Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Ever since the Towerthon in San Diego last summer, I’ve had my sights set on doing a vertical mile stair climb, so this evening was yet another test towards that goal. Like the time I did the vertical 1/2 mile, and the vertical kilometer, this evening, I planned on doing 3/4 of a mile vertical. That’s 6 times up the practice course from 4 to 55 in the Aon building, 306 floors, 6,756 steps, 1,260 meters, 4,128 feet, which is just a bit over 3/4 of a mile. And coincidentally, at about 335 calories per ascent, six times up will burn approximately 2,000 calories, or about one day’s worth of normal food intake. Not that I’ve ever been one to pay attention to such things…

I got kind of a late start, and I didn’t get into the stairwell until 5:15. I took a quick snapshot of my phone to establish what time I was starting, and then I headed up the stairs. My goal was to do 4 1/2 floors per minute on the way up, and I assumed that the hallways and fire doors between 20 and 24 would eat about the time it took to do 1/2 of a floor. So my time points were:

4
8 1/2
13
17 1/2
22
26
30 1/2
35
39 1/2
44
48 1/2
53

The goal was to get to each of those points at a one-minute mark on the stopwatch. That would make for about 11 1/2 minutes for each ascent. I figured that that’s about how fast I want to go to comfortably be able to climb the stairs and ride the elevator back down, all within 15 minutes.

The first time up, I had to hold back to keep from going too fast. And in the end, I still got to the top a few seconds ahead of schedule. I snapped a picture of the stopwatch while I was waiting for the elevator. Then I went back down and started up again.

The second and third times I pretty much hit the target pace, and those two climbs were pretty easy. The only bad part was that I’d forgotten my headband, and by then, the sweat was running into my eyes. And I’d also forgotten to bring a towel, which compounded the problem.

By the fourth time, I was starting to slow down a bit. But I still made it up in reasonable style. The fifth time was hard, and I was thinking about calling off the experiment after that one. I had to adjust my target pace down to 4 floors per minute that time, but then I was able to maintain a steady pace. So I decided to press on with the sixth ascent.

The sixth time up was going to be last, so I started counting down the floors from the start. When I took the first step up, I said to myself, “51”. And each floor, I counted down by one. Counting down through the forties was kind of hard, but knowing it was the last time up the staircase made it bearable. When the count went below 25, I felt like the end was in sight. And when I finally got to five to go, I managed to find some energy to run the last five floors to the top. I came out on the 55th floor and just sat down for a few minutes to rest. Then I took a second snapshot of the phone to establish the time.

So I did six ascents up the 51 floors in 1:26 elapsed time, including the elevator rides back down between ascents. Yes, I was slowing down the last time up, but I think I could probably do two more times up in 34 minutes. So that’s going to be the project one of these evenings. Yes, I know it’s insane. That’s what I like about it.

A couple weeks ago, a reporter and photographer from the Los Angeles Times came out to the practice session at the Aon building. And the article came out last weekend. I managed to get quoted in two paragraphs, so that’s pretty good.

The article is here:

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-stair-climb-20130303,0,916269.story

It’s Tuesday evening, and time for yet more eternal agony climbing the stairs at the Aon building. After the problems I had over the weekend at the Stratosphere Tower, I wanted to see if I could still go fast up the stairs this evening.

I got suited up and headed up the stairs. No use waiting around at the bottom. It doesn’t get any easier. As always, I was aiming for 10 seconds per floor, and I managed to stay close to that, except through the middle section from 24 to 44 with the wide landings. But I made it to 55 in 9:04, which is solidly in the range of normal times I’ve been doing at practice. So I’m not any slower now than I was last week.

I went up a second time just to try out a couple of different ideas for dealing with the wide landings in the middle section of the staircase. Maintaining a steady but slow pace, I made it up in 11:50.

And just for sheer perversity, I went up a third time. I didn’t bother timing it. It was slow, but steady. I managed to make it all the way up without stopping, so that’s not too bad.

On the way home, the subway train stopped for a minute on the approach to Union Station, and I saw an electrical conduit on the wall outside with a stern warning on it:

DANGER 34,500 VOLTS

Yup. I’m not inclined to think they’re kidding on that.

Here’s a selection of pictures from the rest of our weekend in Las Vegas.

On the way there, we stopped at the beef jerky place in Baker. Kathleen likes their jerky a lot. And it’s a chance for a photo-op with the alien.

When we got there, we met up with the whole West Coast Label stair-climbing team for dinner at The Peppermill. And after that, we went back to the hotel to get ready for the race on Saturday morning.

On Saturday afternoon, we headed downtown to go see the The National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement. Since that name is a mouthful, it’s just called the Mob Museum. There, we saw the entire history of the Mafia from its roots, and how Prohibition was the thing that made the Mob into a major organization. In later parts of the museum, they went into the Kefauver Hearings and RFK’s crusade against the Mob. An interesting afternoon.

