Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Lucinda is taking basic ice skating lessons. She said she wants to try speed skating. So I told her she needs to learn basic skating technique first. Once she’s comfortable on the ice, I’ll take her to one of the speed skating clubs here in L.A. They have skates available for kids to try, and I’ll dust off my speed skates, too. It would be fun to do it again. Back in my bike racing days, I used to skate with my other bike friends during the winter. It was fun, and it would be interesting to try it again, and possibly even to try competing.

So this could be an interesting adventure.

Today was the last practice run for the Aon Tower stair climb on the 24th. There was a good group there this time. I rode the train in from Pasadena, which makes going downtown really easy.

I set my metronome for 75 beats per minute this time. This is 4% faster than my climb on Monday. I think I’ve about found my limit now. I was able to keep pace with it up to about the 45th floor. The last 15 up to the 60th floor were pretty painful. But I made it up in 10:28, which is my fastest time yet. So I think on race day I’m going to maybe set it for 74. Just back off a slight bit, since the real climb is six stories more than the practice.

I guess this means I’m ready.

This weeks is Spring Break for Pasadena schools. Apparently, this is later than all the other school districts in southern California. This worked out well for us, since it meant that this week was not in the blackout period for our friend Mike’s Disneyland pass. So yesterday we went down there and met up with him in front of the gates. He let us in with his pass and turned us loose as he headed back to work.

We went to California Adventure first. We rode the Golden Zephyr, which was entertaining, since the wind was picking up, and it was close to the level of wind that would close that ride down. After that, we went on the Jellyfish ride, and then the Mulholland Madness roller coaster. We looked at the line for Toy Story Mania and decided it was too long. So we went and had lunch instead. Then it was time to go Soarin’.

Now it was time for the Main Event. We walked across to Disneyland and headed straight for Space Mountain. The sign said the wait was about 20 minutes, so we stopped and picked up Fast Passes and then went to wait in the line. We rode the ride, and when we got out, we had only 15 minutes before we could use our passes to go back in. So we walked over to Star Tours, which had no line at all. We rode that and then went back to Space Mountain for a second time.

Next, we walked over to Big Thunder Mountain. Again, we picked up Fast Passes and then waited in the not-very-long line. The ride was fun, as always. When we got out, we had about a half-hour before we could go back. So we went over to the Matterhorn and found it closed for maintenance. They said it would be open on Saturday, but that was too long to wait. Instead, we went back for some old favorites: Pirates and the Haunted Mansion. After that, we went back to Thunder Mountain and found it closed for repair.

At this point, we needed to do something different, so we went to Toontown and rode the Go Coaster. This is a relatively tame ride now, but it was Lucinda’s first roller coaster. Then we went back to Tomorrowland so the girls could drive the cars at Autopia. But along the way, we stopped and picked up some more Fast Passes for Space Mountain. So after they finished driving we went back and rode for the third time.

We went back and checked and found Thunder Mountain was open again, so we used our passes and rode it again. By that time, it was starting to get late. I said we had time for one more ride, and the girls said they wanted to ride Space Mountain again. So I told them we could go back there, pick up Fast Passes, and then they could do their gift shop time while we were waiting. They bought matching Mickey Mouse sweatshirts. Then we headed back for our fourth run on Space Mountain.

When we got there, we had 15 minutes to go before we could use our passes. The sign said the wait was 15 minutes. So we waited in the line, rode for the fourth time, and then we walked around and used our passes to ride it a fifth time. That’s the most times on any one ride for us except for the day at Universal when we rode the Mummy eight times.

On the way out, we stopped for the obligatory dinner at the Jazz Kitchen in Downtown Disney. This is my sentimental favorite, since I can line up all our pictures from there and see my journey through and climb out of Divorce Hell.

It was a very fun day. Tiring, but fun. All the pictures are here.

Today was the third practice day for the Aon Center stair climb a week from Saturday. Erik couldn’t go today, but I made time in my day to go do it. My quest is to do the tower in under 12 minutes, so today I put on my little electronic metronome and I set it for 72, which is 4% faster than the 69 beats per minute I had it set on last week. There were probably a bit over a dozen people there to do the climb today. I let about 10 people go ahead before I started.

On the way up, I noticed that the turns on the landings took at least one and sometimes two beats of the metronome. If I assume an average of 1.5 beats per landing, that means I spent about 1.25 seconds on each landing, and that totals up to just a bit over two minutes total for the approximately 110 landings in the 56-story climb. That’s really a lot of time spent not climbing. But sadly, 1.25 seconds rest really isn’t enough to recover in any significant way. No matter how you slice it, climbing that many stairs hurts.

Today’s climb felt like it was very close to my limit. I just kept focused on the beeping of the metronome to keep pace. And I managed to keep the pace all the way up. But the last 10 stories were pretty grim. I passed all but one of the people who’d started in front of me, which was nice. And my time at the top was 10:38, which I thought was quite good. Based on that, I should be able to do the full tower climb in about 11:45, which is well-within my goal of 12 minutes. So this is a Good Thing.

