Can I tell you something really stupid about myself? Of course, that's what this blog is for. For the past year I've been working on the fourth floor of the Marquette Building, I take the Blue Line to work which drops me off right underneath the building and I've been running the stairs up to street level to make up for knowing that I will never ride my bike to work again as long as public transportation is this convenient. And for the past year, I've been bemoaning that the door at the top of the grand marble staircase that goes up from the lobby to the second floor is locked on the outside. You can go out that door, but not in. Because that would be a perfect little morning workout, wouldn't it? Up two flights of stairs from the subway to the street, and up four flights of stairs to the office. At the end of the day, I do go down the stairs from the fourth floor to the lobby; but that's not a workout, I'm just too impatient to wait for an elevator.
It never occurred to me, for a year, that the stairs that go down from the fourth floor to the lobby... go up to the top of the building.
Until I started these pomodoro workouts. I'm such a Pavlov's dog, that bell goes off and I really feel like I should do a little something something; but I'm too self conscious to do, like, situps in the office. I work with economists, they've started playing chess on their breaks. I liked the year that we had the pushup contest, I kicked ass at pushups.
So what do you know, those stairs go up from four to, I think, sixteen. I don't know for sure because I made it up to fourteen and I was breathing so loud I was too embarrassed to keep going up.
So that's ten floors, right?
So based on the formula in How to Get a Complete Workout with Nothing But Your Body but totally changed to suit my own nefarious purposes, I have calculated my workout as follows:
- Run up as many floors as you can. Skip steps in between if you can (not). Stop when you're so tired you can't climb another floor.
- Take the total number of floors and halve it. So, ten floors halved is five.
- Ta da, your stair workout is: run up 5 floors of stairs then down, then up 4 floors and down, 3 floors and down, 2 floors and down, and 1 floor and down. I don't know if I'm doing it wrong, but going down is recovery for me so I like to break it up.
- So as not to demotivate myself from escalating, ha ha, this workout, I will keep this at five sets, so next up will be 6 floors up and down, 5 floors, 4 floors, 3 floors, and finish with 2 floors. Etc.
Huntress boots, unfortunately, are not ideal for running stairs, I keep tripping on the toes. Unintentional burpees, I guess. I need a pair of, like, slip on running shoes...
You may be doing the math and thinking to yourself, twenty-five minutes of work plus five minutes of break in an eight hour workday, minus lunch, is fourteen pomodoros, Poppy, are you running up and down ten floors fourteen times a day?? The answer to which is, HA. Man if I were solidly working through an eight hour workday, I wouldn't need pomodoros. Right now I feel pretty good if I do two good pomodoros, the rest of the time I nibble away the time in my usual "SQUIRREL!" style. I'm working on getting better, but I will not be running 1400 floors twice a week anytime soon. I will get unselfconscious about situps well before that becomes a possibility.
ETA: Also woah, hello calf muscles, probably best to alternate stair runs with stair stretches, as it happens, stairs are great for calf stretches.
ETA: And also I have to keep in mind that I designed these pomodoro workouts during league break, when I had energy to burn. I am finally walking the walk when it comes to recovery, I don't want that to come undone.
