We riding fools cannot do our Climate Rides this year. I can’t even really ride my road bike right now. I mean, I could. It would be a great stress release, riding solo, in my face mask, on local roads. It’s just that when you ride a road bike there’s a first time for everything, and I have never yet gone over the handlebars. I keep imagining turning up in the ER during a global pandemic with a road-bike concussion.
But the Climate Ride folks are endlessly resourceful, and they have come up with a shelter-in-place alternative for this year’s cancelled rides. It’s called Climate Rise, and it encourages us road bikers to sign up for some personal or team challenge that we can do at or close to home on a designated day. The day is Saturday April 18th. Examples of personal challenges are: writing 37 poems, baking bread for the first time, and climbing 18,700 stairs.
I include that last one as an example of just how bonkers humans can get when they are forced to #staythefuckhome. But also because I personally know the person who’s going to attempt it. Ok, I’ll just come out and say it. It’s me.
I loved the idea of a Climate Rise challenge. It would be inspiring to me, I figured, and also hopefully to some other people. I didn’t want to fundraise, we’re all strapped enough for cash at this time, but I wanted to do something that might keep climate change in people’s minds while also connecting us somehow in this time of separation and fear. I just couldn’t decide what my challenge would be.
As the social distancing restrictions tightened and we were constrained to staying closer and closer to home, it came to me. Right outside my front door is a staircase with 187 stairs. What if I climbed up and down this staircase some number of times on April 18th?
One day I went out and climbed the staircase three times. It took me ten minutes and I was pretty winded. The next day my calves really hurt. So the day after that I tried it five times.
When you are unable to go to the gym, hang out on the beach, ride your bike up a glorious mountain, or even drive to some local trailhead for fear of people who live next to that trailhead yelling at you (this has happened to me), you have to get creative. When you are climbing the walls from being indoors so much, you get a bit punchy. I decided a hundred times sounded good to me. So I signed up for Climate Rise and I started to train.
When I am training for a Climate Ride, I ramp up slowly over several months on a carefully planned schedule. My training coach is a very inspirational friend of mine. She is a triathlete and she takes no prisoners. This is how conversations with her go on a 50-mile ride on a Sunday morning:
Her: We don’t need to stop at Olema for coffee, right? We can power on to Marshall?
Me: Ummmm
Her: Great! That’s how I feel too! Marshall!
However, training to climb 18,700 stairs during a global pandemic when I’m also still working full-time as a nurse is proving to be a little less scheduled and, let’s just say, kind of spotty.
One day recently I did the staircase seven times. The next day, six. I was sort of tired that day, but also happy hour came around before I had a chance to do my stairs. It was completely beyond my powers to prevent it. A word to anyone out there wanting to climb 1870 stairs: don’t have a glass of wine first.
I have a great playlist that I have put together to keep me engaged as I trot up and down the staircase. It’s called Born Slippy after my all-time favorite workout song by Underworld. There are songs of different speeds on my Born Slippy playlist, because in the beginning you want to run up and down the stairs, but after a while you just want to sort of slowly slog. And sometimes, when it is getting a bit weird to be climbing the same staircase yet again, you want to get fancy: take steps two at a time, skip down, use a new rhythm that matches the song. Exciting stuff!
I feel lucky because as a hospice nurse, not only am I still fully employed but I get to drive around a bit. I’m not the kind of person who would do well being stuck in the house all the time. So despite the risks inherent in visiting patients, I’m thankful that several times a week, these visits are essential for hands-on care and I get to beetle up and down 101 with no trouble at all. It’s like a good dream, driving 101 during the pandemic. And then I come home and I get to climb a staircase eight times! I mean, what more could anyone want?!
You will not be surprised to hear that it becomes a little meditative, hoofing it up and down those stairs. I have deep thoughts. I can’t really remember what they are now. It occurred to me I could record them on my iPhone, but then I was afraid it might be like when you get really stoned and the next morning you read over your penetrating wisdom from the night before.
I do remember thinking this evening, at about stair twelve hundred, that my activity was a little like a metaphor for life: it’s a lot easier to go down than it is to climb up. Deep, no? I’ve also been soaking up the wisteria vine that hangs over much of the top half of the staircase. Every day, a little more in bloom, a little more fragrant. I think about how people in India can see the Himalayas for the first time in decades as the lockdown eases air pollution. Shoals of tiny fish are visible in Venice canals. Nature is taking back some of what we stole.
In celebration of this momentous shift, of humanity’s epic fight against a microbe, of the kindness and humor and generosity and heroism that have blossomed during the pandemic, and of my own hopeless optimism, I’m climbing stairs. I don’t really know what else to do with myself.
At 8am on April 18th, Bill McKibben is going to virtually address us Climate Risers before we head into our challenges. After his talk, I will go outside and face my demon staircase. I honestly don’t know if I can do it. I’ve only climbed eight so far, and it’s a week before. Whether I make it to a hundred or not, I really hope I don’t trip and break a bone. Imagine turning up in the ER during Covid-19 because you were running down a staircase to the rhythm of Born Slippy.
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