Stan’s Obligatory Blog

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 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.

It’s Thursday evening, and time to torture myself on the stairs some more.

Tonight I wanted to try a new experiment for handling the middle section of stairs from 24 to 44. Because the floors are 22 steps each, doing double steps leads to an unbalanced pattern, where one leg is doing six doubles and the other is only doing five. In the past, I’ve tried both switching off which leg starts each floor, and also doing one single step at the beginning and the end of each floor. With the single-step strategy, I was able to do a pivot turn without an extra step on the landing, but because the landing is wide, I still ended up losing a fraction of a second on each landing due to the stretch. And doing doubles and switching which leg leads makes a balanced pattern at the cost of adding one extra step per floor. So tonight I wanted to try going with the unbalanced pattern and just adding the extra step to switch sides once every five floors. On the other two sections of stairs I’ve been switching off which leg does the extra work every five floors, and that’s worked well. So I figured doing this on the middle section would be balanced enough and still eliminate unnecessary steps.

I was on schedule all the way to 22, and I had a look at my watch at 24. But at that point I kind of lost track. I was keeping track of five floors at a time to decide when to switch which leg led off, and at the same time I was trying to keep track of six floor chunks to see if I was doing them in one minute according to plan. And it got to be too much. So I just gave up on the timekeeping and concentrated on trying to maintain my pace. And it worked well. I think the ‘switch legs every five floors’ strategy is a winner.

At 44, I took a quick look at my watch with the aim of seeing if I made it to 50 in one minute. And when I got to 50, I’d made the one minute target, and it was just a few seconds after eight minutes in. At that point, I knew I had a shot at beating my best time of 8:58. So I ramped up the pace for the last five floors. And when I heaved up onto the landing at 55, I had 8:58. Again. Still, I can’t complain. Last year, when we were climbing up to 60, I did 9:48, but I was only able to do that once. Oddly enough, that was on Valentine’s Day, too. That I’ve managed to do 8:58 twice is a good thing. Maybe next time I can beat it.

After a few minutes of rest, I headed back down to start up again. The second time up, my goal was just to follow the step pattern and try to go up non-stop. When I got to about 39, I could hear someone coming up behind me. I looked over the side and saw that it was Veronica, and as usual, she was moving fast. So I put on a little burst of speed just so I could make it to 44 ahead of her. Then I was able to hold open the two fire doors for her so she could go faster. Then I just sort of cruised up the last 11 floors to the top, and I was pleasantly surprised that I had made it up in 11:32. That’s not bad for a second time, especially when I’d gone fast the first time.

I went back to the bottom and hung around there talking for a while. I wasn’t sure I wanted to got up again. I was sort of hoping Amber and her entourage would show up and I could walk up with them. But they weren’t there tonight. So I finally just decided to do it.. Again, I was just sort of cruising. I was hoping to do about 12-12.5 seconds per floor, and I managed to get close to that. And when I got near the top, I could hear someone ahead of me. Leland had started up a little ahead of me, and I was catching up to him. So that gave me a little boost, and I picked up the pace for the last 10 floors to see if I could catch him. I didn’t catch up before the top, but I came close. And I did 11:14, which is really remarkable. I don’t think I’ve ever done a third climb that was faster than the second.

So all in all, it was a good evening in the stairwell. And on the way home, I saw a sign that they are having the popsicle stick bridge competition at Union Station on Saturday. I think I may have to ride down there to see it. I like seeing engineering contests.

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:

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.

Today, when I was thinking about stair practice this evening, I really didn’t want to push it for speed tonight. I got a little cold this week, and it’s in its final stage now, which means I’m coughing a lot. Add that to the stair-climber’s-cough, and that would make for an unpleasant evening. So I hatched a plan. I said, “I’ll just go there and do low-intensity. I’ll go slow. It’ll be easy. And since it’ll be easy, I’ll plan on going up five times. That will make a vertical kilometer. How hard could it be?”

Where have heard that before?

So that was the plan. A slow-paced vertical kilometer. That’s five times up the 51 floors from 4 to 55. 210 meters each time, for a total of 1,050 meters climbing. I planned on doing each time up in somewhere between 11:00 and 11:45, and I planned on trying to maintain a steady pace for every climb. The pace was about the same pace I did at the Towerthon in San Diego last summer, so it seemed reasonable.

