{"id":537,"date":"2012-05-14T16:14:41","date_gmt":"2012-05-14T04:14:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/physicsstop\/2012\/05\/14\/why_going_downhill_is_hard_wor\/"},"modified":"2012-05-14T16:14:41","modified_gmt":"2012-05-14T04:14:41","slug":"why-going-downhill-is-hard-wor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/physicsstop\/2012\/05\/14\/why-going-downhill-is-hard-wor\/","title":{"rendered":"Why going downhill is hard work"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On Saturday I took the train out to Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains. The train journey certainly gave me a feel for just how vast Sydney is. An hour out of central station, and one is still in the Sydney suburbs. But suddenly the end of the city comes abruptly &#8211; the train is suddenly amongst the trees and starts climbing. Another hour gets it to Katoomba, a small town perched on top of precipitous sandstone cliffs.<\/p>\n<p>I quickly got the impression that the way many (most?) tourists see the Blue Mountains is on a coach tour. The coach pulls up in the vast carpark at Echo Point, the tourists pile out with their cameras, take lots of photos of <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Three_Sisters_(Australia)\">&#8216;The Three Sisters&#8217;<\/a>, grab an overpriced icecream, then pile back into the coach to go to their next viewpoint, wherever that is. Certainly Echo Point has a feel of an international airport about it.<\/p>\n<p>However, escape the crowds, and it becomes rather more pleasant. The way I did that was to head to the bottom of the cliffs. There&#8217;s three ways of doing this. 1. Take the &#8216;railway&#8217; (I assume this is a funicular &#8211; I didn&#8217;t get a look at it) or the cable car down. 2. Walk. 3. Jump.&nbsp; I chose option two. That involved heading down the &#8216;Giant Staircase&#8217; &#8211; about nine hundred steps in total down 250 metres or so of nearly sheer sandstone cliff.<\/p>\n<p>One of the surprising experiences going down this number of steps is just how hard going it is. Near the bottom, my legs were burning &#8211; rather like having done a REV class in the gym. What&#8217;s happening is that I&#8217;m exercising muscles that don&#8217;t usually get a good workout, and it hurts. In physics terms, I need to provide a force against gravity to slow me down as I descent. The force of gravity alone would cause an acceleration downwards;&nbsp;&nbsp;in order &nbsp;to descend at a constant speed I need a force that balances this (Newton&#8217;s first law), and that comes from under-used muscle groups within my legs. After several minutes of this, it hurts.<\/p>\n<p>Incidentally, in energy terms this force is not supplying energy to you, unlike the reverse case where it takes energy to climb the steps back up. That&#8217;s because the force is in the opposite direction to your movement &#8211; therefore it doesn&#8217;t do work on you (transfer energy to you). In fact, it is doing the opposite &#8211; your legs are absorbing the potential energy lost as you head downwards. No wonder they are burning at the bottom.<\/p>\n<p>Once at the bottom, it was a lovely walk through the bush (though I did get a little worried about what zero- or eight-legged nasties might be lurking in the undergrowth). I went back up a different route &#8211; past many lilttle waterfalls. I lost count at 1200 steps. And at 1000 m altitude, or thereabouts at the top, it&#8217;s quite an effort for a near-sea-level-dweller like myself.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On Saturday I took the train out to Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains. The train journey certainly gave me a feel for just how vast Sydney is. An hour out of central station, and one is still in the Sydney suburbs. But suddenly the end of the city comes abruptly &#8211; the train is suddenly [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2,13],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Why going downhill is hard work : Physics Stop<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/physicsstop\/2012\/05\/14\/why-going-downhill-is-hard-wor\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why going downhill is hard work : Physics Stop\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"On Saturday I took the train out to Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains. 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