Stan’s Obligatory Blog

We have a new dog staying with us. She’s been here for about a week now, and she’s been getting into some trouble. Today, she found the cracked board at the bottom of the driveway gate, and somehow managed to break off the cracked part and get out through the hole. I was impressed by this, since I didn’t think she’d even fit through that hole, but both dogs got out and were running around the neighborhood when I got home from work. Suzie came running back when she saw me coming home, but I had to chase Sadie down and bring her back. Then I locked them in the house while I patched the hole as best I could do on such short notice. I’m reasonably sure she won’t be able to get through that any time soon.

Today was another practice at the Aon building in downtown Los Angeles. I wanted to practice my footwork for changing which leg was the lead on the first and third major portions of the stairway. I also wanted to do some more counting, since I want to know the actual count of steps.

As always, I rode the train there. When I got there, I did one thing differently this time. Before starting up, I followed Theodore down the stairway to the ground floor. He started his run from there, but I just walked it and counted steps. It’s 82 steps from the ground up to the 4th floor where the main stairway begins.

At the mechanical floors where the stairs reverse direction, I paid attention again, and there are exactly two floors that are different from the standard 22 steps per floor. Those are on 22 and 42, and they are both 24 steps. Aside from that, it’s 22 steps per floor all the way up to 60.

If you look at the picture of the building on the Glass Steel and Stone web site, you can see two dark floors. Those are the mechanical floors at 22 and 42. I counted the windows to be sure that those are the right numbers.

When I got to 56, I looked at my watch, and it said 9:30. So I knew I wasn’t going to break any records today, but I was on track for a good time anyway. I managed to put on a little sprint from 57 to 60 before doing the traditional face-plant in the hallway. After a few minutes, I had a look at my watch, and it said 10:05. Five seconds slower than my best time so far. Not bad.

On the train home, I did some math, since I now have accurate step counts from the ground all the way to the roof door above 62. And here’s the story:

82 steps from BL to 4
22 x 56 = 1,232 steps from 4 to 60
4 extra because the mechanical floors at 22 and 42 have 24 steps
24 from 60 to 61
28 from 61 to 62
10 up to the roof door
——
1380

Right off, this means that the published count of 1,377 steps for the whole climb is wrong. It’s close, but not quite right. I think the actual count will be just shy of 1,400. I wrote to Vanessa at the Lung Association, and she’s going to try and find out how long that last flight after the roof door is.

This started me wondering if the step counts on other climbs are also inaccurate. The U.S. Bank Tower climb is said to be 1,500 steps. But that building was built in 1989, and since about 1980, the building code has specified that steps are 7 inches. Doing some math:

1500 x 7 = 10500 inches
10500 / 12 = 875 feet

The U.S. Bank Tower is 1,018 feet tall. We climb to within about 8 or 10 feet of that level, since the finish line is just below the helipad on the roof. So clearly it has to be substantially more than 1500 steps.

So that’s my stair-geek story for the day. And on the way home, I saw a funny electrician’s truck. “Shock-a-Doodle Doo! Don’t let this happen to you!”

Since it rained on Saturday, and the forecast called for rain on Monday, I thought it was prudent to plan for the possibility of rain on Sunday. So the Sunday bike ride was the route that goes 42 miles through Los Angeles, but never is more than two miles from the nearest Metro Rail station. That way, we have a bailout option if the weather decides to go bad on us.

We rode downtown by way of Huntington Drive and Mission Road, and we passed by the little street that I’d seen a few weeks ago when I was out riding with Carla. We’d noticed that there was a little street called “Supreme Court”, and we thought that was funny. But at the time, we failed to noticed that the next street was “Superior Court”. I suspect that this was not a coincidence.

We rode through downtown Los Angeles, so we stopped off at LAPD headquarters to have a look at the “Three Weeks in January” art installation that we’d seen last week. As we expected, there were more reported rapes plotted on the map.

Continuing through downtown, we saw the crazy guy on the bike we’d seen last week. He was riding down Spring St yelling.

When we got to one of the turns on the route, we came around the corner and found a very large fallen-over tree blocking our way. But that was all right. It meant that the traffic on that street was going to be less than usual, so that’s not a bad thing.

Our stop was at Noah’s Bagels in Larchmont Village. There was a very cute tiny dog on the table next to us.

We rode back through Silver Lake, and then up Figueroa St through Highland Park. It never did rain, but we stayed on the route so that we were never far from a Metro Rail station. All told, it was a good ride.

