Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Tuesday was a unique treat. I got a chance to go downtown to do a survey climb up the U.S. Bank Tower staircase. I’ve done this now for the Aon Center stairs, as well as the Stratosphere Tower in Las Vegas. And both of those times, I found that the published step counts they quoted for promoting the stair climbs were wrong. So this was a chance to see if the 1,500 step count for this building was right. I suspected from the start that it was not.

A few months ago, I’d emailed the organizers of the Stair Climb for Los Angeles at the downtown YMCA to see if this trip could be arranged, and they came through. I was to be at the building at 10:00 on Tuesday morning, where I would meet Whitney from the YMCA and we would climb the building and take in the stairs.

We got checked in and got little adhesive visitor name tags to wear. The guard asked us if we wanted to take the elevator up to the top and walk down to count the stairs. We just looked at him like he was crazy. I walked down a 42-story building once and swore never to do it again. So we went outside and he opened up the door next to the sidewalk and we started up from there.

It turns out that this staircase is much more consistent than I’d remembered from the races I’ve done before. Most of the building was two flights per floor, 11 steps per flight, with right-hand turns. This pattern covered something like 47 of the 73 floors.

There was no 13th floor.

Oddly enough, 2 was missing, also. When we started up from the lobby level, the first floor number we saw was 3. And at 5, it settled into the regular 11/11 pattern all the way up to 46. Then there was one weird floor, and it was back to 11/11 until 58. At that point, there was the only fire door we encountered, and it switched to left-hand turns for a short while. Then it was back to the same pattern up to the last office floor on 71. The floors were numbered up to 74, and then there was just a short two flights up to the roof door.

By about the 50th floor, my shirt was totally soaked with sweat, and my adhesive visitor tag fell off. So I picked it up and stuck it to my notepad.

When we got to the landing by the roof door, the intercom box squawked at us and asked if we were ready to come down. This was a bit creepy until we saw the video camera on the opposite wall. They were watching, and they’d seen us on the monitor. So they said the guard would meet us at 71 and we could ride down with him.

On the train home, I added up the steps. I got 1,679 1,674 as the final tally. And that night, I made up a chart of the stairway. Now I know how to attack it to climb it in the most efficient and balanced way possible. And that’s a good thing. Not only will I avoid wasting steps along the way, remembering the stepping patterns is a good distraction to avoid the “OMG! What the hell was I thinking signing up for this again!” that I always get around the 45th floor.

So now we’re ready to race.

The stair charts I’ve made are all here: http://www.1134.org/stan/Stairs

This is a truly pathetic story.

Remember Rosie Ruiz? She was the ‘winner’ of the 1980 Boston Marathon. But after she won it in record time, some investigation showed that she had not run the whole course, and had just jumped back into the race at the end. Further investigation showed that she’d also cheated in the New York Marathon, which was where she did the time that qualified her for Boston.

Competitive stair climbing is an odd little sport. It’s done as a charity fund-raiser. There are no prizes, aside from cheap little medals and sometimes small trophies. There’s really nothing valuable at stake. So I guess nobody ever thought that anyone would think it worth the effort to cheat at this sport. But this time, someone did.

I was in the first wave of climbers, and we were done pretty early. And from the start, it the odds were on Jesse Berg to win. He’d won last year, and he is ranked as one of the top stair climbers in the world. So we were all surprised when we came down and saw the first set of times posted, and there was a name we didn’t recognize in first place, with a time that was 18 seconds faster than the course record. That record was set in 2010 by Javier Santiago, who is also one of the top-ranked stair climbers in the world.

Asking around, we found out that the unknown climber was a guy who worked for the building management company. When we saw him, we all immediately thought that he wasn’t capable of doing a time like that. Some of the guys went to talk to him, to ask him how he trained and to ask if he would climb the building again with them so they could see his technique. He said that he didn’t really train in any meaningful way. He said he plays basketball with his friends. Sheesh. At that point, he claimed he couldn’t climb again, due to having pulled his hamstring on the first climb. And he made a point of limping from that point on.

Needless to say, none of this passed the smell test.

Later on, another of our guys went to talk to him again, and specifically told him that we thought he had cheated. At that point, his friends started actually making veiled threats of physical violence if we didn’t stop saying we thought he’d cheated. And apparently, there was money at stake. He’d made bets with a lot of the other people who work at the building, and if he admitted to cheating, he was going to lose those bets.

