where are your gloves and your helmet?

Got my last stair climb of the season tomorrow: the Wediko Climb for Kids 2019. I've done this climb several years running now. In case I haven't blitzed you with the info in the past, Wediko is a children's services organization in New Hampshire that operates a school, a summer camp, and a number of community services programs to provide support and education for kids with mental health issues, emotional issues, Asperger's, traumatic backgrounds, and the like. https://www.wediko.org/about-us/who-we-serve has more information if you're interested.

I'll be doing 46 floors; the climb starts at 8:30 tomorrow. We'll see how it goes.

Stop by my Climb page if you like. I promise I won't pester you guys about this again.

The upper body exercise routines I'd been doing before I got sick have started to all look a bit similar, so today instead of doing upper body work from my usual selection of routines I opted to start two more thirty day challenges from Darebee. Today I had:

- Ironborn, day one: shoulders, chest and triceps. 14.5 pound weights for the shoulder presses, chest presses, and triceps extensions; 9 pound weights for the lateral raises because I know which of my muscles are okay with more weight and which will only scream and cry and refuse to cooperate.
- Gladiator Challenge, day eight: one-armed plank, one minute, one go. Oh God my wrist. But I did it.
- Wall Sit Challenge, day eight: twenty seconds of wall sit. Day eight is basically a rest day, I guess.
- Ten Thousand Punches Challenge, day one. With this one you have the goal of a total of ten thousand punches thrown over the course of thirty days, with a specific number of punches to do each day; you can break them up into as many sets as you like and rest between the sets, but you have to do five push-ups before each set. Day one is 160 punches. I did two sets, so.

What can I say, I like having scores to keep track of.

Tomorrow in addition to challenge work I am going to be doing stairs, most likely. I have registered for the 2019 Fight For Air Climb, for American Lung. If you want to assist with a donation, my page is here, and if not, that's cool too.

Well, it turns out that the Weight of the World Division for the Wediko Climb for Kids is not quite as hard as I thought it was going to be. I just contacted one of their organizers to ask what the backpack weighed, and she said it's a backpack with a ream of paper in it and with ribbons pinned all over it to represent individual issues and challenges... so somewhat more than five pounds. She did say I could add to it if I wanted.

I will consider this, but the important part is that I do not have to worry nearly as much as I thought about the weight I'm practicing with. I had it in my head somewhere that I was going to have to climb with a forty pound pack. Mind you, I'm still going to be upping the amount of weight I carry when I climb the stairs for practice.

-- oh, right, I didn't actually fill folks in on this, did I? This'll be my third year climbing 2 International Place as part of the Wediko School Climb for the Kids. Wediko is a school for kids dealing with mental and emotional issues; here's what the Climb's page has to say:

Children's mental health matters.
The Climb for Kids stairclimb is a fundraiser for Wediko Children's Services. Register to walk, run, or race 46 stories up International Place and you're committing to kids in need. Those struggling with ADHD, depression, autism spectrum disorder, anxiety, trauma, and countless other challenges deserve a fighting chance; help us help them fight.

Weight of the World: So many of the children and families that Wediko serves carry the ‘weight of the world’ on their shoulders and are challenged by multiple stressors each day. Show your support in the Weight of the World Division and wear a weighted backpack as you climb up 46 flights of stairs. The backpack lists stressors that any given Wediko kid may be carrying with them every day, including: ADHD, Parent Absent in Life, Racism, Unemployment, Fear, Mood Disorders, etc.

So... yeah, that's what I'll be doing on May 6th.

If you'd like to support any of that, stop by my page. Thanks!

Signed up for my third stair climb of the season yesterday. This one's for Wediko School, which is a New England school for kids with mental health and emotional issues. I backed them last year after I found out about them during a stretch of jury duty, and I haven't been able to find anything bad about them, unlike a lot of other places that claim to be working for kids with issues. These guys actually seem to help. So I'll be doing 46 floors on May 7th to raise money for them, if anyone's interested.

... sorry, that wasn't my best post ever, but I'm tired this morning and my coffee hasn't kicked in yet.

Basement to 34 in 9:54. Did it by taking a few floors two steps at a time. This may have slowed later performance.

I will continue. Lung climb on Saturday.

Haven't been posting much about it here, but I'm going to be doing the American Lung Association's Fight for Air Climb on February 4th this year. We're climbing One Boston Place, which is forty floors of stairs, to raise money for lung disease research and treatment. Also for environmental standards related to breathing and for anti-smoking efforts, because, well, lungs.

