and now for something completely different

Once more unto the stairs, dear friends! Once more!

You may recall, a couple months ago, that I had wanted to start a stair-climbing regime, one in which I would time myself walking up my building's huge stairwell—up to the 6th floor, then maybe to the 19th, and eventually all the way up to the 26th. I let that regime fall by the wayside because, at the time, I was so completely out of condition that I was gasping and strengthless by the time I reached the 5th floor. Now, however, it's been routine for me to climb at least twenty staircases during my long evening walks. I've been doing this for several weeks, and I think the time has come to return to the staircase. If I create a unit of measure called "a Namsan," and "1 Namsan" equals the number of steps from the public library to the mountain's summit (roughly 1,100), then my building rates about 0.85 or 0.9 Namsan.

Starting tonight, I'm going to climb all 26 floors, stopping when I need to. I won't note how much time the climb takes, but I will be noting how many times I stop on the way to the top. The goal is to get to a point where I can do the entire 26 floors without stopping, just as I used to be able to do when I would climb up Namsan from the library side. This is going to suck for sure, but it's a concession to the notion that brief, intense exercise is ultimately better for you than slow-burn exercise. This might, in fact, be an even better idea than the 28-staircase plan I had discussed earlier.

The staircase is dark, and it's inside the building, which can be a bit depressing. I don't plan on doing the building's staircase every single day: I'll probably limit it to three times a week, and the pain starts tonight. Expect a report on how often I stopped during my trudge.


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