Last rehearsal
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This evening, I went downtown for one last hard practice on the stairs before this weekend’s fun and frolic up the Stratosphere Tower. The plan was the same as before, which was to come as close to 10 seconds per floor for the 51 floors. I planned again on taking it in six-floor chunks, and just seeing how far I could get doing those in 1-minute increments.
On the first climb up, I made it all the way to 22 on schedule. Then I lost a few seconds going through the two fire doors on the hallway there. But that was all right. I expect to lose some time opening those doors. Then, when I got to 24, I had a look at my watch. I wanted to see if I could make it to the 30th floor in one minute.
As it turned out, on the 18 floors from 24 to 42, I lost about 5 seconds in each 6-floor chunk. I’m still trying to work out the fastest way to take the wide landings in this section, and so far I just haven’t worked out a good way to do it.
At 44, I went through the second set of fire doors, and then I was on the home stretch. I managed to get back on pace for 10 seconds per floor there, with a sprint to the finish from 51 to 55. I heaved up onto the landing at 55 in 8:59. One second off my best time, but I can’t complain too much.
After a few minutes of rest, I started up the stairs again. The second time, I just wanted to go slow and experiment with some different methods for dealing with the wide landings from 24 to 44. I’ve come up with about four different methods for handling them, and I’m still not sure which one is the best. I timed the second climb, but I wasn’t expecting to do anything particularly fast.
At the end, I decided to go up one more time, for no reason in particular. I didn’t want to go fast. I didn’t stop, but I went very slowly, and I didn’t even bother timing it.
It was a reasonably good outing.
