Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Today was the first practice session at the Wells Fargo building in downtown Los Angeles. This is the traditional final training staircase before the U.S. Bank stair climb at the end of September. Last month, we were practicing at the 777 Tower, which was a nice building. But because we’d never climbed it before, I couldn’t compare my times from last year.

Tonight, I had tow main goals. First was to do a run for speed up the building, just to get to know the stairs again. And second, I was going to walk up slowly, taking measurements and counting steps so I could make a chart.

When I started up, I quickly found that the staircase is very consistent. It’s a 10/11 configuration with right turns all the way up. The only variation was at the beginning and the end. So I was able to adapt my stepping pattern from the Columbia Center climb. Then the only challenge was paying attention enough to remember to change which leg was leading every five floors. I’d made up a split time card, aiming to be at the top in 9 minutes, but by the time I got to 30, I was a little behind schedule. In the end, I heaved up onto the landing on 55 in 9:28. Not terrible, but not especially good. I think I was distracted.

The second time up, I brought my tape measure and notepad. I’d seen another guy taking notes on the way up the first time, so I guess the idea is taking root. The steps average 7 3/8 inches tall, and there are 1,126 of them to get to the 55th floor. The chart is here:

http://www.1134.org/stan/stairs/wells-fargo-la-stairs.pdf

Now I can work out precise split times for next week. I can also work out how to do the last two floors and not get caught on the wrong foot for the turns. And now I know exactly where the three murals are on the between-floor landings near the top.

It was a good outing.

This Sunday’s bike club ride was yet another celebrity grave tour. Back in February, we’d taken a ride to East L.A. to visit the grave of Lincoln Perry, who, as “Stepin Fetchit“, was the first black movie star. So today we were going to North Hollywood to see Willie Best and Mantan Moreland, who were the other two earliest black movie stars. And as an extra bonus, we got to visit Aneta Corsaut, who was on “The Andy Griffith Show”, but who I always remember as Steve McQueen’s girlfriend in “The Blob“.

On the way out, we found some more topiary in Burbank at Alameda and Victory. I’ll have to add them to the Topiary Tour West route for the future. We also stopped off at the house in Burbank with the giant desert tortoises in the yard. They were very active today. I was glad the camera has a ‘fast action’ mode on it.

When we got to the cemetery, we found Willie Best on the way in. His stone is new, since he was unmarked for many years until Scott Michaels and the Findadeath.com crew arranged to get a stone made for him. He is buried close by to Oliver Hardy. Mantan Moreland and Aneta Corsaut are close together in the far back of the cemetery.

After the cemetery stop, we rode down to Riverside Drive to stop at Priscilla’s Coffee. On the way we saw a sign-painter-fail. The painter had made the sign say, “ABLAMOS ESPAÑOL”, so the had to just paste on the “H” in front of it.

The route back went down the L.A. River bike path, and then home by way of South Pasadena. It was a pleasant ride.

46 miles.

Last night, I was at home when my phone chirped at me. It was a message and a picture from Morgan from work. She had gone to the L.A. County Fair and sent me pictures showing my cookies. The very ones I’d brought in last Tuesday. Apparently, all that development and all those endless test batches I baked paid off. My traditional chocolate chip cookies were 4th in their category, and my chocolate cookies took 1st place.

Woo-hoo!

So here are the recipes:

http://1134.org/recipes/chocolate-cookies-2012.pdf
http://1134.org/recipes/chocolate-chip-cookies-2012.pdf

Today was the last practice at the 777 Tower. Sure, there’s one more on Friday, but that’s at 6AM, and that’s just a bit too early for my taste. So this was my last time for this building. I rode the train there with Chris and Nick, we got signed in, and then we were ready to climb.

We weren’t the first in the stairwell today. A fair number of people went ahead of us. But we managed to catch and pass nearly all of them on the way up. I used the same split times card from Monday, and I managed to keep up with it until about 30. That’s about where Chris and Nick fell off the pace. It’s always easier to maintain speed when there’s someone nipping at my heels. This time, I also remembered about the extra step from 35 to 36, so I didn’t get caught on the wrong foot. And in the end, I ran up the last two floors and flopped down on the 50th floor landing. When I looked at my watch, I had 8:22. A bit slower than on Monday, but still my second-best time for this building. Can’t complain about that.