When it was time for the awards, he made a point of limping up to the stage to get his first-place certificate and trophy.

This was all brought up with the race organizers, the timing company, and the building management. At first, they defended the guy. They really believed him when he said that he’d climbed the building in record time.

On Sunday, a friend of ours who is a sports writer contacted the guy to interview him about his ‘incredible performance’. We suspect that he figured out that people were on to him. But he still insisted that his time was real.

When the finish line pictures from the race were posted, we saw him coming out of the stairs, and based on where he was and who came out after him, he’s have had to have passed quite a few people we know on his way up. None of them remember seeing him. And anyone going that fast would have been pretty obvious.

On Monday, we heard through the grapevine that he’d confessed. That he admitted to using the freight elevator. But it turned out not to be true. But then, on Tuesday morning, we got word from the building management company that they had investigated, and they’d found that he did cheat. He was disqualified from the race, and ‘is no longer associated with the building’, as they said. We all presume that means he was fired from his job.

So here it is. The original sheet of posted results. The faker going up to accept the winner’s trophy. And then the revised results from the timing company’s web site, with the faker moved down to last place at the bottom.

Really doesn’t seem like it was a smart move on his part. And I guess on some level, our insane little sport has lost its innocence.

For another view of this incident, here’s a link to PJ Glassey’s writeup of it: http://www.flightclubseattle.com/2012/04/2012-aon-los-angeles-results/

Addendum: This has made the local news: http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/sports/Cheating-Accusation-in-Los-Angeles-Stair-climb-Fundraiser-146152105.html

Update 4/5/2012: Now it’s on the main MSNBC site: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46958185/ns/local_news-los_angeles_ca/t/stair-climb-champ-fired-alleged-cheating/

Update 4/6/2012: Unlike Mr Cheater, this story has legs. Now it’s made the jump across the Atlantic to Britain: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2125829/Miguel-Larios-Stair-climbing-champion-accused-cheating-took-lift.html

Update 4/7/2012: And now, look at the number one result in Google for a search for Mr Cheater:


Update 4/11/2012: Now he’s made Hispanically Speaking News: http://www.hispanicallyspeakingnews.com/notitas-de-noticias/details/latino-liar-stair-climber-believed-to-have-cheated-and-taken-elevator-durin/15081/

Today was the 5th Annual Fight for Air stair climb at Aon Center in downtown Los Angeles. This is the fourth time I’ve done this. Oddly enough, it never gets any easier.

Kathleen and Lucinda were also doing the climb, so the three of us went downtown, along with a couple of Lucinda’s friends. It was kind of cold and windy, but for the most part that didn’t matter, since most of the event takes place indoors.

This year, I’d made a detailed map of the stairs, and I’d worked out the most efficient way to climb them. And on Thursday, I’d thought of one more improvement to my method. The middle section of the building, from 24 to 44 is a bit odd. It’s still 22 steps per floor, like the rest of the building, but instead of two flights of 11 steps, it has one flight of 10, a landing and left turn, three steps up to a second landing and left turn. And then 9 steps up to the next floor. As a result of the three steps in the middle, the landings on the floors are wider than normal, and it’s hard to avoid having to take a step on the landing to get across it. But on Thursday, I realized that if I started with a single step with my left foot at the beginning, then I could double-step the stairs, and when I got to the next floor, I’d take a single step onto the landing with my right foot. I drew out a full-sized diagram of the landing on the floor, and I saw that if I made the step onto the landing wide enough, I should be able to stretch and get up the first step of the next flight with my left foot. So that would make a neat little 12-step pattern to climb each floor, and the load would be evenly distributed, with each leg doing 11 of the 22 steps. Being that I thought of this on Thursday, I didn’t get to try it in practice, but I figured I’d try it when I got to 24, and if it didn’t work out, I’d just fall back to my old method.

I started in about the middle of the elite climbers group. I made sure to stay behind anyone who I knew would pass me. And when it was time, I ran into the stairs and started climbing. I got to the main staircase on 4 at about 40 seconds, which was right on schedule. By this time, the guy who’d started behind me had caught up. I kept going, but he didn’t try to pass, and by the time I got to 20 or so, he was falling off the pace. I checked my watch at 20, and I was on schedule. I’d made up split times, aiming to be at the top in 11 minutes.

At 24, I tried out my new step pattern, and it worked. It was a little bit of a stretch, but after a few floors, it felt natural and smooth. And I could tell that I’d achieved my goal of avoiding a load imbalance between my legs.

