To celebrate this great milestone, Maria and I went to Jaxson’s Ice Cream Parlour and ordered the biggest sundaes we could find
Monday marked my One Year Anniversary of Running Stairs. I have been doing aerobic workouts for more than 17 years, but a year ago I started running up and down the courthouse steps with my neighbor, Maria. She and I had been walking our dogs together for a while and decided to try running the stairs after my husband told me he tried it while on a midnight run.
There are 28 steps. We call it an “inning” when we run up and down once (56 steps). The first time I ran, I strained to do 13 innings. Stepping of this sort is one of the most strenuous exercises. Over the course of this past year, I ran more than 1,000,000 steps, up and down, that’s more than 17,850 innings! The most innings I ran at one time during that year were 100, or 5,600 steps. It took about an hour. On a regular basis (5 X per week), I ran 60 and sometimes 80 innings, 40 at the least. We ran in the rain, extreme heat and some cold (for FL) weather.
Some tips if you want to try this: Bring a towel for sweat and plenty of water. Buy a cheap stopwatch to time yourself so you can mark your improvements. Stretch your calves on the steps before you run. Have a cell phone in case of emergency. Take 60-90 second walking breaks between innings. We break after 20 or 25 innings. Don’t stop moving when you take a break or when you have just finished! We walk 1/2 mile to and from the courthouse, so it is a great warm up and cool down. Make sure you stretch when you’re done or your calves and quads will get very tight. I run barefoot due to plantaar fascitis. When I wear any type of shoes it causes heal pain and even knee pain. No shoes = no pain for me.
Let’s see how many steps I can run in the next 12 months and hopefully I can accomplish some other milestones unrelated to working out.