staircase math

About those staircases I did last night—

You may recall, when I talked about the creekside stairs before, that I'd said the staircases were spaced about 200 meters apart. In truth, they're very unevenly spaced: sometimes, they're as close as 100 m together; in other cases, I can walk 300 m before I reach the next set of stairs. On last night's walk, I did all the staircases I encountered while going east. The eastward walk moves ever so slightly uphill; with street-level height remaining the same, this means the staircases shrink as you move away from the Han River. I paid somewhat closer attention to the shrinkage last night, but I was still too lazy to count all the steps at every staircase. Here's what I discovered:

Staircases 1 through 13: number of steps goes from 63 to 53.

Staircases 14 through 20: number of steps goes from about 36 to 23.

So, roughly:
For the first thirteen staircases, I'm averaging 58 steps.
For the final seven staircases, I'm averaging about 30 steps (29.5, to be exact).

(58 x 13) + (30 x 7) = 964 steps. That's close to the 1100-ish steps that take you up the most badass staircase on Namsan, so this is not bad practice for me.

If I were to walk straight up to the 26th floor of my building from the B1 level, that would be about 936 steps. I don't think I'm anywhere near ready to tackle that particular walk anytime soon—not without stopping, anyway. But I suspect I can do more now than I could even just a couple of months ago, when I made the abortive attempt to use my building's immense staircase as my own personal gym. Back then, I couldn't even walk up to my own sixth floor without stopping short of the goal. Now, I suspect I could walk past the sixth floor... although I have no idea where I'd stop. I'll be finding out soon: I've promised myself that I'll stick with the creekside path and staircases whenever the weather is good, but I'll switch over to my building's staircase whenever it's raining.

More info later.


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