I’m really enjoying this weird little sport I stumbled upon last year. It’s fun in a way that I can’t quite explain.

Wednesday was the second practice session at the Aon Tower for the stair climb on the 24th. Work has been crazy this week because of the earthquake last Sunday, but I made a point to get downtown at lunchtime to try my legs on the stairs again.

Since Erik couldn’t make it this time, I rode the train there so as not to have to use my car. When I got there, Carla from the bike club was there. She works in one of the other big buildings downtown, and I’d told her about the climb on the ride last Sunday. She doesn’t want to do it, but she came by to see us practice. This worked out well, since I had my backpack and bike helmet with me, and she was able to take them on the elevator up to the 60th floor while I was climbing.

Last time, Erik and I had noticed that turning on the stair landings took a noticeable amount of time compared to the actual climbs up each flight. I took a wild guess and assumed that each stair landing eats up about 1 second. All together that would eat almost 2 minutes total for the climb. So if I want to make the top in 12 minutes, I need to do the actual 1377 steps in about 10 minutes, which would mean 137 steps per minute. Dividing by 2 to account for taking double steps, I get 69 per minute.

I got a small electronic metronome that clips on my belt. I set it for 69 beats per minute. I concentrated on just having one foot going up two steps for each beep.. And I made the climb to the 60th floor in 10:58. This was 15 seconds faster than last time, and works out to making the full climb in about 12:10. So I think it worked. Next time I’m going to try for 71 or 72.

On the train ride back, I had a touch of ‘Climber’s Cough’, which means I went pretty hard on the climb. But I still think I can go faster next time. It was a good practice session, and a good little mid-day adventure.

Practice!

Today was the first practice day for the Aon Tower stair climb next month. They opened the stairs from the 4th floor up to the 60th for an hour at lunchtime for practice runs. I talked my friend Erik from work into trying the stair climb. We’ve been practicing on the stairs at Millikan Library at Caltech, but that’s only 10 stories. (The building is 9 stories, but we start in the basement.) So we thought it would be good to go and try the real thing. I did this climb last year, but Erik had never done a big stair climb before. And there’s nothing like trying the real thing to know what it’s like.

Can you tell it hurt from the pictures?

The climb from 4 to 60 is 90% of the full climb from the ground to the roof. It took us 11 minutes and 13 seconds. Based on this, we could do the full climb in 12:20, which is very close to my goal for this year of breaking 12 minutes. So the steady pace training we’ve done helped. Next time we’re going to try it with a small electronic metronome for pacing. I’ll set it for about 3% faster than we went today and we’ll see how that goes.

This past weekend was a grand adventure. Last fall, when I did the “Stair Climb to the Top” at the U.S. Bank tower in downtown Los Angeles, a woman I talked to there told me about the stair climb up the Stratosphere tower in Las Vegas. I looked it up, and it looked like fun. The climb was on Saturday, March 13. And as an added bonus, if I could make the cut and be in the top 50 climbers, I could do it a second time on Sunday in the ‘run-off’ to determine the winner. And besides, it seemed like a good excuse for a weekend in Las Vegas.

Kathleen and I drove out there on Friday afternoon. The trip was pretty uneventful, and we got there just after dark. I was pleased to see that the middle-age-mobile averaged over 30 miles per gallon for the trip. After checking in to the hotel, we took a walk to go find some cheap prime rib, since that’s one of the things Las Vegas is known for. We got a good nighttime view of the tower, and I took a moment to contemplate it a bit. And after dinner, we rode the elevator up to the observation deck to see the view. When we were up there, we asked the security guard where the stairs were, and he showed us the door and the top of the staircase. It looked simple enough. How hard could it be?

Saturday morning, I got dressed in my running gear and got ready to climb. The starting order was pretty random. They said it was just the order that we’d signed up in, so I knew I’d be able to catch and pass at least a couple people on the way up. When we lined up, they gave us a small lecture about the tower stairs. The staircase goes up the central core of the tower. it follows the side of the elevator shafts, so it’s in a roughly triangular space. There are landings on each end of the base of the triangle, and the staircases go back and forth across the space. One way, the staircase is attached to the wall. The other way, it goes directly across the space, about 6-8 feet away from the wall. So that leg is about a 20-step staircase that is just anchored at the ends, and there’s nothing on either side of the railing. This is known to give some people the willies.

When I started climbing, I saw immediately what they were talking about. And yes, it gave me a slight case of the willies. So when I was on those staircases, I just focused on the middle of the stair about three steps ahead and just blocked out the fact that on my right side there was a 300-foot drop. This went on for the majority of the climb. Probably on the order of about 600 vertical feet. I’d been practicing my pacing on the stairs at the library at Caltech, and I set my watch to beep every second to act like a metronome so I could maintain a steady pace. And I managed to do that all the way up. At the top of the tower core, the stairs entered the ‘pod’, which is the round space at the top where they have the bar, restaurant and observation deck. From there it was just a normal staircase for about eight floors up to the observation deck. The stairs let us out into a hallway where they gave us each a towel and a bottle of water. When I got there, I just flopped down on a chair and gasped like a fish out of water. Yow.

