Goines On: The stairs

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It rained again today, hard at times, so Goines walked inside for half an hour. Or, rather, he mounted the 13-step stairs to his office over and over, recording each ascent with a vertical mark on a card. Only once, he was confident, did he forget to mark, but he did two verticals after the very next ascent.
    His timer signaled just as he began to descend for the 37th time, but he’d consider the 37 to include that descent as well, because he needed to go down to drink some water and relax a few minutes before monitoring his blood pressure, which he hadn’t done for over a week.
    Anyway, the exercise wasn’t “timed” in the sense of how many he could do in such and such a period; the 30 minutes was just what he had committed to, to satisfy Mrs. Goines’ standards for his physical welfare.
    Usually, when he walked indoors because of the weather, he mostly walked around the ground floor, throwing in a stair mounting every few minutes, ascending and descending maybe six or seven or eight times in the half-hour.
    He mostly mounted stairs today because of what he considered a challenge. Someone had commented on a weblog that his exercise that day had included climbing the stairs 42 times. Goines now understood that 42 was pretty darn good (unless the fellow meant 21 up and 21 down, and even that wasn’t bad).
    Whether “competitive” or not, Goines was pleased that his blood pressure, a few minutes after his 37 ups and downs, was 124/66, with a pulse of 69. Mrs. Goines liked it too.

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