Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Today, when I was thinking about stair practice this evening, I really didn’t want to push it for speed tonight. I got a little cold this week, and it’s in its final stage now, which means I’m coughing a lot. Add that to the stair-climber’s-cough, and that would make for an unpleasant evening. So I hatched a plan. I said, “I’ll just go there and do low-intensity. I’ll go slow. It’ll be easy. And since it’ll be easy, I’ll plan on going up five times. That will make a vertical kilometer. How hard could it be?”

Where have heard that before?

So that was the plan. A slow-paced vertical kilometer. That’s five times up the 51 floors from 4 to 55. 210 meters each time, for a total of 1,050 meters climbing. I planned on doing each time up in somewhere between 11:00 and 11:45, and I planned on trying to maintain a steady pace for every climb. The pace was about the same pace I did at the Towerthon in San Diego last summer, so it seemed reasonable.

When I got to the building, I signed in and got changed. There was no feeling of dread, since I knew I wasn’t going to go so hard that I’d end up collapsing on the floor or anything like that. So I just started my watch and headed up the stairs. I figured I should be at 13 by 2 minutes, 22 at 4 minutes, 31 at 6, and 40 at 8. That was aiming to be at the top in about 11 1/2 minutes. And when I got to the top, I just walked out of the stairs and went straight to the elevator to ride back to the lobby to do it again.

The first four times up were actually pretty easy. I maintained my pace, and my times were all pretty close. But the last time was hard. I was really dragging the fifth time up the stairs, and I was behind schedule by the first checkpoint. By the time I was halfway up, I knew I wasn’t going to make my cutoff of 11:45 on this trip. So, since it was the last one, I figured I’d push the last 10 floors or so and at least try to make it under 12 minutes. I ended up running the last four floors, but it wasn’t quite enough. Still, I can’t complain too much. I climbed the building five times. That’s 1,050 meters, 3,445 feet vertical, 5,630 steps total. The five climbs add up to 58:08 of actual up-the-stairs time. Each trip down in the elevator added about 4-5 minutes between trips up. At that rate, maybe one of these times I can try doing a vertical mile. I’d only have to go up three more times. I think I could fit that in in two hours. How hard could it be?