As always, I had the “Climber’s Cough” at the top. And everyone else did, too. It was easy to tell who had just finished the climb, because we were all hacking up phlegm. Apparently, this is a known phenomenon caused by high blood pressure in the lungs from the exertion of climbing.

After catching my breath, I had a look at the results that they were tallying on a large monitor. I was pleased to see my time was 11:35.96. I’d hoped to do about 12 minutes, so this was a pleasant surprise. And at the end of the day, it was good for 23rd place overall. This meant that I’d made the cut and could climb in the finals on Sunday.

We spent the rest of Saturday doing Las Vegas-y things. It was good fun.

On Sunday morning, I got dressed again and ready to climb. This time, the starting order was the same as our rank from Saturday. Between that and the fact that they sent us off at one-minute intervals pretty much guaranteed that nobody was going to be passing anyone else today. This meant that it was going to be a solitary climb. Just me against the stairs. Before starting out, I did a little warmup by walking up on the down escalator. Sort of like a stair treadmill. Again, I set my watch to maintain pace, and again I was able to maintain the pace all the way up. For some reason, it hurt a whole lot more the second time. Go figure. But I managed to shave a second and half off my time to finish at 11:34.50, which was good for 26th overall, and 3rd in the 50-59 age group.

I did the math, and my power output for the climb works out to about 0.35 horsepower for the 11.5 minutes it took to get to the top. I’m pretty happy with that for being 50 years old.

So now it’s onward and upward to the AON tower climb next month. And this one is also for charity, so if you can, please stop by and make a donation, however small, to the American Lung Association.

And that’s when a young man’s fancy turns to the ME72 Engineering Contest at Caltech. I’ve gone to see this several times over the years, and it’s always great fun. The 2008 contest featured machines hurling a ball across a field. In 2007 they had to place a small piece of chain high up on a net. And the rules explicitly allow machines to interfere with their opponents’ machines, which makes the whole thing much more entertaining to watch.

So next Tuesday, I’m going to walk over to the gym and see this. It should be fun.

This Sunday’s bike ride was to visit the Portal of the Folded Wings at Valhalla Cemetery in North Hollywood. It’s a monument to people who you’ve probably never heard of, but who played key roles in the early development of aviation. It was a nice day for riding.

We rode straight out across Eagle Rock and Glendale into Burbank. Then we took Victory Blvd to the cemetery. We spent a little time looking around before we headed out. On the way, we stopped to see Oliver Hardy and “Curly Joe” DeRita, who are also buried there. Then we headed south to our snack stop at Priscilla’s in Toluca Lake.

The route back took us down the L.A. River bike path, where we saw trees bent over from the rushing waters that filled the channel last week when we had some hard rain. Then we headed home by the standard route through Highland Park and South Pasadena.

It was a very pleasant ride.

44 miles.
cycling

Since Lucinda and I had the Presidents’ Day holiday off today, we decided to go back to Universal again. They only sell tickets with the ‘buy a day and come back any time for a year’ thing, we figured we’d take them up on it. Since today was a nice sunny and warm day, we figured there would be more people than last time, but the upside to dealing with crowds was that we weren’t going to get soaked. So we gathered up Kymber and we all headed over there this morning.

When we got there, we immediately headed down to the lower lot, since the sign said that the lines for the rides down there were not very long yet. We rode Jurassic Park once, then the Mummy twice, and then back to Jurassic Park again. In between the first and second Mummy rides, I stopped at the snack bar and got a napkin to make some earplugs. And then I was much more comfortable. As I’ve mentioned before, riding a roller coaster with two ten-year-old girls can involve a lot of screaming. The first picture on Jurassic Park had me stoically holding my ears to block out all the screaming on the final drop.

We had lunch overlooking the end of the Jurassic Park ride, and then we went back up and saw the “Waterworld” show. After that, we did the obligatory tram tour. I got a chuckle from the Los Angeles Fire Department golf cart. We usually think of the fire department with lots of gear going very fast to put out fires. And the image of them puttering around in a golf cart was just a bit absurd.

After the tram tour finished, we went back down to the lower lot for the “Backdraft” show. And then one more time on the Mummy. By then, it was getting late. I figured we had time for one more ride, so Kymber and I got in line for Jurassic Park again. This time Lucinda didn’t want to go for some reason. So while we were waiting, I texted her and said that we were going to send her a message from inside the ride. I wrote up a short message:

AAAAAAAAAA!!!

and saved it in the ‘Drafts’ folder on my phone. Then, when the boat was just tipping over the edge of the final drop, I pulled out my phone and hit ‘Send’. The ride photo shows me holding my phone in the air as the boat plunged into the water at the bottom.

All around, it was a fun day, even if we did have to wait in line some. The rest of the pictures are in Lucinda’s photo album.