14

It took longer than I thought—maybe a week or two longer—but I finally walked up to the 14th floor of my building's staircase tonight. It wasn't as bad as I'd thought it would be, but there's a lazy part of my brain that wants to hang back at six floors.

Next step: I'll walk up to the 14th floor for the next couple of weeks, then finally try my hand at walking the full staircase (up to the 26th floor) sometime in May (at night because the weather will be getting hotter, which always makes the staircase workout more exhausting). My eventual goal is to get back to doing the full-staircase walk from B1 to 26, but twice. In my heyday, I was able to go up three times, but I no longer see much benefit in doing that extra climb: climbing the staircase twice—i.e., doing 56 floors—is enough to get the heart beating and the blood pressure down. If, however, I ever got myself a GoPro, I might want to try climbing the staircase three times. Just to show off.

Just a reminder that, from B1 to the fifth floor, the number of stairs isn't uniform. From 5 onward, it's always 18 steps (2 flights of 9 steps) between floors.

B1 to 1: 36 steps (4 flights of 9 steps)
1 to 2: 27 steps (3 flights of 9 steps)
2 to 3: 27 steps (3 flights of 9 steps)
3 to 4: 32 (4 flights of 8 steps)
4 to 5: 40 (4 flights of 10 steps)—the 3rd and 4th floors are devoted to a gym
5 to 6: 18 (2 flights of 9 steps)
6 to 26: 360 (2 flights of 9 steps per floor, for 20 floors)

540 steps up the staircase total. With an average height of 15.5 cm per step, that's 8370 cm, or an elevation of 83.7 meters. Not that much, really. Walk that height 106 times, and that's the height of Mount Everest. More modestly, the Lotte World Tower has 2,917 steps. That's 5.4 staircases in my building, and there are people who, when doing Lotte's annual Sky Run (a vertical marathon—here's info from 2017), can make it up the tower's steps in under 16 minutes. That's impressive. Were I to maintain a speed of about 11 minutes per staircase (close to my actual speed), then huffing and puffing my way up the Lotte World Tower would take me a full hour. (I don't think you are permitted to walk up the staircase during non-Sky Run times of year.) Namsan's steps, if you go up the side that has the public library, number about 1100, so going up my apartment's staircase twice is almost like going up the Namsan steps. A Canadian acquaintance of mine, who used to be a mountain guide, found himself in China visiting a mountain temple, and the only way to reach the temple was to go up a 6,000-step staircase. I can't even imagine that. That's more than two Lotte World Towers.

Anyway, for me, it's baby steps, but progress is happening.