42 miles.

Last week, I saw a review of “Pulp Shakespeare“. This is a play that is a ‘re-imagining’ of “Pulp Fiction“, if it had been written by William Shakespeare. It had been years since I’d seen “Pulp Fiction”, but this sounded amusing. And since we’d seen “Hamlet” and “The Merry Wives of Windsor” last summer, we were relatively ‘up’ on our Shakespeare. So I got tickets, and we sat down and watched the movie again before going. And yes, it was truly hilarious. All the dialogue had been reworked into faux-Shakespeare, and they worked in a lot of well-known Shakespeare quotes in the mix. But the story and characters were pure “Pulp Fiction”. They even adapted the music, so the show had a lot of the same music, but reworked into an appropriate style to maintain the 16th-Century Elizabethan feeling.

All told, it was a great show, and I recommend it highly. We may have to go back again before it closes.

This is so consistent that it’s getting a little creepy. We’re three weeks into stair practice at the Aon building for this year’s stair climb. And every week, the same two things happen:

• On Tuesday, I beat my previous best time by an average of seven seconds;
• On Thursday, I go two seconds slower than I did on Tuesday.

This has happened three weeks in a row now, and I find it remarkable that it’s so consistent. On the other hand, I find it very hard to visualize taking seven seconds off my time every week from now until the end of March. That would have me doing the practice in 8:50 on the Tuesday before the race. And that would put me at a pace that’s just not something I think is possible. So my streak is going to end. But let’s see if I can keep it going for a couple more weeks. That would be really great.

Once again, I spent the whole train ride downtown dreading what I was about to do. But I had a useful mental diversion this time. I’d worked out a way to switch leading legs on the first and third major portions of the stairs. This is the part where there is about 16 stories in a row of 22 steps per floor, divided into two 11-step flights. This works out to five double steps and one single on each flight, and 12 footfalls per floor. This means that the left and right leg are working in a 6:5 ratio, and that unevenness builds up after a few floors. So I’ve been doing a little skip-step every few floors to switch which leg starts off, so as to even out the load. But today, I wanted to try a new scheme that I thought might be a bit smoother and not break my rhythm. The plan for today was to switch legs on every even-numbered floor. I figured that would be easy to remember. Normally, my rule is that if I do a single step onto the landing, then I pivot and start the next flight with a double. And if I do a double onto the landing, I start the next flight with a single. The difference this time is that I was going to reverse that on every even-numbered floor. On those floors, if I did a single onto the landing, I turned and started off with a single. And if I did a double, I did a little reach and started the next flight with a double. This had the effect of switching which leg was doing the two singles per floor. I got confused a couple of times on the way up, but I think with a little practice, I can probably do this without having to think too hard. And I did notice that it helped a lot to even out the load on each leg.

I also paid attention to the mechanical floors again. This time, I only counted two that had more than the standard 22 steps. Just from 22 to 23 and 42 to 43 were 24 step each. The others were all 22.

All this thinking about stepping patterns and such really helped to keep my mind off the usual “What-the-HELL-was-I-thinking-doing-this-again”. This was a good thing. when I got to 57, I looked at my watch and saw 9:40, and I knew I was on track for a good time. So I managed to put on a little burst of speed to make it to 60 and do my usual face-plant on the floor. But when I looked at my watch, it said 10:01.72, which is only 0.02 seconds off being exactly two seconds slower than on Tuesday.

Remarkable. But I’m not complaining one bit. This is great!

It’s practice time at the Aon building in downtown Los Angeles, and like I’ve been saying a lot lately, “this is great!”

I was really not looking forward to this today. But I didn’t want to miss the chance to practice on the actual stairs where we will be racing in March. So I figured that I’d use this chance to pay attention some more to the layout of the stairs, and practice switching leads on the first and third sections of the stairway to balance the loading on each leg.

I paid close attention this time, and I realized that in the practice climb from 4 to 60, there are only three floors that are larger than the standard of 22 steps per floor. They are from 21 to 22 and from 41 to 43. Those three are 24 steps, where all the others are 22. It’s interesting how I’d noticed that the mechanical floors were larger than the standard, but at the same time, they seemed like they were a lot bigger. Two extra steps per floor really isn’t all that much. I think the illusion comes from the fact that from 20 to 24 and 40 to 44 the steps change and go from counter-clockwise to clockwise. So each of those interludes feels like one big floor, even though its actually several individual floors.