When I got to the building, I signed in and got changed. There was no feeling of dread, since I knew I wasn’t going to go so hard that I’d end up collapsing on the floor or anything like that. So I just started my watch and headed up the stairs. I figured I should be at 13 by 2 minutes, 22 at 4 minutes, 31 at 6, and 40 at 8. That was aiming to be at the top in about 11 1/2 minutes. And when I got to the top, I just walked out of the stairs and went straight to the elevator to ride back to the lobby to do it again.

The first four times up were actually pretty easy. I maintained my pace, and my times were all pretty close. But the last time was hard. I was really dragging the fifth time up the stairs, and I was behind schedule by the first checkpoint. By the time I was halfway up, I knew I wasn’t going to make my cutoff of 11:45 on this trip. So, since it was the last one, I figured I’d push the last 10 floors or so and at least try to make it under 12 minutes. I ended up running the last four floors, but it wasn’t quite enough. Still, I can’t complain too much. I climbed the building five times. That’s 1,050 meters, 3,445 feet vertical, 5,630 steps total. The five climbs add up to 58:08 of actual up-the-stairs time. Each trip down in the elevator added about 4-5 minutes between trips up. At that rate, maybe one of these times I can try doing a vertical mile. I’d only have to go up three more times. I think I could fit that in in two hours. How hard could it be?

It’s another stair-climbing night, but nothing special happened this time. I went there with the intention of trying the same mental trick I used last Thursday, and seeing if I could equal or better that time. But it didn’t work out that way.

On the first climb, I was in trouble right from the start. My first time checkpoint was at 10, and I was already a couple seconds behind. I tried to pick up the pace, and I made it to 16 on schedule, but it kind of fell apart after that.

At 24 I started up the big middle third of the building, and I was dragging. I tried going back to my technique of doing the big pivot turn on the wide landings. That means a bit of a stretch on each landing, but it’s balanced, and it saves an extra step. I’m still not sure whether or not it’s worth it. More experimentation is in order. But tonight, even though the pattern felt smooth and steady, I kept falling off the pace by just a few seconds in each six-floor section. My goal is to do each six floors in one minute, and I was consistently falling behind by about three seconds each time. And when I finally heaved up onto the landing at 55, I had 9:10, which is a full 12 seconds slower than last Thursday.

After a few minutes of rest, I headed up a second time. I wasn’t trying for speed this time. Just to make it to the top without stopping. And I did, but I didn’t even bother timing it, since I know it was very slow.

Back at the bottom, I gave out some of the chocolate chip cookies I’d brought along, and thought about whether or not I wanted to do it again. But then I saw my friend Amber and her entourage show up, so I figured I could walk up with them. Then we could get to talk, and that would be a useful distraction from those intrusive ‘what the HELL were you THINKING doing this again!’ thoughts that come up when I’m climbing alone. So that made for a good third climb. Again, I didn’t time it, but that’s all right.

It was a good evening.

It’s Thursday, and time for more fun and frolic on the Aon building staircase. I went downtown this time with an experiment in mind.

Last weekend was the race at the Aon building in Chicago, and my friend David did it, and he posted a writeup of it on the stair racing group on Facebook. In particular, the part that caught my eye was when he was describing when he hit the 50th floor:

“My legs were starting to feel tired, but i started to play a game i often played in the gym. When i have a workout planned, say 140 steps/minute for 18 minutes. Often at only 5 minutes i find myself thinking i can’t keep up my pace for as long as planned. So what i do is say ‘Ok, maybe i can’t do 10 more minutes, but i can do 2 more and see where i am.’ Often i can keep doing that until i hit my original goal. In this case i had 30 floors left, and the last ten were going to be at a faster pace than what i was doing now. I wasn’t sure i could do it, but 5 more seemed like no big deal, so i focused on going 5 floors, and reassessing. at 55, i felt exactly like how i felt at 50, so i just focused on keeping the same pace to 60.”

