Stan’s Obligatory Blog

This week, I happened on the featured grave of the week at cemeteryguide.com. It was Sally Rand, former silent movie star and burlesque performer who is famous for her fan dance. It said she is buried in the cemetery in Glendora, so I knew where we were going this Sunday.

It was kind of chilly, but not a bad day for riding. We had a small group, but that’s pretty normal when it gets colder. We headed out to the east. We saw a lot of storm damage in Arcadia, and a little in Monrovia. In Azusa, we saw one sign blown over, but that was the end of it.

In Glendora, we stopped at Classic Coffee. We were just sitting down when Carla rolled up. She had been about 5 minutes late to the start, and she’d been chasing us all the way there. We had coffee and snacks, all the time wishing that our table was about 10 feet west and out of the shade of the building.

Continuing on, we came to Oakdale Memorial Park. Apparently, they don’t get a lot of tourist traffic there. I had to go into the office and they had to look up where Sally is buried. It took them a few minutes to find, but I came out with a little map marked to tell us how to get there. So now I have yet another entry for my graves gallery. We had neglected to bring fans, so Carla made do with the map and two route slips to demonstrate the basics of the fan dance.

Our sightseeing mission accomplished, we headed home. It was a nice ride.

42 miles.

It turned into a very nice day today, and I had a few hours free, so I went riding.

I’d seen the yard-Grinch in Arcadia before, but he’s always appropriate around this time of year.

There wasn’t any parade today, and no marching bands chanting about wanting fried chicken.

Ever since the storm, crews have been going around cutting up and carting away the fallen trees. I’d wondered briefly what they were doing with all that stuff, and when I rode by the Rose Bowl I found out. They had a tremendous pile of sticks and leaves and branches. There was a front-end loader scooping up batches of stuff and dropping it into the hopper of an enormous grinder. This was followed by BIG NOISE, and then ground-up stuff came spewing out the other side. There were a lot of pine and eucalyptus trees damaged in the storm, so the ground-up stuff smelled pretty good.

I saw they had part of the road closed for filming near JPL. It’s on the part of the road where it’s like a little freeway for about 1/2 mile. The guy at the barricades said they were filming a commercial.

The wallabies weren’t out today. But I did see the remains of the biggest fallen tree I’ve seen from the storm last week.

30 miles.

Yesterday, one of the neighbors pointed out this tree across the street from my house. It’s been leaning like that for longer than the 16 years I’ve been living here, and I’ve seen it go through lots of wind storms over the years. But this time it seems to have sustained major damage in last week’s wind storm. Check out how the trunk of the tree is cracked.

I put up my holiday decorations.

This Sunday’s bike club ride was the Random Ride to Whittier. I figured that going south would get us out of the area of destruction from last Wednesday’s wind storm.

We saw a little bit of destruction on the way out of Pasadena, but after that it was all right. The bike path by Whittier Narrows Dam had a big sign saying it was closed, but we saw people riding on it, so we just tried it out. And it was fine. We were able to get through to where we wanted to go, so I don’t know what the problem was.

I was too slow with the camera to get a picture of the guy on the skateboard being pulled by two dogs. Sort of a SoCal version of the Iditarod. I did get the guys riding on the motorized skateboards. But I still don’t get what the purpose was of the row of sandbags on the edge of the river.

We had to take a small detour in Arcadia where the road was closed and a crew was fixing the overhead wires. But we went around it and made it to our snack stop at Merengue in Monrovia.

It was a pleasant ride.

45 miles

It’s December, and time for the second edition of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation’s Climb for Life. This is yet another charity skyscraper stair climb. And of course, I had to be there, along with Kathleen, Lucinda, and all our stair climbing friends.

The venue was the Wilshire-Figueroa building in downtown Los Angeles. It’s only a 53-story building, which is rather modest by our standards, but it’s still hard enough to climb. So far this year, I’d been going slightly faster in practice runs than last year, so I was going in to this with (relatively) high hopes.

At last year’s event, They didn’t have a photographer in the stairwell to capture the pain and suffering, so I’d talked to Chanda from CFF about this, and she said I could arrange for something. I put out a call on the Light Chasers photography mailing list, asking if there was anyone who wanted to try their hand at this. In the end, three guys showed up. One took pictures around the start and in the lobby of the building, one was on the 21st floor landing, and one was on the big landing at 49, right below the finish line on 51. I figured that that would make for good pictures.

