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Epilogue

Six years later.
In 2012 we got a puppy who liked to get underfoot, especially on the stairs, and whose litterbox raiding and wastepaper basket raiding necessitated the placement of baby-gates on the stairs. Around the same time I developed an interest in long-distance walking so the focus of my exercise time gradually moved away from stair-climbing until I hardly did it all anymore.
Yet, the original "Everest in my house" concept refused to let go of me. It was always there somewhere in the back of my mind. Year after year it continued to feel like unfinished business.

Then finally last week I did it, albeit in an altered form. This now is the full story:

http://terraarcadia.blogspot.ca/2017/03/a-donkey-sack-of-gummi-bears-and-mt.html

And that concludes this blog. Thank you so much for reading and coming along on this odd journey with me.

"This world is but a canvas for our imagination"
- Thoreau

"I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells."
-Dr. Seuss

Ben Nevis

I hadn't been planning to do this. I had been planning on cycling in Belgium, France and England, but then Lorraine became ill and I had to cancel that trip at the last minute. Suddenly flush with time, the notion began to develop in my mind that I should stair-climb another mountain. I noted that the royal wedding was slated for early last Friday morning and I further noted that Ben Nevis, Britain's highest peak, is 1328 meters from the start of the trail to the summit, which is a handy 246 circuits of my stairs. So there I was, early on Friday morning, with the sounds of the royal wedding in the background as I began to ascend the 6642 steps (and at the same time descend 6642 steps of course). This proved to be rather arduous and took the better part of four hours, in part because I went slowly at first to avoid making too much noise as everyone was still sleeping and in part because I looked in on the wedding from time to time.

When I tell people what I've been doing they look at me as if I've just declared my intention to become a competitive marathon pencil-sharpener. And this is the beauty of this project. The attraction is entirely personal. There are no bragging rights, there is no admiration, there is no fresh air, there are no spectacular views and there are no great stories to tell afterwards. There is consequently a kind of purity of endeavor about this that is appealing. Or at least this is what I tell myself... ;-)

Eiffel Tower Three Ways

It might surprise some of you to hear that stair climbing can be monotonous at times (what, it doesn't surprise you??), so to vary the routine I tried the approach suggested in this article:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/ask-a-health-expert/ask-a-trainer/how-can-i-use-my-staircase-at-home-for-working-out/article1947908/
I did the 60 cycle Eiffel Tower climb by alternating a walk, a jog and a sprint. This was more confusing than interesting, but there are probably some benefits to interval training like that. Dunno.
Coming soon: Mt. Fuji!

One Hundred Flights

 

I haven't posted in a while because there hasn't been much of interest to report, even by the admittedly generous definition of "of interest" that I have applied in the past. I have, however, continued to stair climb and stair run and have tried to do one hundred flights at least once a week. Each of my in-house "cycles" includes two flights up (and two down of course), so one hundred flights means fifty cycles, or a little less than an Eiffel Tower. I hope to do Mt Fuji within the next month or so and then Everest by the summer....

Racing

This stair climbing project has been a somewhat lonely endeavor. This doesn't bother me, but it did lead me to wonder at times whether I was the only person doing this. Well, it turns out I am not. Sort of. read on:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/sports/31staircase.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

Of course these racers are going up actual towers, not "virtual towers" within their homes, but a bit of digging on the web reveals that some actually do train in their homes. This led me to wonder, do I want to run a real race up a real tower? Maybe. The 10 minute time listed for the Empire State Building is insane. I did my Empire State Building equivalent climb today and even sprinting at my fastest it takes me 9 seconds to get up my two flights which would translate into a 10.7 minute total time. But that would be impossible for me as I can barely sustain that pace for two or three cycles, let alone the 71 needed. More realistic is my slowest time as I complete the last cycle which is 14 seconds and therefore a 16.5 minute time. Even this is questionable as I am essentially interval training by having the down run inserted every two flights. The Empire State Building apparently has some flat stretches, but the sustained up is certainly far more than in my house, so my slowest time here would be even slower there.

