Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Kathleen had to have surgery today, and due to the requirements of it, we had to go to the West L.A. Kaiser hospital. They said it would take 2-3 hours, and that I should be available during that time. Since just sitting in the waiting room is just excruciating, I made sure they had my cell phone number, and I brought my bike along to scout out some possible sightseeing for the Sunday morning bike club ride.

Since we’ve done a couple of rides to see different aspects of the history of the Los Angeles oil fields, I’ve done a bit of reading about this. And I ran across an article about fracking wastewater disposal that mentioned polluted water bubbling up out of the ground in a dog park on the west side of L.A. They weren’t very specific about where it was, and when I finally tracked it down, it turned out to actually be in Culver City. But as it turns out, this is just a couple of miles from the Kaiser West L.A. facility, so I had my first sightseeing destination.

To get there, I rode down Venice Blvd, which isn’t nearly as bad as it sounds like it would be on a Thursday morning. There is a bike lane, and it was really only a problem going under the big bridge under construction for the Metro Expo Line. Then I turned on Culver Blvd and rode over to the park in Culver City. There was a line of pawprints painted on the sidewalk marking the way to the dog park. When I got there, it was an acre or so of dirt, complete with oil wells pumping away just up the hillside beyond the fence. There was also a little fenced-in enclosure across the street from the entrance, with humming equipment inside that was pretty obviously something to do with the oil field.

Another recent sightseeing theme on the Sunday morning ride was to see the Mulholland Dam and the Hollywood Reservoir. This came out of having gone to a talk about the St. Francis Dam disaster in 1928, which is considered to be one of the worst civil engineering failures of the 20th century. During that talk, they mentioned that the dam collapse is largely forgotten in Los Angeles, possibly because all the death and destruction it caused happened far outside the city. So during the question-and-answer period, I asked the panel to compare this to the 1963 Baldwin Hills Dam collapse, which is also kind of forgotten, even though it happened within the Los Angeles city limits, just about 8 miles west of downtown. They said that they thought that that was probably because of the combination of the fact that the destruction it caused was much less than the St. Francis Dam, and also because it happened in December, 1963, just weeks after the Kennedy assassination. In any event, I’ve wanted to go see the site of the Baldwin Hills Dam for some time now, and it’s only a few miles east of Culver City and the dog park. And to add to the connection, the prevailing thinking now is that the dam collapse was probably caused by ground subsidence due to operations in the Inglewood oil field just south of the reservoir. The remains of the dam and the bowl of the reservoir have since been landscaped and turned into Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area.

So I rode over to Baldwin Hills, and I headed up a street that looked like it might lead to a way in to the park. The main entrance to the park is on La Cienega Blvd, but on the section that was built decades ago as a section of the planned Laurel Canyon Freeway. Even though it’s officially just a street, I really don’t want to be riding my bike on the freeway, so I was looking for another way in to the park. I rode up a steep hill to a place where I had a good look at the former dam, complete with the dip in the wall where it broke. I continued on up to the end of the street, where there was a locked gate. So I asked someone who was out walking in the neighborhood. She said that she thought there was a way in off the street on the other side of the former reservoir, so I rode back down the hill and up the other side, only to find more locked gates. I finally did find a gap in the fence with that looked like a goat path that may have led into the park. But that’s not really what I was looking for. The only lesson I can draw from this is that for some reason, the powers that be REALLY, REALLY don’t want people to come to this park by bicycle. Still, I did get a pretty good view in through the gates to see the nicely landscaped bowl of the former reservoir.

On my way back down the hill, my phone made some noise. It was a message from the nurse that Kathleen’s operation was nearly done, and that everything had gone well. So I headed back to the hospital. As I’d learned back in 2007, going for a bike ride is a good way to pass the time while waiting for these sorts of things. So it worked out well for both of us.

I went downtown today with a distinct lack of planning or ambition. I didn’t want to try going for speed again tonight, but I didn’t have any other ideas of what to do. But when I got there, George said he was going to do a vertical kilometer. He had added up my times from when I did it a couple weeks ago, and they totaled 59:10 of climbing time. So he was going to try and beat that total. And with that, he lit a fire under me, and I had a goal for the evening. My goal was to do the five climbs again, and to improve on my time, and to beat George.

