Stepping Up

The landing for the 15th floor.

In January, colleagues in the Finance department started the Tower challenge for themselves and co-workers who also office in the building.

The Tower Apartments building is the tallest on campus with 15-floors of apartments and a 16th flight to reach the roof.

There are 256 steps from the ground to the step that would get you on the roof if it was unlocked.

Over the first few months, a young employee in finance was doing multiple trips up and down the steps every day, setting a untouchable pace.  At first, I'd walk up after getting to work and possibly add a second trip later with a colleague.  That younger employee was moved to a different office by May and stopped climbing.

As January walked into February which skipped into March, I became intrigued by the Tower challenge.  

Most weeks I'm on the campus four days.  I could put five hash marks on the paper used to track everyone's steps by adding one extra climb on one of the four days.  'IIII' doesn't look as satisfying as seeing 'IIII' with a diagonal line through it.

Heading back down.  6/28/23 dwm photos

 Then the personal challenge was getting 10 climbs every week.  In a normal week, that means two-days of 3 climbs and two-days of 2 to reach 10.

 

 There are a couple benefits from the climb, first, the exercise.  Second I like using the steps to think about the day ahead, think through various projects and settle on the most important things I need to do that day.

 

 If there was just a couple days left at the end of the month, I made sure to get 5 steps during the last days of the month so I could reach 30, 35, or 40 climbs on the monthly tally.

The Tower is a perfect for the challenge.  It's tall, but not so tall the number of floors scares off participants.  Now that it's summer, I try to put time between climbs so I'm not as heated as I would be on successive trips.  At the end of June, I logged 230 climbs.  Just counting the steps going up, that's 58,880 steps.