This also allows me to compute the number of steps in the practice climb:

56 x 22 = 1,232
1,232 + 6 = 1,238 steps
1,238 x 7.5 = 9285
9285 / 12 = 774 feet of climbing

Knowing the layout of the stairs has helped me to sort of mentally break up the climb into smaller chunks, which makes it easier to deal with.

So today, I was just going up the stairs, not really trying to set a blazing pace. I noticed that on the first section that it only took about four or five floors before I noticed that one leg was working much harder than the other. So I remembered to do a little stutter-step about every four floors to switch which leg was leading. That was also a useful mental diversion.

When I got to 50, I had a quick look at my watch and saw that I was on track for a good time. So I kept going, and managed to put on a little burst of speed from 57 to 60. I stumbled out of the stairs and flopped on the floor. When I looked at my watch, it said 9:59.74. This is the first time I’ve been under 10 minutes for this climb, although by the rules I’ve established, I really have to round that to an even 10 minutes. Still, this is 10 seconds faster than my previous best that I did last week. Nothing not to like there.

Working out my power production gives:

9285 x 2.54 = 236 meters
236 x 77 x 9.8 = 178,086 joules
178,086 / 600 = 297 watts
297 watts = 0.398 horsepower

Not too bad.

On the train home, I worked out another possible way to switch leading legs between floors. One that will not require any fancy footwork. I’m going to try that out on Thursday.

This is great!

Since today is a holiday, Kathleen and I went over to LACMA to see “California Design, 1930–1965: Living in a Modern Way“. We’d seen a little bit of this last fall when we saw the Tim Burton exhibit, and we’d been meaning to come back to see it.

We went there a bit early, just on general principles, and that turned out to be a good thing. Today was a Target Free Holiday Monday, so the museum was free, and it was packed. Still, we had a good time looking at all the odd objects in the exhibit, from the Airstream trailer that looked like an aluminum lucha libre mask, to a 1938 digital clock. We also saw a propaganda poster that looks just like things we see today, an original 1959 Barbie doll, and a video with Walt Disney demonstrating how a nuclear bomb works with mouse traps and ping-pong balls. It was a weird assemblage of stuff.

After that, we wandered around the rest of the museum. We went looking for Magritte, since I like surrealism. We also saw the big “Metropolis II” installation. That had little cars and trains zooming around the giant model city. It was kind of hypnotizing to watch, although it was kind of loud.

It was a fun afternoon.

On Friday, the L.A. Times had an article about “Three Weeks in January“, which is an art installation on the wall outside LAPD headquarters in downtown Los Angeles. It’s the brainchild of Suzanne Lacy, who originally created it in 1977 to raise awareness of rape in Los Angeles. The installation features a map of the city, with reported rape cases plotted, as well as a continuous storytelling soundtrack with people telling their rape stories. It’s all rather disturbing and haunting, which I guess is the point. So of course, when I saw this, I thought it would make for an interesting riding destination for Sunday morning.

It was kind of cold and cloudy, with the forecast saying there was a slight chance of rain. But the route we were taking is one that is never more than about 2 miles from the nearest Metro Rail station, so we had a bailout plan, if it became necessary.

We took the direct way downtown, down Huntington Drive and Main St. We stopped off to look at the art project for a bit before continuing on through downtown. Looking back, we got a good view of all the skyscrapers, and Jeff and I both took a moment to remember all the pain of climbing the stairs in all those buildings. Then we turned on Adams to head west for a bit. It started to rain a bit then, but it was very light, and it only went on for about 10 minutes. So we just kept on going.

I found a little back way from West Adams up to Larchmont. It was a little roundabout, but the streets were quiet, and we had lights to cross all of the major streets, so it worked well. Our snack stop was at Noah’s Bagels in Larchmont.

The route home went up Benton Way in Silver Lake, which is a nice, steep little hill. Always fun. Then we rode across the L.A. River and up Eagle Rock Blvd. That was when Silvio started having trouble with his chain skipping. We stopped to try to adjust it a bit, but in the end, it turned out that one of the pins was coming loose, and the chain was about to break. So he had to ride very carefully the rest of the way. He managed to make it up the Colorado hill, and after that, he turned off to go visit a bike shop.

It was a pleasant ride.

41 miles.

Since I had to take Lucinda to art class after work today, I went downtown at lunchtime to do the Aon building practice climb. On Tuesday, I’d done my best time yet, as well as made some useful observations about the stairs and how to climb them more efficiently. So today I wanted to try implementing those ideas and see what happened.