I'll probably be doing a few more stair climbs for other causes this year- most likely for the Multiple Sclerosis society and for Wediko School for children with mental health/emotional issues- but if you'd like to support the American Lung thing, let me know and I'll send you an email with a support-the-climb link.

I got an early bird registration notification from the American Lung Association today. Fight for Air Climb 2017 is scheduled for February 4, 2017. I signed up pretty much as soon as I finished reading the email.

I will probably be posting here about my practice in my office building’s stairwell on an irregular basis between now and February. Possibly after that, too, since I expect to hear back from the MS society and Wediko School about their stair climb events. Regardless- I’ll be tagging posts of that nature ‘stairs’ in case you want to block it out.

That being said I did my first test climb today, from the -2 floor (it’s the bottom level of our parking garage) up to the machine room access on floor 34. No stops except when I had to change stairwells. Not sure how long it took me, but I know the total time up to the top and back to 28 plus the time it took to circle the elevator bank twice at a walk, then stagger back to my desk, added up to around... something like thirteen minutes. So that’s a start.

So, yeah.

Had a look at https://towerrunning.com/races.html . There's another Boston stair climb come early April. 46 floors up One International Place, which is about two blocks from my office. It's a fundraiser for an organization I'd never heard of before, Wediko Children's Services. Apparently they're a boarding school and summer camp for children (the school appears to be boys only but the camps are coed) with various forms of mental, emotional, behavioral, and learning issues. I got a little nervous straight off the bat, because the 'troubled teen' camps I've heard about have been unmitigated nightmares and the first permanent installation I thought of that dealt with kids with issues was the Judge Rotenberg Center. (Don't look that one up if you want to stay in any kind of decent mood. They're one Amnesty International violation after another, including the use of electric shocks on children.)

Fortunately, Wediko appears to be both legit and decent. I searched on 'Wediko reviews' and found a goodly number of positives from parents, a number of positives from staffers on glassdoor.com, and one blog from someone who'd been in their program something like twenty-five years ago. Didn't find anybody with awful things to say, didn't find even the slightest mention or reference on sites aimed at helping survivors of the really nightmarish troubled teen 'camps'. Found one court case that referenced them- but the reference was to Wediko evaluating and diagnosing a teenager with issues and suggesting a specific educational plan. When I searched for 'wediko horror stories' I got a lot of 'did you mean wendigo horror stories' and almost nothing that referenced the school itself. And when I searched for 'wediko accreditation' I found that their school had proper accreditation and regulation from the New Hampshire Department of Education, as well as several other states where they operate.

I honestly mean these people neither harm nor offense. It's just that if I'm going to be entering a race that raises money for them, I want to be absolutely sure that they are what they appear to be- a decent place that does genuine good, without gratuitous harm. They really do come across as a good place.

If anyone reading this happens to have personal experience with them, or knowledge of them, would you mind contacting me? I haven't registered for the event yet and I'm open to whatever information you might have.

Thanks.

So I've got until March 5th to get to the point of climbing 61 floors without stopping. The MS Society fundraiser will undoubtedly have rest stops in 200 Clarendon, they've always had them in New York, but I'd like to be able to do this without losing time to a rest stop. Problem is, my building is only 34-35 floors high (-2 to 34 in one stairwell, -2 to 33 in the other, no ground floor, just -1 straight to 1). I've been going from -2 to 18 and then turning around and walking back down a bunch of floors, then climbing up again sans stopping. It's not as much effort to walk down the stairs, obviously, but at least I'm still moving...

Anyway. Today was -2 to 18, then down to 2, then back up to 28, then across to the other stairwell to take stairs from 28 up to 34. So that's 19 + 16 + 10 + 6 unless I've lost my mind. I should be able to get to the point of doing this whole building twice before the event day.

Also working on push-ups now, and squats. Today was day one of week one of the One Hundred Pushups workout; I've been practicing push-backs from the wall to get to the point where my arms have at least a bit of base to work from. Did an initial test yesterday, so today was 10 + 12 + 7 + 7 + 10 triangle pushups, or diamond pushups, or whatever you call the ones where you put your hands close together under you and touch both index fingertips and stretched-out thumbtips the whole time. Tomorrow will be... some week of the two hundred squats workout. probably week 3.

Given that I'm doing this at lunch I am making a point of washing up afterwards and using hand-sanitizer wipes. I need to find a better formula, though. These smell weird even if they do kill germs that would smell worse.

Here's hoping this keeps up. If anyone's interested in the MS Society part of this, lemme know and I'll send you a link.