At 32, I looked at my watch, and I was a few seconds behind schedule. I think that not having that guy on my tail took away part of my incentive to go faster. One guy did pass me at about 38 or so. He was breathing hard and loud, and I just stepped aside and let him go by. It didn’t cost me any wasted steps, so that was all right.

When I got to 46, I saw that I was about 20 seconds off my pace. Oh well. I kept on going, and got to 60 at about 25 seconds behind schedule. Then it was into new territory, on up through the last two floors and up to the roof. I came around the last turn through the roof door and somehow managed to put on a little sprint to the roof. I stumbled over the timing mat and then did the traditional face-plant on the roof. I stayed like that for a couple minutes to catch my breath. And then got up and had a look around. It was overcast, and the clouds were very low, so there wasn’t much of a view. I waited for few minutes until Lucinda came out. Then we both waited just a few more minutes for Kathleen. I also made a point of looking down at the final flight of stairs and counting the steps. This was the final piece of information I needed to finish my chart of the Aon staircase. And when Kathleen got to the top, I knew that she’d done very well this time, going something like 10 minutes faster than last year.

After resting a bit, we walked down the second staircase to 60 and got the elevator back down to the ground. They were already posting results, and I was reasonably pleased with my time of 11:31. I really do think I could have gone faster, but it’s still faster than any of my previous times in this race, so I really can’t complain. I figured that since both Mark and Michael were there, I was racing for third place. And my time put me in third. Then I looked a little closer and saw that I was only three seconds behind Michael. I guess he must have been having an off day. But if I’d known it was going to be that close, I would have gone a little faster.

A bit later, I was talking with a reporter from the L.A. Times. He said that he was assigned to write an article about stair racing for publication some time in the late summer. They want to publish it to help drum up interest in the U.S. Bank Tower stair climb in September. I told him about my charting the stairs and working out the most efficient line. He was going to climb the building in the last group, so he took some notes about proper methods for doing the turns on the landings, and he wrote down my time as the time to beat if he wanted an award. When I saw him later, he said that he didn’t beat my time, but that my pointers helped him a lot. So there’s value in being a stair nerd.

Since I finally got the count of the final flight up to the roof, I can now definitively state that the published step count of 1,377 is wrong. The true count is 1,391. This makes the second race where I have made a detailed study of the stairs and found the published count was wrong.

In the end, I got a certificate and medal for third place in the 50-59 age group. Even when it’s 50-something degrees and cloudy, being on the podium for an award just brightens up one’s day.

Full results are here. http://raceresults.eternaltiming.com/index.cfm/20120331_Fight_For_Air_Stair_Climb_-_Los_Angeles.htm

Addendum: I’m not going to go into the controversy about the first place overall award. Let’s just say that it doesn’t pass the smell test. Shades of Rosie Ruiz.

This coming Saturday is the Aon Center stair climb, so today is the last day I’m planning on going there for the practice session. So as an exercise in look-how-far-we’ve-come, I decided to try a little experiment. The first time I did this, I averaged 12 seconds per floor, and I felt like I was gonna die! Now I’m averaging about 10, still feeling like I’m gonna die!. So I wanted to try going up at the same pace as my first time, just to see what that would feel like now.

I made up a split time card, with the aim of doing the 56 floors in 11:20. That’s pretty slow by my standards now, but it’s the same pace that I did the first time I did this climb.

Right from the start, I was having to hold back and deliberately go slow. When I got to 20, I was way ahead of schedule, so I slowed down a bit. At 32 I was a little ahead, but not much. And at 46 I was ahead again. I took it easy at the end, not really trying to sprint the last few floors, and I came out on 60 at 11:00. So even trying to go as slow, I still ended up going faster than I did at my first race.

In any endeavor, it’s useful sometimes to stop and take stock of the progress one has made.

The Aon Tower stair climb is a week from Saturday. I’ve been coming to the practice climbs since the beginning of January. And now we’re in the final stages, getting ready to do the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It’s funny, because the first time I did a skyscraper stair climb, I went into it thinking, “how hard could it be?” And by the time I got to the 20th floor, I knew. Stair racing is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But I’m reasonably good at it, so that makes it fun.