No matter though, winning wouldn't be the issue or the goal, but participating and surviving might be fun. Empire State? CN Tower? Hancock? I'll have to think about this...

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... ;-)

Day Seven - Asia

This morning I got up 7:00, put on my shorts and t-shirt and began ascending the tallest structure on earth. The Burj Khalifa ("Caliph's Tower") in Dubai has accumulated just about every superlative possible for a man-made structure and is taller by a good measure than any other building, structure or tower, supported or not. It has the fastest elevators, the highest swimming pool, the highest bar, the highest residence, the most potential occupants (30,000 apparently) and so on. It's 828 metres to the top of the spire, or 153 cycles up and down my stairs. That's 4131 steps each way. The top floor is quite a bit lower than 828m as there is a long pointy spire at the top, but I've generally been using the stated highest point of a building for my calculations.
It took me just under two hours. I kept the pace modest to be gentler on my knees and this seems to have worked as they feel fine now.
So that's the tallest skyscraper on each continent in seven days... An odd little achievement.
Speaking of odd little achievements, last night Lorraine and I went to a Weakerthans concert that promised to feature one of their four albums. They have been performing an album a night at a different venue every night. Last night though the lead singer, John K Samson, declared that they would play through every song on all four of their albums in one marathon session. And so they did. 49 songs and three and a half hours later they were through. It was an incredible experience and, as I say, kind of an odd little achievement. It's got nothing otherwise to do with my stair climbing project, but it was much on my mind as I climbed this morning.

Day Six - Australia

60 times from the basement to the top floor (and 60 times back down) took me to the equivalent of the top of the tallest skyscraper in the Southern Hemisphere and the tallest residential building in the world, "Q1" on Australia's Gold Coast.
My knees are much happier today. It was probably the beer last night.

Day Five - South America

I had planned to run Q1 (Australia, 60 cycles) today, but my knees were a bit sore and time was tighter than anticipated so I made do with the Parque Central Torre Est (Caracas, Venezuela, 221 metres, 41 cycles) instead. It was a good run and I only felt a slight tingle in my knees afterwards. Nothing that a little beer won't cure.
Tomorrow it'll have to be Q1 then and the Burj Khalifa to top it all off on Sunday.

Day Four - North America

It was the second tallest building in my seven skyscrapers in seven days series today, the Willis (formerly Sears) Tower in Chicago. It's 442 metres tall, which had me running up and down my 27 steps 82 times. Whew. I don't remember it being quite this hard before. And the Burj Khalifa is almost double that...

Day Three - Europe

The "Moscow Tower" of the confusingly named "City of Capitals" skyscraper complex in Moscow is the tallest building in Europe right now. Perhaps the name sounds better in Russian. It is 302 metres tall, which translates into 56 up-and-down stair runs, or 1516 steps each way, which is easily a more impressive number.

Day Two - Antarctica

Google "tallest building in Antarctica" and this is what you'll find. They're the "LDB Bays" at the McMurdo Sound research station. I could not find any references to height, so by looking at the size of other objects around I guessed them to be around 12 metres or so tall, or two stair cycles for me. They probably don't contain stairs, but we'll pretend they do since we're doing quite a bit of pretending anyway... I needed a quick one like this yesterday because I had meetings, work and activities scheduled from 7:00 am to past midnight. Consequently I didn't even get this blog post up until today. There we have it - two "skyscrapers" down, five to go...

Day One - Africa

Ok, here we go. In the next seven days I'm going to climb the equivalent height on my stairs of the tallest skyscraper on each continent, as defined by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. One continent per day. "Serious climbers" have their "Seven Summits"; well, I have my "Seven Skyscrapers"...;-)

First up is Africa's tallest, the Carlton Centre Office Tower in Johannesburg - 223 metres for 41 climbing cycles.

