I'm going to do a nutty, rich-people thing: tomorrow (Saturday), I'm going to take a bus down to Daegu just so I can eat a meal at that Chinese restaurant I praised on my most recent walk blog. I've been dreaming about that resto for months. And, as rich people do, I'll be coming back to Seoul the same day. I'm looking forward to this.
Sunday will likely be one last day of misbehavior, but come Monday, I'll be back to the grind, working my way up my building's staircase once again. I'm probably going to start back a bit, i.e., I'll take a rest at the 14th floor, then climb up to 26 without stopping. Once I'm back to doing the staircase with no stops at all, I'll begin working on 1.25 staircases, i.e., doing one full staircase, going back down to B1, then walking up to the 6th floor. As I wrote long ago, the first five floors aren't equal in length:
B1 to 1: four flights, 9 steps each (36 steps)
1 to 2: three flights, 9 steps each (27 steps)
2 to 3: three flights, 9 steps each (27 steps)
3 to 4: four flights, 8 steps each (32 steps)
4 to 5: four flights, 10 steps each (40 steps)
After that, from 5 on up, it's only two flights between floors, 9 steps each. So by the standards of floors 5 to 26, B1 to 5 is more than five floors' worth of stairs: it's closer to nine floors' worth. This is a huge physical and psychological hurdle: once I'm past the 5th floor, things get easier, and the floors pass by more quickly. You also start to notice the staircase's little quirks, a bit like getting to know the ins and outs of your significant other. Between the 6th and 7th floors, there's a bicycle against the railing, making it difficult for my stroke-y self to navigate that flight because the handrail is harder to reach over the bicycle, which blocks access. At the 8th floor, there's an odd step that juts out diagonally. Same for the 19th floor. And depending on the floor, there might be thick pipes jutting out of the wall at the landing where the door leading to the freight elevator is. The 26th floor has pipes.
Once I master 1.25 staircases, I'll move up to 1.5 (up to 14), then 1.75 (up to 22), then 2 whole staircases. Another celebration, then it'll be on to 2.25, 2.5, 2.75, and finally 3 whole staircases. That'll be a good 40-plus minutes of exertion—a day's sweaty cardio in itself—and by that point, it'll be summer. What I've been doing up to now, barely 10-15 minutes of daily exercise, hasn't been even minimal. By the time I get to 3 staircases, I really ought to see significant improvements in blood pressure, resting heart rate, etc.
If I survive the coming heat and humidity. More on all of this later.
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