Another attempt
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It’s Tuesday, and that means time for more stairs. After doing the vertical kilometer last Thursday, I was ready to make another attempt to see if I could beat my best time so far of 8:58.
I brought my metronome tonight to try using it again. The last time I used it, I did a 9:01, which is my second-best time this season so far.
I set the metronome on 71, and I was all right with keeping up with it up to 20. I did all right through the little bit of weirdness between 20 and 24, but when I started up the second big set of stairs from 24 to 44, I was having trouble keeping up. I was fine while climbing the stairs, but I was losing time on every one of the big landings. The stairway has wide landings in this section, and I figured out a way to do a one-foot pivot turn on them, but it’s a stretch. And that stretch takes a non-trivial fraction of a second. So I was losing about half a beat on the metronome on every landing. If you look at the width of the landings and the number of them, you can see how this could add up to losing significant time:
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So when I came out on the final set of stairs at 44, I was about 10-15 seconds behind schedule. I kept going, and when I got to 50, I looked at my watch and saw that it was just after 8 minutes. I figured I still might break 9 if I hit it for the last five floors. I ramped up the pace as best I could until I ran the last floor up to 55. I flopped on the landing and looked at my watch. I had a 9:01. Not a new best time, but tied with my second-best, so I can’t complain too much about that.
After a few minutes rest, and looking at the sunset colors, I headed back down to do it again. My plan for the second time was to go slow and steady and just try and make it up without stopping. And I did that, pretty much. But as you can see, it was considerably slower than the first time.
Still, all told, it wasn’t a bad outing.
