This blog post started its life during the pandemic, [1] as part of a series in the daily beemail called Madhack Mondays.
Here’s a highly beemindable workout idea for the dead of winter [2] if you have stairs in your house. Put 100 marbles or legos or whatever in a bowl at the bottom of your stairs. Then start a timer and see how fast you can carry them all upstairs one at a time. I did this during the pandemic, when my record was 17m31s, edging out our then-11-year-old by 2 seconds.
If you’re doing this for time, there are three rules:
- The marbles/legos must go one at a time from the floor to the top of the stairs.
- Start and stop the timer in the same place, i.e., 100 full laps.
- Both feet must touch the floor both at the very bottom and very top every time.
I worked out a technique where you stay super crouched as you bring your second foot up to meet your first foot at the top, before pivoting and dropping two stairs down. That way you minimize how far you raise your center of mass. So much saved energy! Not as much saved energy as ignoring this blog post altogether, but, I mean, are you going to leave this gauntlet just sitting there?
Of course I don’t know how standardized house heights are so if you beat me I’ll assume your house is shorter.
And for those who are not freakishly competitive you could just beemind a number of times you go up and down the stairs per day or per week — tracked via marbles/legos — without timing it and without doing it 100 times in a row or until you throw up. I assume that’s a thing people could do!
Footnotes
[1] Here’s another fun variant, invented independently during the pandemic by Jon Courtney. You know how Mt Everest is 29,032 feet high? And your stairs are something like 10 vertical feet? Well, if you divide those numbers you get about 3000. Put that many marbles in a bowl at the bottom of your stairs — or maybe a tenth or a hundredth of that and do this ten or a hundred times. Then, after you’ve carried them up one by one, you’ll have effectively (technically ineffectively) climbed from sea level to the top of Mt Everest.
[2] Shout-out to our Australian users, of which we have weirdly many.