Speed Saturday 05: Stairs at the State Fair

First: Friday Night on the Trainer: Yep. I finally gave in and hit the trainer. I HATE the trainer. But I had a plan. I was going to watch the hour long “Simpson’s / The Family Guy Comedy Block” from 6-7 pm, and then do a 30 minute “Spinervals” DVD workout. That would be 90 minutes on the trainer. I didn’t know if I could do it.

The great news was that the Simpson’s was one that I HADN’T SEEN BEFORE! It’s the one where Homer drinks something to forget what had just happened earlier in the day. Then The Family Guy was a rerun that I had seen a million times. (The one where Stewie shrinks himself and goes inside of Peter to kill all of his sperm. “Do you know what today is? Today is a bad day to be a sperm!” Good stuff.)

So I actually did the entire workout as planned! And as proof, here’s the little bit of sweat that missed hitting the “bike thong” sweat collector:

Next: Speed Saturday at the Coliseum: My foot was pretty beat up from running hard on Thursday (4:54.6 mile!!) in my spikes, and it shows:

I didn’t think it’d be a problem for running stairs today, and it was fine. Steph and I showed up at the Coliseum at the Minnesota State Fair, saw Jeremy right away, and then Jen showed up a minute later. We were all ready to get to work:

Steph, Jeremy, Uggo, Jen

Steph was just going to run around the outside of the arena. Jeremy, Jen, and I were going to do a Crossfit workout on the stairs. Here was the plan that was inspired by blogger buddy Darcy:

• Run up and down stairs (94 total steps - 47 up, 47 down)
• 15 Push-ups
• Run up and down stairs
• 15 Tri-dips
• Repeat for 20 minutes

We each grabbed a stairway. I grabbed the steps between sections 19 and 20:

Here’s Jeremy and Jen showing where we did our push-ups and tri-dips at the bottom of the stairs:

So we were off. I was able to run up and down the stairs (and do either push-ups or dips at the bottom) a total of 25 times in 20:18. That’s exactly 2350 stairs, 195 push-ups, and 180 dips. All done in just over 20 minutes. It was a good workout. Here I am as soon as I finished:

(with a slight appearance by the "vein of approval"
in the middle of my forehead)

After running a few laps with the gang and cooling down for a minute, I decided to run more stairs around the Coliseum.

I took off up the steps, over to the next section, down the steps, over to the next section, etc, etc. I did 2 full laps around the Coliseum (first one in 7:11, second one in 7:08). That was around 1500 steps / loop, for a total of another 3000 stairs.

Here I am after running all those stairs. I’m out of focus, and all that is in focus is the little girl behind me skating on the ice (with the aid of a walker). Creepy!

Yep, I’m a big creep.

Anyway, for a $3 entry fee I did 5340 stairs, 195 push-ups and 180 tri-dips (and about a mile of warm-up / cool-down). It was a good way to spend the morning on a cool Saturday in MN!

And guess what I get to do tomorrow?!? I’m heading to the Vikings playoff game with Pharmie, Borsch, and Steph! GO VIKES!!