I thought that this sounded like a good idea, and I wanted to try something like it tonight. My goal was to do 10 seconds per floor on the climb from 4 to 55. Allowing about 30 seconds extra for the three hallways and four fire doors, that makes for a total climb time of 540 seconds, or 9 minutes. And it’s pretty easy to verify my pace, since 10 seconds per floor means six floors per minute. I figured that I’d start at 4 and check the watch at 10 and 16. The stairs from 20 to 24 are weird, and there are three hallways and two fire doors, so I planned on just checking my watch when I hit the start of the second main staircase at 24. From there, my plan was to make it to 30 in one minute, 36 in two, and 42 in three. Above 42, there is another hallway and two more fire doors, so I planned on checking the time again at 44 and then just trying to make it to 50 in one minute. The fundamental difference between this time and previous climbs was that I wanted to try David’s trick of not thinking about the overall goal, and just taking it one small chunk at a time. So at each time point, I just thought about making it to the next checkpoint in one minute, and I figured that after that, if I really felt bad, I could slow down. But as it worked out, at the end of each minute, I really didn’t feel any worse for wear, so I just kept going. And I made it to 55 in 8:58, which is three seconds faster than my previous best time for the practice climb.

After a few minutes rest at the top, I fired up my nighttime camera app and tried out taking some pictures of the sunset. It was a bit of a challenge holding the phone steady enough for the long exposures, but the pictures came out much better than they do with the standard camera app.

I’d planned on going up a second time, just on general principles. I wasn’t planning on trying to go fast the second time, but I wanted to just try and go non-stop. I managed to do that, but I was pretty slow. Still, I made it to the top, so I really can’t complain.

It was a pretty good outing.

Tonight was the ‘Kickoff Party‘ for the Lung Association’s Fight For Air stair climb. They had food, videos, speakers, and a news crew at the Aon building downtown, and they had the staircase open for us to practice on, from the ground floor up to 55. So, of course, all the usual suspects were there.

I knew there would be a pretty good turnout tonight, so I brought my Serious Camera to take some pictures. I’d gotten some good photos at last year’s event, and I knew that I’d be able to get better ones this time with the more serious camera. Still, I wanted to do one run for speed at the start, although it turned out to be pretty hard to climb fast while carrying the Serious Camera Bag. It ended up taking me 10:18, which is on the slow side. But when I got to the top, I was able to take a nice picture of the sunset, so it wasn’t all bad.

With the first climb out of the way, I went back down and started up a second time. I wanted to set up to take pictures looking down the stair shaft from the 44th floor. The middle section of stair 6 in the building is a single staircase from 24 to 44, and the two sides are about two feet apart, so you can look over the side and see straight down 20 floors. That’s about 250 feet, and it’s far enough that the stairs seem to just fade off into infinity. I knew this would make for some dramatic pictures.

George started up the stairs for the second time at the same time I did. He was wearing his 40-pound weight vest, and I was carrying my camera bag and tripod. So I was able to get ahead of him and set up on the last flight just below 44 to take pictures. And the image of him climbing the infinite staircase with the weight vest is much like a classic self-mortification ritual.

A couple minutes later, Lisa came up, and she was moving fast. And right after she passed by, a group of people came up, so I got a picture of them all coming up the staircase. As they passed by, they said that the prize raffle was going to be held soon back down in the lobby. So I packed up my camera gear and climbed the rest of the way to 55 so I could get the elevator back to the lobby.

Sadly, I didn’t get any prizes in the raffle this year. But it was still fun to hang around in the lobby and visit with everyone. I’d brought along yet another batch of my award-winning cookies to hand out and tell the story to all the people I know from this event who I haven’t seen since last spring.

After the raffle, we all headed back for the stairs again. There was a camera guy from Channel 2 there, and he wanted to get some video of people climbing the stairs. I told him that he should see if he could get the guards to take him up to 43 so he could shoot the infinite staircase. And when I got up there, he was there with one of the guards. So he shot some video looking down the stair shaft, and then shot a bunch of people as they went by. I think he got some good action scenes.

Once the last person had gone by, I packed up my camera again, and finished the climb up to 55. Then I changed and headed for home. It was a fun evening.

There was a reporter who came to the CFF stair climb here in L.A. last December. He said he was writing an article about stair racing for the New York Times. And the article came out this past Sunday. Here are the money quotes:

…running in an unventilated stairwell may be the least pleasant form of recreation ever conceived.

It is suffering distilled, and its practitioners embrace the agony with an almost religious ardor.

Yup. That about sums it up. Here’s the link to the full article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/magazine/stair-racing-a-sport-to-make-an-ironman-whimper.html