Stan’s Obligatory Blog

4/10/2013

I’m oddly excited about this

Filed under: — stan @ 9:48 pm

I just heard word that the San Diego Towerthon is on again for this June. I did this last year, and I did pretty well, climbing the 25-story building 17 times in 2 hours.

That evening, I was adding it up, and 17 times up the building totals 5,015 feet climbed. And this planted the seed of an idea. I figured out that 18 times up that building would make a vertical mile. I made this a personal goal, and I finally made my vertical mile stair climb at one of the practice sessions at the Aon building last month. And along the way, I managed to convince several other people to do it, too. It’s a deliberately crazy idea, and I’m a bit surprised that it caught on.

So my goal for the Towerthon this year is to do 18 or more times up the building. That totals 432 floors, 5,310 feet, and 9,108 steps.

How hard could it be?

Vertical Mile stair climb

6 Responses to “I’m oddly excited about this”

  1. G.M. Grena Says:

    Stan, or any other reader who can answer, how do they handle the final lap? For example, if it takes you about 4 minutes, & you begin it after you’ve been climbing 118 minutes, you’ll only be about halfway up for your final lap. Does that lap count, or do they allow you to begin a new lap any time before your 120 minutes elapses, or only the number of whole laps you complete within 120 minutes?

  2. stan Says:

    I asked about this. They said that as long as you get into the stairwell before the 2 hours is up, you get credit for one complete ascent on the lap when your time runs out.

    I think this is a bit silly. And working out ‘partial credit’ really wouldn’t be all that hard. But that’s the way they said they’re going to do it.

  3. G.M. Grena Says:

    Now that you’ve given me a severe case of vertical-mile-itis, I did a trial run on my bicycle up PV today, & was discouraged to find that it’ll take more than twice the time by bike as by stairs. Each Aon lap was about 50 feet/minute, whereas my trial lap was about 25 fpm (1,100 vertical feet in 45 minutes; 3.5 street miles pedaling about 4.5 mph). I was wearing my vest, which I won’t for the full V-mile, but I don’t expect to be able to go much faster. It would be interesting to see how fast you could do it up one of your local northern hills for comparison. The most I’ve ever climbed in a day is about 4,800 feet (PV 4x last year preparing for my first Catalina journey). How about you?

  4. G.M. Grena Says:

    Stan, what’s the story behind the “Elite Sprint” at the Towerthon? You are not listed in last year’s results, but they include people with slow times I know you could’ve beaten. Was it held before you arrived?

  5. stan Says:

    I didn’t do the sprint. I’m not that good at really short events. Also, I’d spent the night at my Dad’s place the night before the race, and I had to ride the bus and train downtown, and I would have had to leave very early to get there in time for that. So I just elected not to do it.

  6. G.M. Grena Says:

    They finally opened the registration! Woo hoo! Guess I’m oddly excited too…

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