The Year That Was and "Equipment"

2010 was a good year in many ways and specifically from a fitness standpoint it was a great year. This was the year that I began cycling to work through the coldest part of the winter, that I climbed Mt Elbert in Colorado, that I cycled from Amsterdam to Antwerp and that I began this quixotic stair climbing project. I ended the year with a 60 up-and-down cycle Eiffel Tower run and in this year I am looking forward to climbing more virtual mountains and ultimately, as the blog title suggests, the full distance from Everest base-camp to the summit in one day.

Earlier someone had asked me to post something about what equipment I use for the stair climbing. To begin with, I have a couple good quality moisture wicking t-shirts from North Face's "seven summits" series. The Everest one is pictured above and is my favorite for obvious reasons. In addition I wear running shorts and good running shoes. Most of the time. Sometimes when I am going up the stairs early in the morning I will go in bare feet as it is an old house with wooden stairs and I don't necessarily want to wake the family up with the noisy pounding of shoes.
I was also asked about hydration and such. This hasn't been intense enough yet to really require attention to electrolytes, but I will drink water copiously every hundred or so cycles and I do try to climb with only light, but fairly energy rich, foods in my stomach. I will probably have to figure out something more scientific for the Everest day, as Vesuvius did mess me up slightly... ;-)