ended up doing this just mind-blowing thing in the story. I don't know if I'd say I'd inspired me because it was more like I came up with this thing as I was going along and then it was natural to use it in this other space. That happens sometimes.

Yesterday marked 3535 days, or 505 weeks, without a drink. That's nicely symmetrical.