Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Today was the second practice at the Aon building in downtown Los Angeles. On Tuesday, I’d set a new personal best for the practice climb from 4 to 60. But, since practice is a good thing, I’m back again.

As always, I was dreading it all the way downtown on the train. I was dreading all the way up to the moment I pushed the button on my watch and started up the stairs. After that, I was in too much pain to be thinking about dreading it.

For some reason, there haven’t been many people coming out to the practices yet. So all the way up, I only saw one other person. It’s hard climbing like that, all alone. I like having people to pass.

At 60, I stumbled out of the stairs and took a couple of pictures. My time was 10:20, which is two seconds slower than on Tuesday, but still faster than any of my practice times last year. So there’s nothing not to like there.

I also did some actual measurements on the stairs. The steps at Aon are 7.5 inches tall. They say the full climb is 1,377 steps, and doing the math gives:

1377 * 7.5 = 10328 inches
10328 / 12 = 860 feet

This agrees well with the published height of the building as 858 feet. Based on this measurement, it seems that the standard stamped-steel staircases at Wilshire-Figueroa, Wells Fargo, and One California Plaza are all 7 inches per step. I’m told that this is the current building code value, and the Aon steps are only steeper because it was built back in the early ’70s, and the code was slightly different then. So all this time, it’s not been our imagination that the stair climb up the Aon building is harder than the others. Good to know.

Well, that’s it for this week. Back at it again next Tuesday.