Good fortune
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It’s Thursday, and that means yet another trip downtown to run up the stairs at the Aon building. Fortunately, I’ve done a study of the stairs there, and I’ve worked out what I believe is the most efficient way to climb them. And the stepping pattern I have to do in order to do this is a useful distraction to keep me from dwelling on “OMG What the HELL was I thinking coming here to do this again?”
Since Lucinda has art class tonight, I had to go downtown at lunchtime to do this. I rode my bike over to the Fillmore St Gold Line station, and I rode the train downtown. The Metro Rail trains really are quite good here. They’re comfortable, quiet, and pretty fast. When they were building them, I didn’t think I’d have much use for them, but it’s turned out that I use them quite a lot now.
When I got to the 7th St/Metro Center stop, I climbed the 79 steps from the subway platform to Hope St. Then I walked over to the Aon building and signed in. The guards there pretty much all know me by now. I got changed and headed up to the stairs. There were a few people who’d started ahead of me, but I caught and passed them pretty quickly. When I got to 48, I knew there hadn’t been anyone by there much before me, since I triggered the motion detector to turn on the light on the landing. At 54, I looked at my watch, and it said something like 9 minutes. So I turned up the heat for the last few floors to make it to the top in less than 10 minutes. I stumbled out of the stairs on the 60th floor and did my now-traditional face-plant on the floor. When I opened my eyes, I saw a fortune cookie fortune right in front of my nose. And when I read it, it was completely appropriate to what we do here in the stairwell. So I took the little plastic badge-holder that I’d used to hold my split times note on my glove, and I used that to clip the fortune to the fire hose pipe on the 60th floor landing so that the other stair climbers could see it, too.
In the end, I did another 9:51. Not my best time, but only 3 seconds off my best. And I’m consistently doing times under 10 minutes, when I was struggling to get under 10 1/2 this time last year. So there’s nothing not to like about this. It was a good day.
