Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Stair practice started this week. It’s at 400 S. Hope St in downtown Los Angeles. That’s the building formerly known as Mellon Bank. Now is has a new name, and we’re in a different stairwell, so my old chart doesn’t quite apply. It’s still the same number of steps, but things are slightly different. It appears that the new ownership also renumbered the floors, since the building didn’t have a 13th floor before, and now it does. But it’s still 22 steps per floor, and from lobby to 2 is 49 steps. So that means that climbing to the 25th floor is in fact an honest 25 floors of climbing.

I climbed the building five times tonight. The first two, I went up to 25. The door to the elevators to go back down was on 20, so those times, I had to walk back down from 25 to 20 to get out. So after that, I figured I wanted to give my knees a break, so the next three times, I only went up to 20. I was pretty much just taking it easy, aiming for 12 seconds per floor, or five floors per minute. That’s my ‘brisk, but not punishing’ pace. Good for the first time out. The last time up, I was talking with some new-to-the-sport climbers, and I took some time to try and explain techniques for not wasting steps on the landings, and ways to balance the load between the legs. All in all, it was not bad for the first time out.