Africa and South America

I haven't gone away. I've just been "doing my Eiffels", although admittedly slightly less frequently, and adding to my list of tallest towers on each continent. This last week it was Africa and South America's turn, with the Carlton Centre in Johannesburg (above) and the Parque Central Torre Este in Caracas (below)  respectively. Each is just over 220 metres, or 41 stair cycles.

Mount Vesuvius

Vesuvius:
-Destroyer of Pompeii in 79 AD.
-Highest volcano on the European mainland.
-Still active and still a threat to the 3 million people living in its shadow.
-1251 metres from the base to the summit.
-232 times up my stairs and 232 times down my stairs.


This took me about two and a half hours plus a twenty minute break half-way. I was really beginning to feel it in my knees after about the two-hundredth lap. I'll definitely need new, better shock-absorbing, shoes before tackling Everest. I have a hard time imagining doing 646 cycles in a row, so I will have to build in more and longer breaks. That's far in the future though. Very very far in the future from the way I feel after those 232 cycles...

Gunung Api

Finally a mountain. A small one mind you, but a mountain nonetheless. Gunung Api is a 282 metre (52 up-and-down stair cycles - half a CN Tower) volcano that rises out of the harbour of Bandaneira in the Moluccas Islands in eastern Indonesia. It is a lovely thing to behold, but a bit of a beast to climb, not because of the relatively trivial elevation gain, but because of the frustratingly loose scree surface all the way up. I know because I climbed it in the spring of 1994 and wrote about it here:
 www.pilotguides.com/community/travel_writers/yes_you_climb_volcano.php

Mountains versus Buildings

So... this is supposed to be a blog about climbing mountains, or at least the equivalent height of mountains, within my house using the 27 steps from my basement to the top floor, but so far I have only been climbing towers this way and no mountains (other than the real one in Colorado). Mountains are, clearly, generally much taller than towers which means that they end up taking far more time for two reasons. One is that there is obviously more distance to cover, but the other is that most of it will likely have to be covered by walking rather than the running I have been doing thus far.
Therefore there are in fact two projects - a tower climbing one and a mountain climbing one where the former is also training for the latter. I alluded to a "project within a project" earlier. That project is to run up the highest tower on each of the seven continents in seven consecutive days. Ok, Antarctica is admittedly silly and it is entirely possible that my house if plunked down there would be the highest tower, but the Burj Khalifa in Dubai at 828 metres or 153 up-down cycles is a serious challenge. I'll have to find a seven day stretch where I'll have the time every day (or for six of those days if we don't really count Antarctica), but I hope to do that soon.
On the mountain side of things the first one I plan to do is Vesuvius (1281 m, 232 cycles). Given that I won't be running, I'm guessing it'll take me three hours. With any luck I should be able to manage this in November.
Fun, fun, fun!

Chrysler Building

This week it's been the Chrysler Building a couple of times. 319 metres. 59 up-and-down cycles. So really just yet another version of the Eiffel Tower run, but this time with a fedora...

Q1

At 323 metres, "Q1", at Surfer's Paradise in Queensland, is the tallest building in Australia. This height turns out to include the more or less unclimbable spire, once again inviting that esoteric and profoundly uninteresting debate about how to measure and rank these things, but regardless Q1 is (a) really really tall and (b) is widely "officially" listed as the tallest in Australia.
The astute and observant will note that this is also almost exactly the height of the Eiffel Tower, so I can now imagine smooth sand and ranks of breakers sweeping in long crescents to the distant northern and southern horizons (assuming the stairwell has a view, which actually it probably doesn't), as opposed to Baron von Hausmann's spiderweb of Parisian streets and boulevards radiating out in every direction. The latter is actually still more appealing and to be honest when I am stair climbing I am mostly imagining an upcoming meeting or a tree-felling project in my yard or a problematic menu item for an upcoming dinner party.
Climbing the tallest building on a continent brought to mind however the possibility of a project within a project. More on this later.