Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Tonight was the last practice session at the Aon building, and I wanted to go up the stairs just a few more times. I’m about as ready as I’m going to be for the race on Saturday. Which is to say, I’m not really ready to race, but I’m going to go in more with the intention of just taking it easy and doing it for the experience and for the social aspect of getting to see all my crazy stair-climbing friends there.

The first time up, I wanted to take just an easy, but brisk pace. And I ended up with a 9:55 for 51 floors. That’s just a bit over five floors per minute, and it’s slightly faster than I went the first time I did this climb. back in 2009. But the difference now is that that pace is ‘brisk, but moderate’, while the first time I did it, it was ‘I feel like I’m gonna die!’ So that’s progress.

I took a moment to take a picture looking up the stair shaft. Just to get a sense of how the stairs feel infinite when we’re climbing them. They just go on endlessly, with every landing looking exactly the same as the one before and the one after. And the buttons in the service elevator are proof that the building is honest, and they didn’t skip the 13th floor.

In the end, I went up three times, just because I could. And because after Saturday, I’m not going to be seeing the inside of this building until next year.

Tonight is the next to the last practice climb at the Aon building before the race this Saturday. Since my back has been feeling a bit better the last two weeks, I’m experimenting with trying to go a bit faster again. So tonight, on my first climb, I opened the throttle a little bit more, and made the 51 story climb in 9:29. That’s still a far cry from the 8:58 I did last year, but it’s the fastest I’ve gone up stairs in a long time. And after that, I went up three more times, just because it was there. Good times.

And since all the building security people at Aon Center have been so nice to us during our stair training sessions, I baked some of my award-winning chocolate-chip cookies for them tonight. I figure, it’s not really their job to watch over a bunch of crazy stair-climbing racers, but they’re gracious and friendly to us, so I just wanted them to know that we appreciate it.

This weekend, we took an overnight trip to San Diego to visit my father, and along the way we did a bunch of other stuff.

The trip started off Saturday afternoon, when we headed down to San Diego. We visited with my father for a bit before we all went to dinner at The Prado in Balboa Park. We had a nice, fancy dinner out, and Trinh got an extra dessert, since Sunday was her birthday.

On Sunday morning, we managed to convince Lucinda, Trinh, and Melissa all to do the Lung Association stair climb with us, so we had five of us signed up to do it. It was a short one, only about 30 stories. The climb was from the lobby to 32, but the building skipped 13. I wanted to go back in and do a proper survey, but the organizers were kind of being redacted about it, and they wouldn’t let me go back in. But we did make the Channel 10 news that night:

http://www.10news.com/news/fight-for-air-climb-was-an-extreme-sport-for-some-an-emotional-day-for-others-03302014

After the stair climb, we headed back to our room to get cleaned up. We didn’t stay for the awards, but I found out later that I managed to place 3rd in the 50-59 age group. Not bad for coming back from not being able to walk a couple months ago.

Finally, we all went to La Jolla Cove to see the baby seals. The pups are generally born in February, so they were still pretty small, and really, there’s nothing cuter than baby seals.

Tonight was another night where I got a late start for downtown, so I only had time for two climbs. But the first one, I managed a 9:40 for the 51 floors. So that was a Good Thing. And I didn’t hurt my back in the process, so all around, it was a good evening.

Tuesday evening, I went downtown again to hit the stairs at the Aon building. Since my back is feeling slightly better these days, I’ve been experimenting with going a bit faster. So far, my best time for the 51-floor practice course has been 9:44, so I wanted to see if I could go just a little faster tonight.

AS it turned out, the answer was “no”. But that’s all right. I did a 9:47, which is pretty close. And after that, I went up another three times, just so I could have a reason to say, “what was I thinking when I signed up for this?”

Back in November, when we were on our way to Chicago to climb the Sears Willis Tower, we got word that registration was opening for the Big Climb in Seattle. Everyone said it’s a good event and a fun time, so we signed up for it. Months came and went, and in the meantime, my back when to hell. But the trip is all arranged and paid for, so we decided to go on it anyway. I’d never been to Seattle before, and I’ve got both friends and family there, plus it’s a chance to play tourist.

On the way there, when we were flying over (I think) about Reno, I saw a little black wisp rising out of the clouds. It looked like a Dementor from Harry Potter. I got out the big lens for my camera, and close up, it looks like it was probably a military jet. It just looked strange, since it was going almost straight up out of the clouds.

A bit farther, I started to see the stratovolcanoes of the Cascades. I was trying to spot Mt Lassen, since that’s the one Cascades volcano I’ve climbed and seen up close, but I couldn’t locate it. I did see Mt Hood, with Portland right next to it. And that told me that we were near Mt St. Helens. And within a minute or two, we were flying right over it. I managed to get a pretty good picture of the crater.

When we got to Seattle, we made our way to our hotel, which turned out to be right downtown, and only two blocks from the Columbia Center tower, which we could see out the window. That night, we met up with my cousin Irene for dinner.