At the beginning, I experimented with doing a quick stutter-step on each main floor landing to switch which leg was leading off on each floor. But this quickly turned out to be too much trouble. So I fell back to switching sides about every five floors. That’s long enough to start to notice that one leg is working harder than the other, so it’s a good time to switch.

The stairs change at floor 20, but it turns out that it’s still 22 steps to get to 21. The mechanical floor starts just above 21, so from 21 to 24, it’s 24 steps between floors. There’s also a short hallway, and several fire doors. Those will be propped open on race day, so they don’t cause much trouble.

On the middle section with the wide landings from 24 to 41, I deliberately took an extra quick step on most of the landings to switch which leg led off on every floor. I figured this wasn’t a problem, since I had to cross the big landing anyway, and I can do it with one long step or two short quick steps, and the time is about the same.

When I got to 50, I took a look at my watch, and it said something like 8:30, so I knew I was pretty much on the same pace as on Tuesday. I was hoping to beat my time today, and I managed to pull out a little sprint from 57 to 60. But after I finished gasping for air and looked at my watch, I saw that I’d gone two seconds slower. Still, that’s not terribly significant here. I’m pretty consistently doing times that seemed impossible last year.

As I find myself saying a lot these days, “there’s nothing not to like about that.”

It’s Tuesday, and that means stair practice at the Aon building in downtown L.A. As always, I rode the train there, and as always, I was dreading it all the way there.

I got to the building and signed in. Then I went to the stair entrance on the 4th floor to get ready. I had decided that I was going to try to be more conscious of the steps today, and try to see how much larger the mechanical floor are, as compared to regular office floors. I figured that would give me something else to think about besides, “What the HELL was I thinking coming here and doing this again.”

This building was built in the early ’70s, and the steps are 7.5 inches each. Regular office floors have 22 steps between them. For most of the building, these are in the form of two 11-step stairways with a landing and 180-degree turn between them. I’ve worked out how to do the ‘one foot on the landing’ turns, so each 11-step flight is basically six footfalls, twelve for one floor. And I noticed that that means that if I start off with my right foot, the fact that it’s an even number of footfalls per floor means that I’ll always be starting off on my right foot. But because it’s two flights, each with an odd number of steps, there’s double steps, with one single at the end of each flight. And it worked out that the single step was always on the same leg. In practical terms, that means that of the 22 steps I have to lift my body for each floor, one leg is doing 12 of them, and the other leg is doing 10. And that difference adds up after 10 or 20 floors. So I figured out to do a little stutter-step about every five floors, so that I’d switch which leg was leading and having to do more work. This may have helped even out the load on each leg. In any event, it kept my mind occupied and thinking about something other than how much all this stair climbing hurts.

I also noticed one other thing about this. The middle portion of the building, from 24 to 41 is a bit different. There are still 22 steps per floor, but they are divided up with 10 steps, a landing with a 90-degree left turn, three steps, another landing, and then 9 steps up to the next floor. So the landings on the floors are big, and there’s no way to do a pivot turn. You pretty much have to take an extra step. But because it’s easy to do double steps with 90-degree turns, it ends up being the same 12 footfalls for each floor. But one of those footfalls is a non-climbing one on the big landing. And so you end up with 11 climbing steps per floor, six on one leg, and five on the other. And if you don’t do a stutter-step every few floors, one leg is doing significantly more work than the other. And that’s bad for business.

The other thing I wanted to pay attention to was the mechanical floors. These are where they keep the elevator motors, air conditioning blowers, and other such things. I’ve always had a sense that these floors are a little taller than regular floors. So I counted steps when I got to the first one at 20. And it turned out that from 20 to 24, the floors were 24 steps apart. That’s not a huge difference, but it is a little bit more. And the mechanical floors from 41 to 45 were also 24 steps each.

The top of the practice climb is at 60, and I stumbled out of the stairwell and flopped down on the floor. I was very pleased to see that my time was 10:10, which is a full 8 seconds faster than my previous best time.

After recovering for a bit, I walked up the stairs the rest of the way to the roof door, just to see how many steps there were. It was 24 steps to 61, and 28 to 62. Then there were 10 steps more to the roof door. After that, there’s just the last flight up to the roof, and I didn’t open the door to count them, since the guards at the building have been very nice to us, and I don’t want to cause trouble. But that last flight is probably something like 12 or 16 steps.

And that’s my report from the stairwell. Back to you in the studio…