The other day I was talking to a friend of mine who has never been broken or handicapped and, apparently, even for really out of shape people, it's not normal to find oneself in "barely able to walk" pain after unexpectedly walking down 20 or 30  flights of stairs.

This would explain why so damn many Chinese tourist attractions are stairways up (or down) a mountainside.

In 2003, coming back from a Saturday hike of Mt. Taishan (where I actually took the cable car down), I was back to using my cane on Monday when the school started freaking out about my having potentially been contaminated with SARS while in Beijing the Wednesday through Friday.

In 2014, on my Yunnan trip, the decision to visit a local mountain which I think was 5,000 stairs (the numbered stairs came out to a nice round number anyways and I don't feel like checking) led to my literally being trapped in my 4th floor hotel room the next day, unable—because delivery apps weren't a thing yet—to eat any food that wasn't already in my panniers.

Today, I don't feel any particularly nasty effects from the stairs. I'm only taking Naproxen not codeine and if everything is stiff all over, that can easily be blamed on the hard bed. However, the video taken of me by the guesthouse clearly shows a limp and, as much as three days later, as I ease myself into a chair without falling over, people are commenting about how someone who has been biking for two months shouldn't be as exhausted as I appear to be.

I didn't even want to do the stairs either. But, the guesthouse has discovered that I'm wanghong and I'm getting a free night's stay¹ and free food² and they're showing off the very impressive mountain stairs that they are currently using government money to build and I didn't realize that, once we drove up to the point where the stairs end, that we would be walking back down them.

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¹ Ordinarily, this wouldn't appeal to me in the slightest. Ordinarily, my key state owned media client isn't 6 months in arrears because of a structural reorganization 

² I thought I would either be eating with the family or with the batch of workmen they are employing. Eating alone, the food was still really good, but it wasn't anything special.