June 7, 2009
Stairway to (somewhere other than) Heaven
Lance, Jennifer, Alex, Kyle and Sarah (the entire Milton Clan) invited me along for a trip to Stadium HS for a meeting with the stairs. The HS has a bowl around the football field/track that has 21 sets of stairs with as many as 60 and as few as 55 steps per set. It is a concrete bowl that is pretty steep and not friendly to a fall. Running the stairs means to do the entire bowl by running up and then down each of the 21 sets of stairs as quickly as possible. Our times were Eug 20:25, Alex 21:31, Lance 25;30 and Jennifer 46:30 with several time outs to curse my name...though I reminded her that she brought me to the stairs. Back at the gym Lance and Alex got a wild hair and set out to do 100 benches with 135 for time. Lance had already done 20 before they came up with the idea and 30 or so reps into the 100 he thought 50 sounded better. Lance did it in 6:40, Alex in 10:33 and I made it through in 8:03. We just didn't want to do anything with our legs. They added some power cleans and got up to 155 for reps.
Brenda went out to Gig Harbor for the Penninsula Century which also had a 44 mile route that she turned into 48 when she missed a Dead Henry which is what the painted roadway markings are called. She did it in 3:18 and did 5,251 feet of climbing and almost the same amount of descending...I wouldn't have minded the descents. Brenda is a much better climber than me. I work really well with gravity on my side.