Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Today was the first practice climb for the Cystic Fibrosis stair climb in December. Coincidentally, it’s also just a few days before the Sears -er- Willis Tower climb on Sunday. Since practice is generally a good thing, I made a point to go.

The building is the Wilshire-Figueroa building in downtown L.A. It’s ‘only’ 51 stories. A veritable walk in the park by comparison. But still enough to hurt. I’ve been practicing at Millikan Library at Caltech, so I was looking forward to doing 50 stories in one stretch, instead of having to stop and take the elevator back down after every 10 stories. I’d also figured out what I think is a more efficient way to do the turns, and I wanted to try it out today.

The stairs are pretty standard-issue steel stairs. The steps averaged about 7.5 inches, which is pretty normal for these buildings. There are railings on both sides most of the way. It averaged 22 steps between floors. 11 steps, a landing, and then 11 steps up to the next floor. There was one short corridor at the 21st floor. Otherwise, it was just one continuous staircase all the way up. Doing a bit of math gives a total of something like 1150 steps for the whole climb. We finished on the 51st floor. I don’t know yet if the actual race will go to the roof.

I set my metronome at 75, which is a bit slower than I’ve been doing. I thought that the more efficient turning method would make up for the slower pace, and it did. My goal was to get up in about 9 1/2 minutes, and I made it in 9:32. So I think the new method is working. It would have worked better if there had been an even number of steps between floors, but it still saved me quite a few steps along the way.

So it was a good time, and good practice for this weekend’s adventure.