We went up a second time, which is good for mental discipline, if nothing else. All the way up, I wanted to ask Chris, “what idiot thought it was a good idea to climb this thing again?”. But I didn’t, since I knew it was my idea. Still, I made it up the second time in 9:41. I guess that’s all right.

Now we get a little break until next Wednesday, when we go back to the Wells Fargo building on Bunker Hill. That will be interesting, since I have my practice times from the last two years there recorded. Then I’ll get a better idea of how I’m doing this season.

Ad astra…

Today was the day that I had to submit my cookies and recipes to the L.A. County Fair for the baking contest. I came home a bit early and started baking. Sadly, the heat wave we always seem to get in time for the county fair came right on schedule, and it was not much fun standing around in the kitchen with the hot oven.

I made two batches of cookies, one of each of the two recipes I’m entering this year. When they came out, I taste-tested one of each for quality control purposes. Truth be told now, I’m pretty sick of these cookies, since I’ve made so many test batches over the past few months. So I kind of had to choke them down. But they came out all right, and I picked out the six best-looking ones from each batch to enter in the contest. I put them in a little box, and headed out to the fair.

The fair is open from 3 to 7 for everyone to bring in their baked things for judging. I got there about 5, and you can see from the picture that the big tables they have set up are nowhere near full yet. But I know that they will be by the end. Los Angeles County is big, and there are a lot of entries in the fair. I put my cookies in, got my receipt, and headed home. They told me that the judging is done first thing the next day. So it’s a good thing I paid so much attention to making sure my cookies were still good more than 24 hours out of the oven.

So that’s this year’s baking contest story.

…but this is great.

Today was yet another practice climb at the 777 Tower in downtown Los Angeles. And again, I did new best time. There’s nothing not to like about that.

As always, I rode the train there after work. It’s so easy and pleasant. I got there a few minutes early, got signed in and ready to climb. This time, I went first into the stairwell. Everyone else there at the time said I would pass them, so they said I should go first. So I started up. By the time I was at 7 or 8, there was a guy catching up behind me. He came up right behind me at about 10, so I stepped to the side and asked if he wanted to pass. And he sort of croaked out, “I’m just trying to keep up with you”, so I went back to the inside and kept going. He shadowed me up to about 20 before he fell off the pace.

I’d made up a card of split times aiming to be at the top by 8:10. I was on schedule at 10 and 20, but by 30 I was a couple seconds off. I also noticed one odd thing. from 30 to 40 I altered my normal stepping pattern in order to switch which leg was doing more work. And at 36, I suddenly found myself hitting the landing on the wrong foot. So the second flight between 35 and 36 had an extra step in it. I had to do a quick adjustment to get back on track, and I made a mental note to pay attention to that the next time up.

When I got to 40, I was still a few seconds behind schedule, but I could see that I still had a chance at a good time. I started to wind it up at about 46, picking up the pace a bit, and at 48, I started a full-on sprint. I ran the last two floors, and then did the traditional face-plant on the 50th floor landing. When I looked at my watch, I saw that I’d done an 8:19, which is a good four seconds faster than my previous best time. And I realized later that this marks the first time I’ve gone under 10 seconds per floor for a large building climb.

After just a few minutes rest, I rode the elevator down and headed up again. The second time, I was planning on going slower. I paid attention, and I saw that, while most of the building is 23 steps per floor, divided into 12/11 flights, from 35 to 36 and from 45 to 46 are both 12/12. So I have to correct my chart for this building. Even going slower, the second time is a lot more painful than the first. Still, I made it to the top in 9:38, which works out to about 11.2 seconds per floor. The first couple races I did, back in 2009, I averaged about 12 seconds per floor, and I felt like I was gonna die! So doing 11.2 when I’m not particularly trying to go fast shows just how much I’ve improved in this insane little sport.

Overall, it was a fun evening.

Tuesday is the day I have to submit my cookies and recipes for the L.A. County Fair. So, in honor of the occasion, I wanted to take the bike group for a ride out to and around the fairgrounds in Pomona. I made up batches of both cookie recipes to bring along to share.

In the morning, I was faced with the essential problem that a road bike is just not a good cargo vehicle. But I managed to figure out a way, using a small cardboard box, a rubber band, and some masking tape. I figured that as long as I didn’t hit any big bumps, it would be fine.

The ride out was pretty uneventful. Until we got to Covina. I noticed that my back wheel was way out of true, to the point that it was rubbing on the frame. So I stopped and got out my spoke wrench to true it back up. But when I looked at it, I saw that one of the spokes had pulled right out of the rim, and there was no fixing that with just a spoke wrench. So I fiddled with the spokes around the bad one to get the wheel straight enough to ride, and then I got ready to head home.