On the way back from downtown, we saw the big sign at the Plaza, advertising “Hawaiin Favorites!” Being spelling and grammar geeks, we were of course appalled. That, or the sign was made by LOLcats.

Dinner on Saturday was the obligatory prime rib and martini that I always have in Las Vegas. After that, we went back to the Stratosphere and went up the tower, since I’d been up there earlier, but I was too wiped out at the time to look at the view.

On Sunday, we went to the Erotic Heritage Museum before heading home. We got to see such treasures as Larry Flynt’s gold-plated wheelchair, and a walrus penis-bone. It was an amusing time, and I highly recommend it.

After that, we headed home. Waze showed us that we were just ahead of the big wave of traffic coming back to L.A., and we made it home early enough for dinner. It was a fun weekend, aside from my disappointing performance on the stairs.

This weekend was the “Scale the Strat” stair climb in Las Vegas. This is my fourth time doing this event, and the first time since I did the survey climb and made the chart of the stairway at last year’s event. I thought this would help with planning.

A few days before the event, George had emailed me and asked about some discrepancies in my chart. It seems that some of the step counts and the elevation signs posted on the landings didn’t agree. We decided that either I’d made a mistake counting the flights, or some of the elevation signs were wrong, or perhaps both. In the meantime, I worked out some planned times for the three big landmarks on the way up the tower, based on the posted elevations above street level:

• The first rest area at 247 feet;
• The second rest area at 522 feet;
• The top of the tower core at 775 feet.

The climb up to the top of the tower core is just a little bit more than the practice climb from 4 to 55 that I’ve been doing at the Aon building in downtown Los Angeles, so I figured on being at the top of the tower core at about 9:15 or so. For the other two, I made up goal times based on the elevation. And this was where the trouble began.

When it was my turn to go, I started up at a reasonable, but brisk pace. Taking a quick look up, I could see the first rest area up above, and headed for that, reaching it right at 2:30, which was my goal. At that point, my lips were tingling, which doesn’t usually happen until the end of these things, but I figured that since I was on schedule, it was all right, and I kept going at the same pace.

I reached the second rest area at 6:00, which was also on schedule, but I was in trouble there. And I hit The Wall very soon after that. By the time the elevation signs got over 600 feet, I was slowing down, and when I got into the final staircase up the pod at the top of the tower, I was happy just to still be upright and moving. I made it to the top and flopped on the floor. My time was 11:47, which was a full minute slower than my time from last year.

So I spent some time lying on the floor at the top before heading back down. Kathleen was downstairs in the theater, where they had a big video monitor set up showing the feed from the four cameras in the stairwell. She’d gotten pictures of it when I went past the second rest area, and also at the finish. And when she saw my time, she knew that something was wrong. We hung around and schmoozed for a while, which was fun. And then we headed back to the room so I could get cleaned up and try to figure out what had gone wrong.

I didn’t work out what had happened until a couple days later. When George sent me his notes from surveying the staircase, I could see that the sign that said “247′” by the first rest area had to be wrong. The starting line is about 47 feet above street level. Based on the count of steps to that point, the rest area was about 226 feet above the starting line, and I’d thought it was 200 feet. So that meant I was going about 14% too fast on the first leg, and because my projected time was wrong, when I got there, I thought I was on schedule and kept on going at the too-fast pace. To put it in perspective, when I’m doing the practice climbs, I aim to do about 10 seconds per floor, and my pace here was the equivalent of about 8.5 seconds per floor. Not much of a difference, but it adds up by the time you’ve climbed the equivalent of 45 floors.

So now it all makes sense, and I’ve corrected my chart. As it turns out, I’d missed counting one 20-step flight near the beginning, and I miscounted the last fight as 10 instead of 9. So the final tally for the climb now stands at 1,391 steps. And I know now that the elevation signs in the stairwell are not to be taken as truth, although they’re still useful as markers. Guess I’ll just see how that works out next time I do it.

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.

This week’s bike club ride was yet another sightseeing expedition. This time, our destination was Cameron Woods. This is a single block of Orion Avenue in Van Nuys, which holds the distinction of being one of the most-filmed streets in Los Angeles. It’s an odd place, with big lots and houses and landscaping that make it able to pass for just about anywhere in the eastern U.S., right smack in the middle of the San Fernando Valley. I’d read about this some time ago when there was an article about it in the Los Angeles Times, and so we finally got to go see it today.

It was a nice day for riding. It’s the last Sunday of the month, so it’s time for our monthly ‘slightly longer’ ride. We headed out, west across Eagle Rock and Glendale and into the Valley. Somewhere in Studio City we saw Ringside Liquors, advertising “Fine Booze”. Somehow, it seems that if you’re calling it ‘booze’, the adjective ‘fine’ just doesn’t fit any more.