The first time up, I was fresh and ready, and I turned in a 10:30. Not blazing fast, but a good brisk pace. The second time, I went a little slower, but still was under 11. Each time up, I was aiming for my usual 4 1/2 floors per minute pace, and I hit that on the third and fourth climbs, coming out at the top in 11:18 and 11:25. At that point, I checked my watch, and it was 6:58PM, So I knew that I’d be able to make it back down to the start before they closed the door at 7:10.

At the bottom, I had a couple of minutes extra to spare before the door closed. So I stopped and had some water before heading up the stairs for the fifth time.

In the past, when I’ve done five climbs in one session, the fifth time up is a real slog. It’s hard to keep moving, and I just keep thinking, “Who the HELL thought this was a good idea???” But this time, all the way up the 51 floors, I just kept chanting to myself, “Beat George! Beat Geoge! Beat George!” It was a good mantra, and I was almost able to maintain my pace, even on the fifth time up. And when I got to 49, I could see that I had a chance of making the top in under 12 minutes. Somehow, I managed to run up the last two floors, coming out on top at 11:47.

So my total for the five climbs was 55:43, which I found pretty remarkable. This is the first time I’ve done five climbs and had them all under 12 minutes. And the average was about 11:09, which is not bad for doing five consecutive climbs up a 51-story building. Nothing like a little friendly competition to gin up some motivation.

Of course, that means that the next frontier is to push the average below 11. Maybe that’s my goal for next week. In any event, it was a good evening.

Tonight was yet another practice session on the staircase at the Wilshire-Figueroa building in downtown Los Angeles. I went there this evening with the goal of trying to climb it in 9 minutes or less. And after that, I planned on climbing it again at a moderate pace as many times as time would allow.

When I got there, I got signed in and started up. My planned pace was 5 2/3 floors per minute. At each time point, I checked my watch to see it ticking over the one-minute boundary. And at each time point, having to mentally add 5 2/3 to it to calculate the next time point was a useful distraction from wondering why the hell I’m doing this insane sport in the first place.

I was able to maintain my pace up to about the 38th floor, when I was suddenly overcome by a wave of ‘What-the-f#ck-are-you-trying-to-prove-here’, which briefly slowed me down. I managed to somehow keep going, and when I hit 49, I did my best to sprint up the last two floors, coming out on 51 with a time of 9:07. It’s not quite as fast as I’d wanted, but it’s still my fastest time in this round of practice, so I can’t complain.

After the elevator ride down, I climbed the stairs two more times. In both, I was trying to do my ‘moderate’ pace, which gets me to the top in about 11:20 – 11:25. It worked once, but on the third time up the stairs this evening, I was starting to fade, and it ended up taking 12:34.

By this time, I was pretty tired. But there was still time to do it again. George was there, and he’d brought his 25-foot tape measure, so we walked up together and took some measurements on the staircase. It turns out that from the door where we start up to 2 is 9 feet. Then from floors 2 to 3, it’s 14 feet exactly. The two floors from 3 to 5 the floors are 14 feet. And then from 5 all the way up to 49, each floor is 13 feet. The last two floors from 49 to 51 are 25 feet and 19 feet each. And doing the math, it works out that the steps on that staircase are 6.8 inches high, and the climb up to 51 is 669 feet, 204 meters. I can now correct my staircase chart for this building. And even though it’s slightly shorter than I’d thought, four climbs is still a half-mile, and five is still a kilometer. This is good for those of us who are irrationally goal oriented.

Fun times.

A few weeks ago, Kathleen and I went to a talk at the downtown library about the St Francis Dam disaster. Back in 1978, I rode in a bike race that went up Francisquito Canyon, and I remember seeing the ruins of the dam during the race. At the time, I didn’t know the history of it, but I could see that they were ruins of something big in the canyon.

To this day, it appears that there is still some disagreement about the fundamental cause of the dam collapse. But one thing that they talked about that I’d never heard before was that the St Francis Dam was one of two dams that William Mulholland and the DWP built to store water from the Los Angeles Aqueduct. The St Francis Dam collapsed not long after being filled to capacity, while the other dam still exists, holding back the Hollywood Reservoir. Apparently, soon after the St Francis disaster, people looked up at the dam above Hollywood and realized that it was essentially the same dam as the one that had failed catastrophically in Santa Clarita. So the DWP embarked on a program to basically fill in the canyon in front of the dam with dirt, and then to plant trees on the slope. Ostensibly, this was to reinforce the dam, but it also had the effect of making the dam much less obvious. From below, it just looks like a little bit of concrete wall on top of the hillside.

