5-club progress

So for a couple months now, I've been working on 5 clubs at the gym at work, either before or after the workout class that I go to every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Basically, a little while after I started working on 5 clubs regularly at Stanford, I decided I needed to be working on it more than once a week.

Anyway, so this past Wednesday at the gym, I had a bit of a breakthrough; my previous record was 28, where it had been for a couple weeks. And I had gotten to where I would usually get one or two runs over 20 each time I practiced. But this Wednesday it was feeling pretty solid, and I'd had two runs of 23, and I was starting to feel tired, thinking maybe I'd peaked, but I just wanted to get one more run over 20. After a bit I got a run that was just barely 20, or maybe only 19. I decided that wasn't good enough, and kept at it for a bit, and then all of a sudden I had this great run that just felt so relaxed and comfortable, and went on and on, for 32 catches!

So that was pretty exciting. Then on Friday after working out, I got 15 or 16 catches my first two attempts, then a couple of under-10 runs, and then boom -- 33 catches! After that, I got a couple over 20, I think, but nothing felt quite so relaxed. I think the key is really to figure out how to get that relaxed feeling. I guess probably it involves actually relaxing, or something.

Anyway, I haven't brought the camera into the gym at work to record my practicing there, but probably I should start doing that soon, so I can have my record-breaking runs on tape.

Wednesday night at Stanford, I worked on 5 for the camera a bit, and got a couple runs over 20. Here's a run of 24 catches.

Large - 25 MB Medium - 3.7 MB Small - 1.1 MB

I had worked out on paper a feed based on the Moose, and I was hoping this would be a nicer, more elegant pattern than the Mock Moose Feed. But when we tried it out, it turned out to be somewhat worse. So, back to the drawing board on that, I guess...

Then we worked on the Communicable Madness a bunch. First we tried to do it starting at a different orientation (relative to the room) from the way we normally do it, and we were having trouble with that. So then we went back to our normal orientation, and got a full cycle on the first try. Tried a few more times rotated 90 degrees, and couldn't do it. So then we decided to try to work up to it gradually -- we did it in our standard orientation, then rotated maybe 20 degrees or so, did it there, and so on. We wound up working our way gradually around a full 360 degrees of starting points, sometimes requiring a few tries at given location, sometimes getting a cycle on the first try. Pretty much we wouldn't go on to the next one until we'd gotten a cycle. Then when we got back around to our normal starting location, we did a run of two cycles.

So here's that run of two cycles. A cycle of Communicable is 36 counts, so this video clip is pretty long...

Large - 97 MB Medium - 16 MB Small - 4.5 MB

We also tried for the first time the Southern Madness, which is the regular Madness done Southern California style (starting to the feedee on the right instead of the feedee on the left). After we'd each fed it a bit, we tried the Southern Communicable Madness. Since the cycle is 36 counts long (in six chunks of six counts), it takes a long time to train one's muscles to know all six chunks. After working on it a while, we'd finally got through almost two-thirds of a cycle. Maybe we'll come back to this some other time...

Posted by neilfred at June 7, 2003 02:17 PM