The plan had been to break out the cookies at our snack stop. But I wasn’t going to make it that far. So we found a Starbucks a couple blocks from where we were and we had a cookie-tasting. I’m pretty happy with how those recipes turned out.

After the impromptu stop, the group continued on the route. And John and I headed back to Pasadena, taking care not to put too much stress on the wounded wheel.

I hate it when things break like this. And this has happened before, and not that long ago.

38 miles.

Today was yet another trip to downtown to climb the 777 Tower. I was hoping to possibly beat my time from last week, but in reality, if I came anywhere close to it, I’d be happy.

We had a big group from the office going downtown today. We rode the train, and, as usual, it was a pleasant trip. The LED-crawl signs in the Metro stations told us about the upcoming phase-out of paper tickets for the train, so we got to all weigh in on how stupid we think the TAP card system is.

We got to the building a few minutes early, got signed in, and we were in the first group up the stairs. I used my same set of split times from last week today. I made it to 10 and 20 a few seconds ahead of schedule. At 30 and 40, I was about 5 seconds behind. I put on a burst of speed from about 46 to 50, and I made it to the top in 8:28. That’s 5 seconds slower than last week, but still in the same ballpark, so I’m happy with that.

When NIck got to the top, he hammed it up for the camera a bit. We got some souvenir pictures on 50, and then we headed back down to do it again. Chris was right behind Nick, and Morgan was along just about a minute later. Looking down the stair shaft, I could see her glove on the railing. And Karina made it up the stairs too, which is not bad for a first-timer. She’s come with us to Millikan at Caltech, but that’s only 10 stories. This was her first time doing a big building.

The second time up, I planned on taking it easy. Chris shadowed me all the way up until about 45. That’s when another guy passed us, and I decided I was going to race him the rest of the way up. In the end, I got 9:53, which is not too bad for just loafing on the stairs.

It was a good outing.

This Sunday’s bike club ride was another art excursion. This time, we rode to the garden in front of the Fisher Art Museum at USC to see Blacklist. This is an art installation about the Hollywood Blacklist from the days of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the late 1940s and early ’50s.

It’s been hot all week, so I thought that going down into Los Angeles might be a bit cooler than Pasadena. So we rode down Huntington Drive and into downtown L.A. From there, we followed alongside the new Metro Expo line down to USC, where we pulled in to the garden in front of the museum. We spent a little time there, walking around and reading all the quotes carved into the stones. On one hand, it’s hard to believe that such things happened in the United States. But on the other hand, a lot of the things they were saying back then are the same things we hear today, only with the word “communism” replaced by “terrorism”.

After taking in the art, we rode out a bit on West Adams, and then north to Larchmont, where we stopped for bagels at Noah’s. Then it was home by way of Silver Lake. The ride back to Pasadena trends uphill, and the temperature went up right along with the elevation. But it was still a fun ride.

44 miles.

Last year, we came to the Nisei Week Festival in Little Tokyo to see the gyoza eating contest. And it was both hilarious and horrifying. So of course, we had to come back again this year. And this year, the number-one ranked eater in the world, Joey Chestnut was going to be there. Last year’s winner, Pat Bertoletti, and also the number-two ranked eater was also there.

There was lots of fanfare before the actual contest started. As they did last year, they had one seat in the contest up for auction to benefit the Nisei Week Festival. This time, there was fierce competition for it, and the winner paid $400 to sit in the last seat. He said he was from Australia, and he’d done some eating contests there, so he wanted to try this one.

When the contest started, it was quite a spectacle. Bulging cheeks, chomping jaws, and everyone doing the little body wiggle that apparently helps the food to pack down better into their stomachs. Looking at their faces, it’s pretty plain that they’re doing something difficult and painful. In many ways, athletics are all about pushing the limits of the human body, and I suppose stuffing massive quantities of food into it is just another limit to be pushed.

This time, nobody suffered a ‘reversal of fortune‘. When time was called, everyone stood up and finished swallowing the last of what they’d stuffed in their mouths. And then the judges counted plates and tabulated the results. In the end, Joey Chestnut had won and set a new record with 264 gyoza in ten minutes.

As I said, it was both hilarious and horrifying. And that makes it a must-see in my book.