“Dam? What dam? There’s no dam here!”

Of course, I decided that we needed to go see this close-up. I’d heard recently that the path around the reservoir is open now for hiking and bicycling, so I dusted off the “Chris Brown’s House” route and, with a few modifications, we were ready to go.

I told everyone that I thought that this might be a slightly easier ride than the others we do that go by Lake Hollywood, since we would not be riding up the hill all the way to the Hollywood sign. But it still turned out to be pretty hard. The climb up the canyon to the dam was quite steep. But when we came around the last bend, I could see the dam. Sort of. It just looked like a hillside. The trees that the DWP planted are all quite large now, and it’s not obvious at all that there’s a dam there.

At the gate to enter the path around the reservoir there was a sign saying that photo and video equipment is not allowed. In the modern age, I don’t see how they could possibly expect that anyone would follow a rule like that.

We went in the gate and rode across the dam. I stopped to look over the side at the slope and trees, and over the other side to look at the lake. It really took a stupendous amount of dirt to construct that slope. I found a picture of it from Popular Science from 1933 or so. Look how small the dump truck is, and then imagine how many loads of dirt it took:

On the far side of the dam, I found a little display case with a faded certificate in it. It was dated 1966 and signed by the chief engineer for the DWP.

Continuing on around the lake, we got back to the main road and groaned up the Lake Hollywood hill. Then down the other side into Burbank for snacks at Priscilla’s.

On the way back, Martha showed us how to get to the Glendale Narrows Riverwalk. This is a short walking and bike path they built along a stretch of the L.A. River. It was a nice little shortcut.

All told, it was a nice day for riding, and an interesting bit of history, too.

38 miles.

I made a 1-k this evening. That’s harder than it sounds, given that it was 1-k straight up. This is the second time I’ve done this at this building. Each time up the staircase is 210 meters of climbing, so doing it five times adds up to 1,050 meters. The last time I was here, I did my first climb for time, aiming to be at the top in 9:30. But this time, since I was able to get in the stairs right at 6:00, I wanted to take it a bit slower so I could try for five climbs before they close the door at 7:10.

The first time up, I did 9:49. That was a relatively easy pace, and even though the elevator ride back down took 7 minutes, I was on my way up again at 6:17, arriving at the top at about 6:28. This time the elevator ride down took about 5 minutes, and when I started up the third time at about 6:32, I thought I had a chance to make it. The first two climbs, including the rides back down had taken just over 30 minutes, so I figured that if I could come close to that for the second set of two, that would put me back at the bottom and ready for the fifth at just a bit after 7:00.

I slowed down a bit on the third and fourth climbs, coming in at 11:19 and 12:26. And when I got back to the bottom after the fourth, it was 7:05. So I stopped long enough to drink some water, and then I headed up for the fifth time. At that point, I wasn’t thinking about speed. I had two goals at that point. The first was to make it to the top before 7:30, and the second was to not be the last person out of the stairwell. But the last climb was pretty grim. I was tired, and I’d neglected to bring some Gatorade along, so I had no sugar in me any more. So it was a slog. Lots of people passed me, but fortunately, I passed one other person, and I could hear a few below me who weren’t catching up. So I made it up in 17:41, coming out on the 51st floor at about 7:23.

So I made my vertical kilometer. It was pretty hard. I can’t quite feature how I was able to climb the Aon building eight times last March. But still, this was a good evening on the stairs.

It’s Monday, and time to hit the stairs again. We had a good group today, with four of us from the office heading downtown on the train. My plan for this evening was to ramp up the pace just a little bit over what I did last Wednesday. I’m slowly getting back into doing my first climb of the evening for speed. We’re still climbing the Figueroa-Wilshire building. The climb is 50 stories, from 1 to 51, 1,181 steps. The typical floor in that building is 23 steps, so the climb works out to the equivalent of 51.3 ‘normal’ floors. The last two floors from 49 to 51 are taller than normal.

