Stairs, Stairs, and More Stairs

My last internship is at Intermountain Medical Center in Murray, Utah. It's the new hospital that was opened a year or two ago and is lovingly referred to as "the Death Star". Inpatient rehab is up on the 12th floor of the hospital and is where I spend my final days as a graduate student. Well, one of the rehab docs apparently had this brilliant idea to create teams and race up and down the 24 FLIGHTS OF STAIRS from the main level up to the 12th floor. That's right...there are 24 FLIGHTS OF STAIRS...not 12...don't let that fool you as it did me.... Well, there are enough crazy people who work on the 12th floor that there were 5 teams of 4 people each who participated in this ridiculous challenge. I was lucky enough to be recruited to one of the teams which included Adam, the PT manager; Kasey, one of the OTs; Courtney, one of the PT aides; and myself. Adam tends to underestimate me on occasion and that's how I got myself recruited to his team...to prove myself (what's new? haha). I had no idea what I got myself into...
Ask me when the last time I walked up more than one flight of stairs was before I did the challenge? Yeah, I don't know either. So needless to say I went in a little untrained after returning from Arizona two days before. Not the smartest thing I've ever done. Adam and Kasey took the 2 downstairs legs which left Courtney and I with the 2 upstairs legs. Their reasoning was that they had more weight to help gravity get them downstairs faster. HA! I suckered Courtney into going first so I had more time to freak out and wonder what the heck I had gotten myself into...
Adam came racing down the stairs and tagged my hand and off I went...
The first adventure I ran into was the mysterious 3rd floor. You can't get to the 3rd floor from the public elevators or the staff elevators so I just thought it didn't exist. Oh but it does and that added 2 flights of stairs to my ascent that I wasn't prepared for. I had to run down this little hallway and up a different flight of stairs on the 3rd floor. As silly as it sounds, I was afraid I was going to get lost and let my team down. But I managed and now know that there IS a third floor that you can't get to from the elevators (the number 3 isn't even on one of the buttons...). Then things were going pretty well until I hit the 8th floor. Almost wanted to die, but I still had 4 floors left to go...which translates into 8 more flights of stairs. I decided I would take the 2 flights up to the ninth floor walking up while still skipping steps with the idea that it would be a little rest break and I could bust out the remaining 6 flights of stairs up to the top. WRONG!! Once my legs stopped...they stopped. It was like running through quick sand to get them to move again. I was so mad at myself for stopping! And thinking about how I was going to be the slow putzy one on my team...the intern who couldn't make the cut. Fabulous. I finally made it up to my last flight of stairs, where I officially wanted to just keel over and die, and I literally had to swing my legs around from my hips to get up the stairs and tag Kasey's hand because they just wouldn't move. My legs were done. And that was that.
Our team ended up coming in 2nd only to the other therapy team, so I guess that's ok. But the best part was my time for going up. I honestly thought I had blown it for my team and that my time would be horrible. Believe it or not, its really easy to lose track of time when you just keep going up and up and up and up and up and up and...I'm sure you get the point. Anyway, I ended up racing up 24 flights of stairs in 95 seconds!! That's pretty much AMAZING! My time was the fastest "up" split for the girls and the 3rd best time overall. I was only behind 2 of the OTs who both ended up throwing up at the top, one of whom missed work for the next 2 days and the other who needed supplemental oxygen to recover. Racing up that many stairs tears you up! It took me a good 30 minutes to get it all back together, but I neither got sick, nor needed O2 for my recovery. So really...who's the tough one here? : )
Moral of the story...I'm going to take the elevator next time : )