Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Today was yet another practice session at the 777 Tower in downtown Los Angeles. 50 stories, 1,138 steps. I’d done a new best time on Monday, and I went in today hoping just to recreate that time.

At the start, I didn’t have anyone else around me. I just headed up, using the same time targets as on Monday. I made it to 10 right on schedule. At 20, I was still on schedule. When I got to 30, I was five seconds behind, but that’s about the amount of time I spent going down the little hallway on 23. And at 40, I was seven seconds behind schedule. I kept going, and starting at 46, I managed to speed up. Just a little at first, but up to a full run the last two floors. I ran up on to the landing at 50, and then I saw that I’d done 8:23. Which was not only as fast, but a full seven seconds faster than on Monday. Which is great. That means I made up something close to fifteen seconds on the last four floors. Can’t complain about that.

After a bit of rest, we regrouped and headed back down to do it again. This time, the plan was go slower and take it easy. I was experimenting some with different stepping patterns to even out the load on both legs. This time, Nick was right behind me most of the way up. But then at about 43, he decided to go faster, and he passed me. I just let him go. I did make a small effort to speed up at the end, but I couldn’t catch him. In the end, he did something like 9:23 and I had 9:41.

I think that one of these times, I want to try another experiment. Once up this building is almost exactly 1/2 of the Sears Willis Tower in Chicago. I’m still in search of breaking 20 minutes there. That’s about 12 seconds per floor, on average. That used to be my race pace, but lately, when I’ve tried going that speed, it feels really slow. So I want to try doing two climbs here, and try to aim for 12 seconds per floor, and see if I can do that pace twice. It will be a good experiment.

All told, it was a good outing.