I rode the train downtown after work, and I got to the building and signed in. There were a few other people I knew there, and we chatted a bit while we were going up to the staging area on the 4th floor. I’d decided to try an experiment tonight. Since the beginning in January, I’ve been dreading doing this every time I do. So I’ve been going into it each time with the idea that I’m just going to go at a comfortable pace, and not try to push myself too hard. And I’ve been consistently doing times that I would have thought unimaginable last year. So tonight, I wanted to try to push, to see what I could do if I tried. So I made up a card with split times for the 20th, 32nd, and 44th floors, and I attached it to a velcro band I wrapped around my arm, just above my watch. I wanted to be able to see both at the same time. I’d done this before, but this was the first time I tried it with times calculated to get me to the top faster than before.

My first goal was to get to 20 by 2:34, and I was there at about 2:27. Then I was supposed to make the halfway point at 32 by 4:45, and I was spot on. The next goal was the 44th floor by 6:56, and I made that right on time. But those last 16 floors up to 60 were a real slog. I was able to keep going, but I could feel I was slowing down. I’d been aiming to get to 60 at about 9:40 or so, but when I came out and face-planted on the floor, I saw my watch had 9:53. So I didn’t make my goal of going faster. But on the other hand, I’m still consistently doing times under 10 for the practice climb from 4 to 60, and that’s still about 30-40 seconds faster than I was able to do last year.

Still nothing to complain about here. It was a good outing.

This weekend was the San Diego edition of the Lung Association’s “Fight for Air” stair climb. It’s only 30 stories, hardly worth showing up for. But it’s an excuse to go visit my father and go see the baby seals at La Jolla. So we all went down there for the weekend. Because this is a short one, Lucinda even agreed to do it.

We spent Saturday going to see the seals and visiting with Grandpa. And on Sunday morning, we headed downtown to the Omni Hotel. Our assigned start time was with the 12:00 group. There was some kvetching about this from the other West Coast Labels people, and most of them agitated for and got an earlier start. So they were all done by the time we got there. But I figured that as long as I started at the front of our wave, it would be all right. They allowed several minutes between waves to clear the stairs, and as it turned out, I didn’t have to pass anyone on my trip up.

Last year, I did this one in 4:03. I knew I could go faster, so I was aiming for 3:30 or better. So I figured I’d look at my watch at 11, after 10 floors. My goal was to do that first 10 in as close to a minute as I could. So when I got to 11, I looked at my watch, and it said 1:15. My immediate thought was,

“Crap! I need to go faster!”

So I turned up the heat, and I didn’t look at my watch again. When I came out at the top on 31, my watch said 3:27. So I knew I’d managed to increase my pace significantly for the last 20 floors. And when we went back down, I saw that my time was 3:23, which I was pretty happy with. It was good for 7th overall, and 3rd in my age group. The only guy older than me who went faster was Mark, and that’s normal. And both Kathleen and Lucinda improved their times from last year. Sadly, Lucinda missed getting third place by 4 seconds. Still, it was a good outing.

While we were waiting for the awards, I talked to a group of cute tattooed girls who were doing the climb for the first time. I’m always a fan of cute tattooed girls, and if they’re wearing bunny ears, so much the better. And I thought that the “Breath Takers” team name and logo were very good. The girl I talked to said that she was a lung transplant recipient, which I thought was very remarkable on many levels. She had done the climb, and she was very chipper for someone who had undergone such a major procedure.

At the end, I got a medal for 3rd place in the 50s age group. And the West Coast Labels team pretty much swept the awards. And in general, any day that includes time up on the podium for an award is a good day. So it was a good day.

Results are here: http://raceresults.eternaltiming.com/index.cfm/20120318_Fight_For_Air_Stair_Climb_-_San_Diego.htm?Fuseaction=Results&Class=Stair+Climb+Individual~All

It’s Thursday, and that means yet another trip downtown to run up the stairs at the Aon building. Fortunately, I’ve done a study of the stairs there, and I’ve worked out what I believe is the most efficient way to climb them. And the stepping pattern I have to do in order to do this is a useful distraction to keep me from dwelling on “OMG What the HELL was I thinking coming here to do this again?”

Since Lucinda has art class tonight, I had to go downtown at lunchtime to do this. I rode my bike over to the Fillmore St Gold Line station, and I rode the train downtown. The Metro Rail trains really are quite good here. They’re comfortable, quiet, and pretty fast. When they were building them, I didn’t think I’d have much use for them, but it’s turned out that I use them quite a lot now.

