Cincinnati · Guide

Cincinnati has 383 public stairways and your legs know it

Cincinnati maintains three hundred and eighty three sets of public stairs. The longest single run, the Main Street steps, is three hundred and fifty four steps. At their peak in the nineteenth century more than thirty miles of hillside stairway connected the neighbourhoods to each other, back when five inclines carried people up Mount Adams, Mount Auburn and Price Hill.

Most cities do not have this. Cincinnati does, and for a lot of people the stairs are not exercise, they are just how you get home.

Stairs are not walking

Going up a flight is a single leg effort with your whole body weight on it, repeated. On a long public stairway that is a few hundred single leg loads in a few minutes, which is closer to a gym set than to a walk. Your legs adapt to that. What often does not adapt is whichever hip or knee is doing slightly more of the work.

The tell is that one side complains and the other does not.

• Change which foot leads. Most people start every flight with the same leg and never notice.
• Use the rail on the way down rather than the way up. Down is where the control is needed.
• If you carry a bag, swap shoulders halfway. A stairway is the worst place to hold an asymmetric load.

Down is harder than up

Descending a long stairway is repeated braking through the quads and the knees, and it is what people feel the next day. Going down slowly is not being careful for its own sake, it genuinely reduces the load.

Winter

Wet leaves in autumn and ice in winter turn every step into a small stabilising effort. That is a real, if invisible, workload on a lower back that already did a full day. It is also why the same stairway feels harder in January.

When it is worth talking to somebody

Tired legs after a hill commute are the job. Worth a conversation with a qualified provider: knee pain that is sharp rather than achy, a hip that is clearly worse on one side and not improving, pain that travels down a leg, or any episode where a leg has given way.

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