Saturday was our day to play tourist. In the morning, I took a little walk while Kathleen was getting ready. The “Field Trip” app on my iPhone told me about the Arctic Building, which was around the corner from our hotel. It said that the tusks on the walrus heads were originally made with real ivory. Yikes. I also poked my head into the downtown Transit Tunnel. It was odd seeing buses and trains sharing the same tunnel, but it seems to work, and we had occasion to ride the train later that day.

Our one real outing of the day was to Lake View Cemetery to visit the graves of Bruce and Brandon Lee. No trip is complete without a celebrity grave tour. We also played tourist a bit, going on an underground tour that’s not the original one, but a spinoff located nearby. It was pretty entertaining. (I’d link to them here, but their web site crashes my browser. Hey, guys! Getter a better web developer!) We also visited the Gum Wall and rode the Seattle Monorail, both of which we found through Field Trip.

Finally, we met up with my old friend K.D. for dinner. She and her partner Amy were among the first to get married after Referendum 74 passed in 2012.

On Sunday morning, it was time to climb. We walked up to the building and found our group. I took it easy going up. My plan was to do my regular easy pace of 4 1/2 floors per minute, which would get me to the 73rd floor in about 15 minutes. But it ended up taking only about 13:45. I was a little surprised by that, but when I went up a second time with PJ to do a survey of the staircase, the reason became clear quickly. The floors in Columbia Center are only about 11.4 feet each, where most office buildings are 13 – 13.5 feet. So I was doing my regular easy pace of 1 vertical foot per second, and that translated into more floors per minute than it would have in another building. And of course, I made a chart for future reference. We also found that once again, the published step count and climb height for the event were incorrect, and it was actually higher and more steps than the event had claimed.

After doing the stairs, we got cleaned up and met up with Irene for lunch before heading back to the airport. All told, it was a fun trip.

Back in November, Kathleen and I both signed up for The Big Climb. This is an event this coming Sunday in Seattle, climbing 69 stories up Columbia Center. Since I’m not planning on trying to go particularly fast there, I figured there was no harm in going downtown for stair practice tonight.

I did my usual four climbs. I could have done five, but I just wasn’t feeling up to it. Still, it was a fun evening.

I had an MRI on my back yesterday. It’s been a bit better over the past few days, but today it’s regressing again. I suppose the overall trend is up, but it still varies a lot from day to day. Still, I went downtown to do the stairs. I’ve found that doing a few sets of stairs, like 150-250 floors or so, will relieve the pain in my back for about two hours. So what’s not to like.

I’m still experimenting with going a little bit faster. Still nowhere near going all-out, but just turning up the pace a little bit. Unlike Nigel Tufnel and Spinal Tap, I’m not turning up to eleven. More like turning it up to seven-and-a-half. Still, I was able to shave five seconds off last week’s time, and I didn’t hurt my back in the process.

I was a bit worn out from the first time up, so I only did it three more times, and I was pretty weary the last time. But I got to see and socialize with the other nutball stair climbers, so it was a fun time.

There was an article in the L.A. Times this week about a pit that Metro is digging along Wilshire Blvd to prepare for the Fairfax station on the extension of the Purple Line subway. The location is right across the street from Hancock Park and the La Brea Tar Pits, and the article talked about all the fossils they were finding there, on what had been a beach during the last Ice Age. So of course, I thought this might be interesting to go see, although I thought that there was a good chance we wouldn’t actually get to see into the pit. Still, it’s just another interesting bit of local color, even if that color is all black from the tar.

We rode out by way of downtown Los Angeles, and then out on 9th St and 4th St to get out to Park La Brea. Along the way, we saw one old brick apartment building that looks like it’s been reinforced for earthquakes. It’s not often that one sees a building with such obvious reinforcement on it. And a little farther down the road, we saw another building with some odd windows. We were wondering where they get blinds for windows that are built at odd angles like that. When we got to the Park La Brea gates, a quick turn south took us to the corner of Ogden Dr and Wilshire Blvd, and there it was. They had a high wall around the site, so we really couldn’t see in. But I was able to reach in through the gate with my camera to get some pictures. Probably about the most interesting thing to see in there was the backhoe that was completely black from digging through the tar that apparently must be everywhere in the ground around there. I wonder what it’s like for people who live in that neighborhood. What happens if you try to grow a garden in the back yard?

Since we were there, we went next door to the lawn in front of the Variety building, where they have a section of the Berlin Wall. We’d come out to see this once before. Then we went across Wilshire to LACMA to see the Big Rock. And after that, we headed back east to Larchmont Village and our snack stop at Noah’s Bagels. And then we rode home, taking York Blvd across Highland Park for a change. They put in a bike lane, and that street isn’t so bad any more.

45 miles.

Since I took Lucinda to the Museum of Death last year, I got us tickets to go on the Dearly Departed Helter Skelter tour. I’ve gone on their regular Tragical History Tour many times, as far back as 1990, when it was still called the Grave Line Tour.

We rode around in the van for the whole morning, and we got to see most of the locations associated with the Manson Family murders in 1969. It’s a multimedia tour, too, featuring movie and TV clips from the time with people involved in the case, as well as songs written by Charles Manson. There was even a song he wrote that was recorded by The Beach Boys. It was all very interesting, at times horrifying, and very entertaining tour. A very good father-daughter bonding activity.