Two weeks ago, I did the first climb in 9:56, which seemed like a pretty relaxed pace. A week ago I made up split times aiming to be at the top in 9:30, which was a bit faster, but not too much of a strain. So tonight I was aiming to do 9:15. Now, this is starting to feel like a pretty brisk pace up the stairs, without being too punishing. That’s 5 1/2 floors per minute. I found that keeping track of the splits was a useful diversion. I checked my watch at each one-minute goal, and after passing each one, I had to mentally add 5 1/2 to it to figure out the next one-minute goal. And all that arithmetic is a good distraction from thinking, “What the f#ck was I thinking doing this again!?!” And I was pleasantly surprised to make the 45th floor in under 8 minutes, which meant I was a bit ahead of schedule. And I made it to the finish at 51 in 9:12, three seconds ahead of the target.

My plan was to continue on and do three more climbs at my ‘modest pace’, which is 4 1/2 floors per minute, getting to the top in about 11:20. The second climb, I came in a bit under that by accident. The third was a little bit over target, but pretty close. And then the fourth time up, my time sort of fell off the cliff. The last time up, I didn’t even look at my watch. And I kept thinking, “whose idea was this anyway?” It didn’t help when Chris kept reminding me that it was all my idea. Anyway, we slogged up the staircase that last time in 13:07. Not terrible for a fourth time up, but not the steady pacing I did last week when I did four climbs, all in exactly the same time.

Still, all told, it was a good outing. Four times up adds up to 2,756 feet, which is a bit over a half-mile. Not too bad for one hour.

It’s another Wednesday evening, and time for more stairs. I went downtown with two goals for the evening. One was to do my first climb at a slightly faster pace than I’ve been doing lately, and the second was to get in five climbs for a vertical kilometer. I should have made a third goal, just so I could start this with, “well, two out of three ain’t bad.”

At the last two practices, I’ve been doing my climbs at a modest pace. Basically, that’s the pace I used for when I did the vertical mile. That’s nine floors every two minutes. In this building, that gets me to the top in 11:22. Last week, I’d gone a bit faster on the first climb, and just by accident, I did the first climb in 9:56. So today, I decided to aim for 9:30 for the first climb. On the one hand, that’s almost a minute faster than I’ve been doing, but on the other hand, it’s also a minute slower than my best time for this building. So I worked out splits so I could figure exactly where I should be at each minute boundary. In this case, the plan was to do 16 floors every three minutes. So 5 1/3 per minute.

I went into the stairs at 6:02, and I started up. I was able to maintain the pace pretty well. It was definitely faster than I’ve been doing, but it was nowhere near maximum effort. At each minute boundary I managed to stay right on target. When I hit the 49th floor right at 9 minutes, I knew I had it down. I kept going at the same speed for the last two big floors, and I came out on 51 with a time of 9:29. Right on target.

The elevator ride down seemed to take forever. Looking at the EXIF information in my pictures, I can tell that it took about 6 minutes to get back down.

The plan was to do the rest of the climbs at my regular ‘modest’ pace. So I headed up the second time, aiming to be at the top in 11:22. But I guess I was warmed up or something, and I found myself getting ahead of schedule. When I got to 49, I was almost 40 seconds up, and I didn’t want to crawl up the last two floors just for the sake of stubbornly staying on schedule. So I just kept going and came out on 51 at 10:43.

Again, the elevator ride down took a bit over 6 minutes. Seemed like forever.

The third and fourth times up, I managed to keep to my schedule, getting up to 51 in 11:18 and 11:22. That was good, since I’ve never been able to maintain that pace on the fourth climb after doing a fast first climb. So that’s good. The bad news was that in between climbs three and four, the elevator ride down took a full nine minutes. That meant that I started the fourth climb at 6:55, and the way things were going, I pretty much knew that there was no chance of making it up and back down before the closed the door at 7:10. And that’s what happened. The ride back down took forever once again, and I got back to the start at 7:12. They were just closing the door, and they wouldn’t let any of us go up again. So that was the end of the vertical kilometer.

Still, it was a good outing.

It’s Monday, and time for more fun and frolic on the staircase. Today’s goal was to try and help my friend Morgan do a vertical kilometer. In this case, that’s five times up the 51 stories of the Figueroa-Wilshire building. Each time is 1,181 steps and 210 meters of climbing.

