Four tenths of a horse!
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Today was another practice run up the 55-story Wells Fargo building in downtown Los Angeles. Last time, I set a new personal best with a time of 9:11. And today I beat that. This is great!
I went down there after work with Morgan from my office. She did the U.S. Bank climb last year, and she’s hoping to improve her time, too. We got changed and headed over. They let us in in groups of about 10, at intervals of one or two minutes. I don’t know why they do this, but this gives me a goal for each climb. I let my group go ahead, and then I want to catch and pass all of them. Once that’s done, I see how many I can catch from the group that started in front of us. It’s nice to have goals.
On the way up, I tried not to look at the floor numbers. The landings all look the same. The only thing that changes is the floor numbers, and they go up much, much too slowly. I took a quick look when my watch said I’d been going one minute. I figured I had to be at least on 8, and I was pleased to see I was on 9. So then I tried not to look until I got into the twenties. At 27, I took a look at my watch, and I was at four minutes and a few seconds. That was good, since that’s just about the halfway point. I was around 50 when the watch ticked over 8 minutes. I was hoping at that point that I might make it to 55 before 9 minutes, but the last two floors are bigger, so that added a few seconds, and I came up on the landing at 55 at 9:03. Still, that’s 8 seconds faster than last time, and 25 seconds faster than my best time last year. Nothing not to like there.
Morgan got to the top just a little after me, so I had my camera out to record the occasion. She looked pretty weary at that point, but that’s not surprising at all.
So I did some math:
700ft = 213m
170lb = 77kg
77 * 213 * 9.8 = 160730J
160730J / 543sec = 296W
296W * 0.001341 = 0.397Hp which rounds to 0.4Hp Yay!
Did I mention that this is great?
