Random Garmin Goal: 100 Floors in a Day

The Hot Dash 5K was just over a week ago. So on Friday, I was only 6 days post-race and didn't want to train TOO hard (otherwise I'll do speed work on Friday about every-other week), but I gave myself a different goal: can I get my Garmin to 100 floors for the day?

On my early morning run, I did a normal loop, but it sure looked ORANGE when I finished:

The reason it thought I ran so much of it fast is that I did one section very slow (so the rest was fast in comparison - one thing I really don't care for about the Garmin pace maps: I wish you could SET a range for the colors and it wasn't just COMPARATIVE). At the northern most corner, I ran up and down the 150 steps from Franklin Ave down to the Mississippi River THREE TIMES. And it truly was slow as there was still some ice on the stairs/trail in spots, and it was dark out as I did this at 5:30 a.m. so I wasn't running hard on them where I'd wipe out:

Split 5 was heading off the normal trail, and split 6 was back on the trail after 3x down and up.

I did the EXACT same run the week before and it gave me something like 20 or 21 "floors" when I was done. After heading up and down around 450 steps, I was a little bummed to see it only tacked on 13 or 14 floors:

Post-run, seeing 34 total "floors" at this point.

I don't know what I expected, but I think I hoped to at least be half way there. Not just a third of the way there.

My "floors" chart after being home for a bit post-run.

After dropping the boys off at school, I stopped at one of the schools where I teach to do some grading. When I needed a quick break from grading, I'd walk up and down this 4-story staircase in a quiet corner of the art building:

Basement up through 3rd floor.

And sure enough, it confirmed what all smartwatch wearers will tell you: the ACTUAL floors are much more than the REGISTERED floors that the watch shows you. I know it's supposed to measure a "floor" for every 3-4 meters of vertical change, but these 4 floors were CONSTANTLY measuring as 2 floors each trip up and down. For instance, after going up and down 6 times (which was 24 floors), my Garmin had added on 11 floors (averging just under 2 floors for every 4 floors climbed). I got my Garmin to register to somewhere around 70 floors by taking 3 "stairs" breaks during my grading session.

I stopped back to do some more stairs on my way to get the boys from school:

At 84 floors at 2:20 p.m....


...but after 10 mins of running (actually running
this time) up and down those stairs, I had hit 100!

After an evening of helping out at the boys' school, I was officially at 113 floors at bedtime:

113 floors at 10:40 p.m.


My "daily floors" took a BIG JUMP that day. Notice I'd climbed 956 floors over those
4 weeks, but 113 of those were in 1 of those 28 days! (12% of the stairs in 3% of the dates!)


Here's the previous 8 weeks on the same scale!

So in ACTUAL stair climbing, I climbed more like 226 floors instead of 113, but that doesn't bother me. It was just fun to try to work in a different leg-burning workout. (As I noted in this post about hiking at Whitewater State Park in Dec, 84 floors was my previous highest on a day I spent hiking with my boys.) The outside of my glutes were a BIT sore the next day, but otherwise there wasn't any real difference. I might do that now-and-then on days where I shouldn't be pushing on a hard run, but still want to find a way to get in a good (different) workout.