Cross-Training: Stairs! And Why I Want To Do Them

Most Sundays in my training plan will be cross-training days. One of my favorite cross-training activities is stairs. I am obsessed with stair training because there are two INCREDIBLE hikes I want to do on Oahu that involve lots of stairs. I was fortunate enough to get to do these hikes when I went last March. I hope to do them again. I will write posts about them individually in the future, but briefly- one is the Koko Crater Tramway, (link is to one of my favorite blogs for hiking information, Unreal Hawaii.) which is totally legal, and awesome, and is the location of my profile pic and this pic:

The other is Haiku Stairs (link to post by Unreal Hawaii again), which is totally illegal and very controversial, and I'm really uncertain about what will be happening with this hike by the time I get there in December and whether I will decide to do it. When I did it before, it was the most exhilarating and exciting thing I had done in my life. 

Koko Crater is 1048 steps and Haiku Stairs are 3,922. But more on those later. (I'll probably devote a post to each on future Sundays.) This morning I climbed about 784 steps. It was fun because I was with my best friend, Jennifer, and because we went somewhere we had never been before. But the stair workout we'd heard about was not what we expected. 

We have both been advised by our doctors that for the injuries we have, going up stairs is fine, but going down stairs is not so good. We had heard (but possibly misunderstood) that there was a set of stairs going up and a trail going down at Fort Creve Coeur. We found the stairs (169 cement stairs), but couldn't really find a path to go down immediately near by.

After some exploring and walking through the neighborhood to a different part of the park, we found the fort and a trail that led to the bottom of the stairs. This was about a mile walk, so we did this four times. So, we walked about 4 1/2 miles, but only got to climb the staircase 4 times, so it wasn't a lot of bang for our buck so to speak. The stairs had a lot of debris, and the route was very mosquitoey, but we always have fun together and it was a fun hike. I look forward to writing posts with details and pictures about the two Hawaii hikes that are motivation for me to hit the Stairclimber if I can't find some good outdoor stairs around here.