Finally doing the Cathedral of Learning stair climb as part of Team Ferlee

Feb 24, 2013 · 3 minute read · Comments
exerciseCathedral of LearningPittsburghFight for Air Climb

I have not been doing a lot of Cathedral of Learning stair climbing in the past month, because of life getting in the way. I did do a fast single rep while tired, and then another single rep when short on time, and a single rep in the middle of a long run, but that was it.

Today, however, I started getting back into things. It’s been hard motivating myself to do the Cathedral of Learning stair climb, in part because I don’t inherently enjoy doing more than one rep. But now, I am part of an official team for the Fight for Air Climb! This makes all the difference.

Team Ferlee

It turned out that a month ago, Chris, upon learning the Bill and I wanted to do the Fight for Air Climb, told us his coworker Becky had created a team and was looking for people to join it. So I joined it, but had been too busy, for a long time, to actually meet my fellow team members to train at the Cathedral.

But today, I finally carved out time to meet on a Sunday afternoon. I met Becky for the first time, as well as Natacha and the two Jennifers. (Bill was the only one who couldn’t make it.)

We have exactly a month before racing the actual Fight for Air Climb.

The workout

The plan was to do one rep and then an extra ten floors after going back down by elevator.

I have not been doing the stair climb for speed at all, so I was happy to do the first rep at my usual “comfortable” pace. Since each of us had a different pace, we regrouped at the top after everyone arrived. Then we took the elevator down.

Since we were to do just ten floors more, I decided to try to race up, to start some serious training finally. Up till now, I was just putting in a rep here or there, without doing any sprinting. I tried to “sprint” ten floors. It turns out that I can’t go all out (running two steps up a time) for ten entire floors. That’s good data to have, because in the actual race in a month, I want to know exactly how long a sprint I can actually sustain.

More than two reps!

The other team members were done for the day for this workout and left.

But now that I was “warmed up”, I decided to stick around to do another full rep by myself, which I did. So this was actually the first time in my life I did more than two reps: I did two reps and ten floors.

Over a month ago, I wrote about my deliberately limiting myself to just two repetitions of the Cathedral of Learning stair climb. The situation has changed now. It is time to not only add on more endurance, but also add more speed.

Conclusion

It was great to meet the team and socialize and get in some exercise also. I left feeling more motivated to continue training and meeting up. The sprint also changed things up and reminded me that it has always been part of the plan to sharpen up before race day.