Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Today was the latest practice session at One California Plaza in downtown Los Angeles. So far this season, I’ve been doing well at these, doing way better times than last year, and improving my times nearly every time out. So far, my best effort was 7:21 last week on Monday.

Today was not a very promising start. My knee was hurting a little bit yesterday when I did the Millikan Library stairs. So I took some ibuprofen before getting on the train to go downtown.

All the usual crowd was there. Again, I let a big group go ahead, just for the sake of having people to pass. I figure it’s good practice, and it’s also a psychological boost. So when I started up, there was a fair amount of traffic. But that was all right. I got past all of them by about the 20th floor, and then it was kind of lonely the rest of the way up. I’m really not sure which I like better.

I took a quick look at my watch at about 37, and I saw I was on track to do a good time. That was nice, and it sort of perked me up for the last 5-6 floors. And when I got to the top, I saw that I’d made it up in 7:16. This is my best time to date, and it’s five seconds faster than my previous best. And perhaps best of all, this marks the first time I’ve generated 300 watts of usable power in a stair climb:

77kg*175m*9.8 = 132,055J
7:16 -> 436sec
132,055J/436sec = 303W

And this works out to be just a tiny bit over 0.4 horsepower. This is great!

The only downside of the whole adventure was that the Gold Line was having mechanical problems. There was a a problem with the overhead wire and a couple of dead trains blocking one of the tracks, so they had to run single-track, and that turned the trip home into an epic journey. But it was worth it.