Man vs Hotel

Back in the hotel relatively early after a day full of 30 minute meetings at various places in Brussels’ European quarters.

The schedule asked for sprint workouts and I was wondering how to do them. In summer I would find a hill or stairs in Brussels to run on, but traveling light in winter means that you are stuck to indoor exercising in the hotel gym.

Then I realized that my hotel has 26 floors.

So, I did:

• Warming up on treadmill (20 minutes)
• 3x(5×5 floors up / 5 floors down)
• Cooling down 15 minutes on treadmill

I started the watch five minutes into the warming up.

The stairs running was interesting. There are three emergency stairways  in the hotel, one at each end of the corridor and one in the middle. The middle one is really a metal cage hanging on the side of the building, wind blowing through it. It also has these metal staircases with holes in it.

I am not so brave with heights, so this was bad.

Luckily the ones on the front and back end of the building were completely inside. You can imagine how this looks. Concrete and pipes. Dust. Cigarette butts. No need to say more. The five floors up / five floors down routine turned out to be quite close to 30″ active / 60″ rest. First set between floors 10 and 15, second set between floors 18 and 23 (cleaner) and the final set was a special one, all the way from the ground floor to the 25th floor, with 30″ passive rest instead of running down stairs. 

The other people in the gym were quite surprised when I entered the gym through its emergency exit.

Tomorrow: steady state in hotel gym. Fly to Prague.