We rode through part of Van Nuys, which looked just like we expected. Lots of auto-body shops and kind of run-down apartments. And then we turned the corner onto Orion Ave. And everything changed. We were suddenly transported to suburban Connecticut or something like that. It was very strange. We rode down to the end of the block at Victory Blvd, where Los Angeles reappeared. It was a very odd feeling.

Coming back, we rode back down Orion Ave and got on the Metro Orange Line bike path. We took that all the way back to North Hollywood, and our snack stop at Panera. Then we continued on the bike path into Burbank before turning off. The route back was pretty much the reverse of the way out. It was quite warm and sunny by then, so all told, it was pretty much a perfect day for riding.

53 miles.

Last week, the L.A. Times had an article about one man’s experience with bicycle commuting in Los Angeles. The overall message was that it’s really not bad. This matches my experience with riding here. Of all the cities I’ve spent time riding in, L.A. is one of the best for the overall experience.

My favorite tidbit from the column:

I have the pleasure of seeing the city through a different lens. Riding at a pace between 15 and 20 mph, the city is a slide show instead of a blur.

This mirrors what I’ve said for years. The bike is in many ways the perfect sightseeing vehicle. It can cover a lot of ground, but not at a speed where you will miss anything along the way.

Still, I felt that something was missing. So I sent in yet another letter to the editor, and they published it in today’s paper:

Re “A new spokesman for the thrill sport of biking in L.A.,” Column, Feb. 19

As a longtime cyclist, both for commuting and recreation, I enjoyed reading Ben Poston’s article about his experiences cycling in L.A. But he left out the best part: Cycling in Los Angeles is exciting; it’s like doing the running of the bulls everyday.

Stan Schwarz
Pasadena

Heh.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/letters/la-le-letters-brave-cyclists-20130222,0,2037422.story

This past weekend was a three-day holiday weekend, and we spent all three days packing and moving Kathleen out of her house and in to mine. So when Tuesday morning came, I was pretty weary, and I really didn’t feel like going for speed on the stairs tonight. Although, I suppose it’s a testament to my insanity that I never considered not going to climb the stairs today.

Since I was low on energy, I thought I’d do something like a couple weeks ago, when I did the vertical kilometer. I’ve been thinking that one of these weeks I want to try for a vertical mile. That would be eight times up the stairs from 4 to 55. Each time up is about 689 feet, so eight add up to 5,512 feet, which is just a bit over a mile. I’m pretty sure I can fit that into the two hours we have for practice. So my plan tonight was to do a vertical half-mile and see if I could do all four climbs, plus the associated elevator rides back down, all within one hour.

I rode the train downtown as usual, and when I got suited up for climbing, I got out my second stopwatch and started it. Then I just tucked it into my pocket, started my main stopwatch, and started up the stairs. As with the vertical kilometer, the plan was to aim for a pace where I would do 9 floors every 2 minutes, and that would get me to the top in about 11:15 – 11:30 each time.

As you can see, I started out a little excited, and perhaps a little too fast. But the pace seemed easy enough for the first three climbs. By the fourth one, I was starting to drag, though. I think the sore-and-tired factor from the weekend caught up with me. But when I finished the fourth climb, I fished the other stopwatch out of my pocket, and I saw that I’d done the four climbs in comfortably less than an hour. Of course, the second hour will be harder than the first, but I think if I start fresh, without a long weekend of moving boxes, I think I have a chance at making the mile in two hours.

I’ll probably try for the vertical mile some time in March, after we get back from climbing the Stratosphere Tower in Las Vegas.

This past week, talk of alleged misconduct by the Los Angeles Police Department was in the news again. So I thought it was time to pay another visit to the man who unwittingly became the virtual ‘poster boy’ for LAPD misconduct, Rodney King.

It was a nice day for riding. A bit chilly in the morning, but it warmed up fast. The route took us through South Pasadena and Highland Park to the L.A. River bike path. Then we rode that up to the end on Riverside Drive. Then we rode over to Forest Lawn. After our experience at the Glendale Forest Lawn back in December, we made a point to stop at the information booth at the entrance to ask directions. That way, they knew why we were there, and it’s been our experience that they tend to be more accommodating when they know we’re there to actually visit someone.

We made our way up to the back of the cemetery, up on the hill. It’s actually a pretty picturesque location. Sadly, Mr King still does not have a headstone, which seems unfortunate. Even though it always seemed like he wanted to just be left alone, he became a figure in local history. Life is strange that way.

After the cemetery, we rode over the Priscilla’s in Burbank. It was a nice day to sit outside in the sun. That was where we saw the electric BMW parked across the street. Then we rode home by way of Hospital Hill and La Cañada. On the way back across Altadena, I saw that the Senior Center is showing a documentary about Brown v. Board of Education. Since that part of Altadena is largely a black neighborhood, it’s seemed appropriate.

It was a pleasant ride.

45 miles.