Still practicing
Today was the third practice day for the Aon Center stair climb a week from Saturday. Erik couldn’t go today, but I made time in my day to go do it. My quest is to do the tower in under 12 minutes, so today I put on my little electronic metronome and I set it for 72, which is 4% faster than the 69 beats per minute I had it set on last week. There were probably a bit over a dozen people there to do the climb today. I let about 10 people go ahead before I started.
On the way up, I noticed that the turns on the landings took at least one and sometimes two beats of the metronome. If I assume an average of 1.5 beats per landing, that means I spent about 1.25 seconds on each landing, and that totals up to just a bit over two minutes total for the approximately 110 landings in the 56-story climb. That’s really a lot of time spent not climbing. But sadly, 1.25 seconds rest really isn’t enough to recover in any significant way. No matter how you slice it, climbing that many stairs hurts.
Today’s climb felt like it was very close to my limit. I just kept focused on the beeping of the metronome to keep pace. And I managed to keep the pace all the way up. But the last 10 stories were pretty grim. I passed all but one of the people who’d started in front of me, which was nice. And my time at the top was 10:38, which I thought was quite good. Based on that, I should be able to do the full tower climb in about 11:45, which is well-within my goal of 12 minutes. So this is a Good Thing.
I’m really enjoying this weird little sport I stumbled upon last year. It’s fun in a way that I can’t quite explain.
