What's the highest flight of stairs you will climb?

[ertyu]

This question occasioned by a clickbait title, "Elevator anxiety is at all time highs, this company may have a solution."

I sat and stared at it for a while thinking, you know what, I think I have a solution, too. Groundbreaking. V radical. Ladies and gentlemen, behold the stairs

Elevators have been identified as a high-risk site of corona transmission. Makes sense for a small tin everyone touches and coughs into. Crowding, poor ventilation. When I raised the topic with friends, most people's responses were along the lines of, "well, I'm not climbing X flights of stairs"

So how many flights of stairs would you climb?

[tonyedgecombe]

Taking the stairs may be worse, you might end up with a lot of people breathing heavily over each other.

[2Birds1Stone]

7, living in a 1970's PRL building and I love doing it after heavy squats and deadlifts.

[C40]

I think it's easier to ventilate a few elevators than to ventilate entire flights of stairs.

Anyway, I'd climb a lot if there were a good reason. At my last work office building, it was 15 flights tall. I'd take breaks, walk to the top, then ride the elevator down, and repeat a few times, then go back to work. I didn't want to get sweaty, I'd do it just 2 or 3 trips, a few different times per day.

[IlliniDave]

I don't know. I climb before I take an elevator whenever I have the opportunity. But I live somewhere where even a three-story building is not something I encounter frequently in my travels around town.

[fiby41]

Ground plus thirteen.

Regarding ventilation, there is a law in Russia prohibiting smoking in the staircase which was needed after under earlier law the balconies of govt-owned building on each floor was soldered shut after occurrences of smoking drunk hostel-students toppling down.

[slsdly]

16 since that is the floor I live on. I was doing long before the pandemic though. Not enough elevators for the population and it is only worse now .

I still never see anyone else on them.

[Miss Lonelyhearts]

Seconded on never seeing anyone else. That’s always been my experience in tall buildings.

I had a friend who lived on the 23rd floor and curiosity eventually got the best of me. I much prefer the elevator!

[jacob]

Last week we went for a stroll in the woods and discovered this: https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/ ... story.html ... despite CV, there was probably about a hundred people (far more than in the pictures in the article) on the stairs going round and around multiple times. At the top, there was a panel with 40ish(?) abacus style counters for those using it as a workout. Apparently, it's a thing.

[AnalyticalEngine]

Back when I worked in offices, I would try to take the stairs multiple times a day. It's good and free exercise. I worked on the 5th floor once, so that was only five flights up. Sometimes I would go up, go down, then go up again if I felt I needed more exercise. Another time I worked on the 7th floor. Even without corona, stairs are always a good idea due to the free exercise.

[Tyler9000]

Since climbing the full set of stairs in my 30-story building (with pushup sets every 2 floors) is my favorite workout routine, maybe I'm not the right guy to ask.

I live in the bottom half, so even in non-workout scenarios I pretty much always take the stairs these days unless I'm carrying groceries. My unscientific observation is that people on the bottom 3 floors exclusively use the stairs as it's quicker and easier than waiting on the elevator. I do see people up to about 6 relatively often, especially after virus worries kicked in. But anything above that is a relative ghost town of solitude, and the rare time I pass someone we always say hi. By the time you get to the top few floors it's so ignored that people start using the stair space as storage.

[Scott 2]

I'll own it - I hate stairs. I get so sick of running things from the basement to the 2nd story. It's not uncommon for my Fitbit to hit 15-20 floors in a day, despite never leaving the house. Without question, my next home will be a ranch.

I haven't been in the office in 8 months now, but when there, I always take the elevator. The temperature is already too high. The last thing I want to do is kick my metabolism on and spend the day wallowing in sweaty office clothes.

[flying_pan]

I like the stairs and always use them when I can. I lived max on 10th floor and always used stairs, if you run I could make it faster than the elevator, with a more moderate speed it evens out at ~6th floor, so it was a bit slower.

However, I have some doubts that I would climb more than ~15 floors. Never had a chance, so hard to say. We have stairs in my home now, and I love to run them.

[unemployable]

I'm mentally still in the halo of the hiking trip I finished where most days I would knock off 3000-5500' (900-1700 m) of elevation gain. But indoors is a different animal.

During my years in Chicago I lived on, in order, the 9ᵗʰ, 7ᵗʰ, 17ᵗʰ and 14ᵗʰ floors of high-rises. In the 7ᵗʰ-floor building I routinely took the stairs, especially when I was training for a hiking trip. At my last real job I worked on the 16ᵗʰ, but would never have walked that. I walked to and from the office from home though most days though, unless it was raining or snowing, some 2½ miles.

Full disclosure, the gym I belonged to was located on the 6ᵗʰ floor of its building. I would take the elevator up to walk on the treadmill.

With regards to the corona, for all my adult life I've followed the Mike Pence Rule with elevators, decades before anyone heard of it, or perhaps when it would've been called the Joe DiMaggio Rule.