When I got to the 7th St/Metro Center stop, I climbed the 79 steps from the subway platform to Hope St. Then I walked over to the Aon building and signed in. The guards there pretty much all know me by now. I got changed and headed up to the stairs. There were a few people who’d started ahead of me, but I caught and passed them pretty quickly. When I got to 48, I knew there hadn’t been anyone by there much before me, since I triggered the motion detector to turn on the light on the landing. At 54, I looked at my watch, and it said something like 9 minutes. So I turned up the heat for the last few floors to make it to the top in less than 10 minutes. I stumbled out of the stairs on the 60th floor and did my now-traditional face-plant on the floor. When I opened my eyes, I saw a fortune cookie fortune right in front of my nose. And when I read it, it was completely appropriate to what we do here in the stairwell. So I took the little plastic badge-holder that I’d used to hold my split times note on my glove, and I used that to clip the fortune to the fire hose pipe on the 60th floor landing so that the other stair climbers could see it, too.

In the end, I did another 9:51. Not my best time, but only 3 seconds off my best. And I’m consistently doing times under 10 minutes, when I was struggling to get under 10 1/2 this time last year. So there’s nothing not to like about this. It was a good day.

Tonight was yet another practice run up the Aon building in downtown Los Angeles, and I think I’m finally over my respiratory troubles from the Stratosphere Tower climb in Las Vegas the weekend before last. Last Thursday when I did this, I was still coughing uncontrollably for several hours afterward. But tonight, I did it, I did it fast, and I didn’t have a coughing fit afterward. So all this is a Good Thing.

I rode the train downtown again. Riding the train is good because I can bring a book to read, which is a useful distraction, so I don’t have to think about climbing the stairs until I get there. Right now, I’m reading The All American Boys, which is Walter Cunningham’s memoir about his years as an Apollo astronaut back in the 1960s. It’s pretty entertaining, and keeps me from dreading what I’m about to do.

When I got to the building, I signed in and got ready to go. There was a small group of people who were about to start when I got to the stairs, and one of them decided to pace me at the start to see how fast I was going to go. He made it about 10 floors before he dropped off. This was a good reminder that, while I look at Mark and Jeff and those guys and think I’m not very fast, compared to the Average Bear, I’m not bad at this at all. And that’s good to know.

I saw a couple of other people in the stairs near the top. I had my split times clipped to the back of my hand, and I managed to stay pretty close to them all the way. And I stumbled out of the stairs with a time of 9:51, which is three seconds off my best time, but not bad at all.

It was a good outing.

Thursday night is Art Walk night in downtown Los Angeles. Kathleen and I were planning on meeting up there to go see the art, so I planned to go practice on the stairs beforehand. This time, I remembered my watch. I also brought along my big fancy-ass camera, since we were going to be going Art Walking. That turned out to be a bit of bother to carry up the stairs, but that’s all right.

This time, I clipped my split times note card to the back of my glove. I made it to 20 a few seconds ahead of schedule. I was right on schedule at 32, but I fell a few seconds behind by the time I got to 44. I was just getting going on my final dash to the finish when I came around the corner at 59 and one of the building guards was sitting in the middle of the staircase. He said they’d just painted the stairs above, so we had to stop at 59. I was a bit startled by this, and it was several seconds before I realized that that meant I should stop my watch. At that time, it said 10:04. So I think my actual time if I’d been able to go on to 60 would have been right around 10 minutes. Which is not bad for being in recovery mode still.

It’s Tuesday, and that means practice at the Aon building. I’m still coughing from the weekend’s ordeal, so I decided I’d just go and do it at a slower pace than usual.

I rode the train downtown again. When I got to the station, I had my first “oh crap” moment when I realized I’d forgotten my camera. And when the train was about halfway to downtown, I had the second when I realized I’d forgotten my stopwatch. So that meant that my cue card with the split times written on it was going to be useless. I looked to see if my phone had a stopwatch function on it, but it doesn’t. The closest thing I could find was a timer in the alarm clock function. So I figured I’d just set a 10-minute timer and see how far I got before it went off.

When I got to the building, I got changed and headed up. There’s no point in sitting around at the bottom, dreading what I’m about to do. I started the timer, put on my gloves, and headed up.

It wasn’t as bad as I was expecting. I managed to maintain a steady pace, and the 10-minute timer went off when I was passing the 57th floor. That’s about 30 seconds from the top. Since I took about 15 seconds at the bottom putting on my gloves, I figure my time was about 10:15 or so. That’s slow by this year’s standards, but still faster than anything I did last year. So I can’t complain.