When it was time to go, I made sure to go to the back of the line of the ‘elite’ climbers. I wanted some people to pass, since that helps me to get motivated. Usually, when I finish a climb like this, I have no memory of the people taking pictures, but this time I was actually aware of them, since I’d arranged for them to be there, and I knew where they would be. At 21, I remember Norman leaning in to take a picture as I went by, and I remember thinking it was odd that he was shooting with just the dim ambient light in the stairwell. At 49, I saw the flash of Luther’s camera, but I don’t recall seeing him as I went by.

I managed to put on something of a final sprint from 49 to 51, and I stumbled out of the stairs with a time of 8:33. This was all right. It was a full 9 seconds faster than my race time last year, and it was essentially equivalent to my best practice time this year. I waited on 51 until Lucinda came out, and then I waited a bit more until Kathleen got there.

When we got back down, they were posting the results. They updated them several times as more people finished, and in the end it was time for the awards. My 8:33 was good for 11th overall out of 180 runners, and I was 3rd in the 50-59 age group. Lucinda’s time of 15:14 was good for 3rd in the 19 and under group.

After everything wrapped up, we joined the whole West Coast Labels stair climbing group for lunch at Bottega Louie.

It was a fun time.

The pictures from the 21st floor are here: http://www.nsapc.com/climb/
The photos on the 49th floor are here: http://www.1134.org/gallery/main.php/v/stairclimbing/cff2011/

And the full race results are here

This has all been covered other places, but here are a few random pictures from Thursday morning, December 1 in Pasadena. It’s fortunately not often that I step outside in the morning and think that my street looks like a war zone.

Today was the last day for stair practice before the race this Saturday. I’m over being sick last week, so this was my last chance to improve on my time.

I rode the train downtown as always. When I got there, there was a good crowd there for the climb. I decided to try an experiment and go a little faster from the start. This worked out pretty well. It didn’t hurt appreciably more, and when I got to 25, I took a look at my watch and saw that I was making good time.

When I got to the ‘petting zoo’ on 49, I looked at my watch and then did my best to put on a burst of speed for the last two floors. I ran up and over the finish line, and then flopped down on the floor. Ow. But I made it. My time was 8:32, which is 10 seconds faster than my race time from last year, and 9 seconds faster than my previous best practice time.

This is good.

After this, a few of us went up again, not trying for speed. We walked up, and Mark showed us his technique for turning on the landings, and how to avoid wasted steps. The second time up, it took us about 12 minutes, including stopping to watch Mark do the turns.

All in all, it was a good practice session, and I think I’m ready to race.

It’s the last Sunday of the month, so it’s time for our ‘longer’ Sunday ride. This time, I didn’t have any particular inspiration for weird sightseeing, so we just rode out to Claremont. It was a nice day for riding, aside from a slight headwind all the way there.

When we got there, we went to Le Pain Quotidien for our snack stop. While we were there, I had a look at the bronze sculptures in the fountains outside.

Fortunately, the wind didn’t die out, so it kept going to give us a nice tail wind on the way back. That combined with the 1% downgrade on Gladstone St to make for a fun trip back.

Silvio got a flat on the way back. His tire just failed, and it did it in a way that made a noise that I’ve never heard a bicycle tire make in all my years of riding. Fortunately, Carla had some tire boots, so we were able to piece it back together enough to make it back to Pasadena.

When I got home, I had 56 1/2 miles, so I rode around the block once just to get to 57. It was a nice ride.

57 miles

I spent a good deal of the last three days sick. And there was a practice climb today at the Wilshire-Figueroa building. These things are fairly rare, so I didn’t want to miss it. But at the same time, all the way downtown on the train, I was haunted by the thought that doing this right on the heels of being sick was a bad idea. So in the end, I decided I’d just approach it as another opportunity to get acquainted with the staircase there.

I wasn’t planning on trying to go particularly fast. I figured I’d just pick a pace that felt sustainable, and just climb to the top and see what happened. I got there on time this time, and there was a good group of people there to do it. I let them all go ahead of me. I like having people to pass. It’s a good distraction from the fact that stair climbing is the single hardest and most painful thing I’ve ever done. Passing people helps me forget that. I figure, no matter how much it hurts, if I just passed someone, it must hurt even more for them, because they just got passed.

I realize that not everyone approaches this with the same competitive attitude I have, but it’s a useful fiction to help me go faster.

So I ground my way up the stairs. I passed most of the people who started ahead of me. And when I got to the big landing with the sort of ‘petting zoo’ on 49, I looked at my watch, and it said 8:11. I was pleasantly surprised by this, and I put on a burst of speed for the last two floors, since I knew I had a shot at beating my previous best time.

In the end, my time was 8:41, which was equal to my previous best. I was doing this on the tail end of being sick, so just going that fast is really pretty good. I really can’t complain about this at all. And there’s one more practice run before the race. Next Tuesday, I have one more chance to beat my time.