stairs: ratcheting up again next week

For three weeks, I've been walking up to the 10th floor of my building from the B1 level on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Starting next week, I'll be walking up to the 14th floor, where I live, so I won't need to take an elevator up the final few floors as I currently do.

Also, my 10-kg dumbbells and pullup bar arrived. I put the pullup bar together last night, and since I'm nowhere near strong enough to do a pullup yet, I'll do what I did in Switzerland and start with negatives. This is where you boost yourself up with a chair, put yourself in a full-elbow-flex position on the pullup bar, step off the chair, then resist the tug of gravity as you do the downward part of the pullup motion only. The slower you can do this, the stronger you get. That's how I built up to finally doing pullups when I lived in Switzerland. 

As you recall, my goal is two pullups by the end of this year. In Switzerland, back in 1989-90, my record was seven pullups. By next year, I hope to beat that. I'm a lot older than I was, but my experience back then was that, after you get past doing that first pullup, it's easy to add more pullups to your routine.

Meantime, I'm counting on the ratcheting-up to help me continue to lose weight, even as my body resists letting go of body fat. Currently, I burn way more calories walking than I do during stair work (the latter lasts barely 4 minutes, although it does get the heart going), but as the stair work gets longer and longer, I expect that to change, especially since stair work is, for me, so much more intense than walking. And I can finally feel some self-respect around John McCrarey and his hill-tackling Hasher crew. John talks about how he admires my ability to go long when I'm on my walks (18K to 35K, usually), but I tell him I probably couldn't hack the walks he does. His walks may be relatively short at 6K to 10K, but they always involve hills and mountains, and because he's in the Philippines, it's always hot and humid. That would absolutely kill me; I hate heat and humidity. And it's why I prefer to walk in the evenings and at night during Korean summer. My long walks are normally on flat ground, but with stair work, I'm going relentlessly upward, and I can feel the cardiovascular benefits. I'm no longer tired out by the two flights of stairs at work, for example, and that's nice.

Unfortunately, my shoulder still hurts, so I have a few weeks to go, I think, before I'm really ready to do negatives, pushups, etc. Once the shoulder is better, I have a bunch of exercises I'll be adding to my routine: shoulder press, bent-over rows, arm raises, triceps curls, etc.