Imagine a sauna two stories tall. Open the door and head up the cedar stairs, gaining in altitude and heat, till you reach the highest cedar bench—an intimate perch where the thermometer reads 190 degrees and 20% percent humidity. Ahhhh! Almost immediately the sweat starts to bead and then to pour. And this is the cool sauna! The hot one—200 degrees and 10% percent humidity—is the next door down the hall. Across from that is a Turkish Hamam, a steam bath so thick with steam that it is in fact like walking into a hot bath. Immediately you feel yourself tenderizing, practically melting in your own juices, until it’s time to take the plunge under the continuous waterfall at 55 degrees! O…M…G!!!
What is this place?
It’s San Francisco’s new temple of sweat—the Archimedes Banya—built by the Russian mathematician and Lincoln University president, Mikhail Brodsky. A passionate sweat aficionado, Brodsky’s dream house provides a complete total body workout—inside and out—where all you do is cycle from extreme hot to extreme cold until it takes everything you have left to carry your IPA up to the roof-deck overlooking the Bay. Ahhhhhh-some.
For more, see In Search of the Perfect Sweat: insidersguidetospas.com/features/in-search-of-the-perfect-sweat/
Editor’s Note: This originally published on April 26, 2014.
Stephen Kiesling
Stephen Kiesling is a writer and editor whose career was launched in 1982 with the classic rowing book The Shell Game and The New York Times Book Review, “Just as it is good that there was a riverboat pilot who could write…it is good that there is one true blue jock who can.” A Scholar of the House in philosophy at Yale, Stephen was a 1980 Olympic oarsman who also raced in the 2008 Olympic Trials. He learned journalism from T George Harris, a decorated World War II artillery scout and Time reporter who created Psychology Today. T George and Stephen launched both American Health magazine and Spirituality & Health, where Stephen continues as Editor at Large. He has written for the New Yorker, Sports Illustrated and Outside, was a spokesman for Nike, started a celebrated rowing club, and has built parks and playgrounds. He lives at Ti’lomikh Falls on the Rogue River in southern Oregon, where he writes for his wife Mary Bemis at Insidersguidetospas.com. Stephen is also the caretaker of one of America’s oldest Salmon Ceremonies and is working on a whitewater park and sculpture garden. He is interested in transformational retreats, anything to do with water, the Native American origins of our democracy, and the process of becoming what he calls an Earth-Indigenous Elder, a person who knows their own story from the beginning of time.