Take the stairs!

I’ve discovered that most buildings have special devices that give you the exercise of a Stairmaster, only they simultaneously transport you from one floor to another.

People still look at me like I’m an idiot when I tell them I climb up the twelve flights of steps to our office instead of taking the elevator. It probably doesn’t help that I get into the office panting like a freak with a drop of sweat on my forehead. But I’ve managed to win over a few coworkers with a pretty simple explanation: it’s free exercise.

Modern existence has left most spending much of our days moving only our mouths and our hands for hours on end. We take great pains to avoid walking anywhere or doing any mild level of physical exertion. Then at some point we get motivated and join a gym, so can spend an hour or two making up for the previous eight to ten hours of ass time. I tried to think of a different want to do this – what if you could spread the exercise out over the course of the day?

Sure, I walk into work huffing and puffing, but I get to enjoy a slight tingling in my quads and a pulsing in my lungs as if I’d actually I’ve gotten a cardiovascular work out. The reality is I have, just a very small one. It doesn’t take more than three or four minutes to climb up all those stairs, but it leaves me with the sensation of actually having done something. This contrasts with the typical day that involves sitting in the office, sitting in a taxi, sitting at a press conference, and then sitting on the bus on the way home.

It also offers an alternative when you’re nodding off in the early afternoon. Those are the moments when I usually head for the coffee machine or go downstairs (in the elevator) to buy snacks. I find most of the time I do this I’m not actually hungry or sleepy, just really bored and needing a change of pace. Twelve flights down the stairs, a walk around the block, 12 flights back up, and I’m feeling a lot more awake. And with no snacks or caffeine.

I’ve started to notice the effects of taking the stairs. A couple months after I started this routine, I went on a hike with a friend of mine who was running half marathons, and somehow my lungs were holding up better than his. Friends started commented that I looked skinnier (I guess that’s not hard for me), even though I wasn’t doing much else in the way of exercise. A least a couple people in the office have said they like the idea, and talked about doing it themselves (mostly talk so far, from what I can tell).

Stairs can also teach you interesting things about buildings. Some buildings won’t let you anywhere near them. At my old office in Caracas I once stopped on the way out by security because I tripped a fire alarm by walking down the stairs after I got tired of waiting 10 minutes for the elevator to show up. Our Sao Paulo offices block them except in the case of an emergency. At a hotel I stayed at in Times Square, I spent a few days walking up and down the stairs, which involved wandering through service areas, walking past utility control closets and laundry rooms, nodding confidently to chambermaids as if pretending I really did belong there (eventually a staff member saw me doing it and told me to stop – seeing the fallout over the former head of the IMF I can understand why). My apartment building’s stairs serve as repositories for residents to stow whatever unwieldy objects like large packaging or strollers or broken chairs that residents don’t feel like leaving in their homes.

People sometimes ask me if taking the stairs is all part of, you know, that whole good-for-the-planet stuff I’m all into. Yes and no. Elevators do use a considerable amount of a building’s energy, and I like to think I’m reducing the number of elevator trips every time I take the stairs. The problem is that assumes that somebody else doesn’t take the elevator anyway – somebody might be pushing the button on the 12^th floor just as I walk past the bank of elevators toward the staircase. The elevator would travel anyway, without me in it, which saves a bit of energy but not a huge amount. Unless several hundred people in the building joined the Take the Stairs Challenge ™, you would probably not see a decline in the number of trips the elevator makes. I’m under no delusion that that many people would consider doing this (and am not really upset about it).

At my apartment I may be saving my condominium owner a couple bucks every year by walking, since there are a fewer elevator trips and I’m generally alone in most of them. But that’s not really the point. The benefit is to me. And I can’t even begin to imagine the benefits that the occasional stair hike could provide to millions of people with heart problems, clogged arteries, obesity, or circulation difficulties. Or to people who are just plain bored in the afternoon.