We had a good group going downtown today. We met up on the Metro and rode the train there. Walking up to the building, we saw that it has a new logo on top. It said ‘pwc’. I suppose that stands for something boring like Pricewaterhouse Coopers, but we thought it was funnier to think it stood for ‘Puking While Climbing’.

We got signed in and headed up the stairs. I did a moderate pace, aiming at climbing the 51 stories in about 11:15-11:32. That meant that we’d do nine floors every two minutes. Chris stayed with me, and I watched the time to see that we stayed on pace. We made it up in 11:21 the first time, and Morgan wasn’t too far behind. We hit the button to call the elevator for the trip down.

Last week I did the vertical kilometer at practice, and that time the elevator trips back down averaged about 5:30 each time. So I figured that if we could get up the stairs in less than 12 minutes each time, we’d have a chance of doing four climbs before they closed the door at 7:10. And as long as we could get back in the door by 7:10, we’d be good for a fifth time up.

The next three times, Chris and I went up together, and I kept the pace pretty precisely. This is the first time I’ve ever done multiple climbs at almost exactly the same pace every time. Sadly, Morgan fell off the pace on the third and fourth times up, and when we got to the top of the fourth climb it was already 7:15. So we’d missed the cutoff. But we still did four climbs, and that adds up to 1/2 mile vertical, which is still quite a bit.

The final tally was: 204 floors, 2.756 feet, 840 meters. My total climbing time for that was 45:21. That works out that I was making 230 watts of useful power for 45 minutes. I really can’t complain too much about that.

Last month, we did a bike tour of the oil fields of Los Angeles. Today’s ride is the second part of our tour of the history of oil in L.A. Today, we visited sites related to Edward Doheny and the Los Angeles City Oil Field.

The route took us downtown to start. We rode through downtown and then headed west on Adams. Then we turned into the Mt. Saint Mary’s Doheny Campus, which is the site of Doheny’s mansion. The guard at the gate didn’t want to let us ride onto the campus to see it. A college campus where bicycles are not allowed? Really? I think that’s absurd. We duly noted his warning, and rode in anyway. The mansion was quite impressive. Apparently, this tract of land used to be a gated community with lots of mansions, but over time, Doheny bought the whole thing, and in the end, he willed it to the college.

The campus is also the site of another oil drilling island, this one the easternmost of the Las Cienegas’ oil field. It had a high wall around it, so it wasn’t obvious, aside from the mechanical sounds and slight oil smell coming from it.

Heading west, we rode to Hancock Park and our snack stop at Noah’s Bagels in Larchmont Village. We saw the puppy we’d met last month there again. He’d grown considerably. After that, we started for home.

We rode east, back toward downtown Los Angeles. Then we headed up to our second stop, which is the last producing oil well in the L.A. City Oil Field. It’s one block east of Alvarado St, in a little fenced-off lot. Word is it produces something like 3.5 barrels of oil a day.

Continuing north into Echo Park, we arrived at the Echo Park Pool. The parking lot there was the site of Edward Doheny’s original well on the City Oil Field. This was the first well dug that produced significant oil from that field, and it set off an oil rush that lasted for many years.

From there, we headed north, passing through Angelino Heights and all the old Victorian mansions there. Then we rode past Dodger Stadium. They had just opened the gates for a game that afternoon. But the traffic wasn’t too bad. We rode through Elysian Park and then home by way of Figueroa St.

It was a nice ride, with some interesting sights.

48 miles.

Here’s the latest installment in my ongoing series, “I’ve never seen one of these break before!”

Yesterday, when I was riding in to work, I noticed that my bike seat felt weird. Like the seatpost was loose. So when I got to the office, I had a look, and I saw that one of the saddle rails had broken. At which point I said, “I’ve never seen one of these break before!”

So when I got home, I replaced the saddle with a spare one I had lying around. So everything is good.

Part one of the series is here: http://www.1134.org/blog/2007/12/30/ive-never-seen-one-of-these-break-before/

Part two is here: http://www.1134.org/blog/2009/03/01/ive-never-seen-one-of-these-break-either/

And part three here: http://www.1134.org/blog/2009/06/15/metal-fatigue-strikes-again/