8-club pass-pass-self

Last Wednesday, Martin was on the phone for a bit of the time. I did a few patterns with Stephan, including the 7-club 3-count, and then the 8-club pass-pass-self, which is a pretty interesting pattern. I guess it's interesting in that it's pretty much the only "complicated" pattern with more than 7 clubs which is fairly commonly done. Or at least, which I commonly do... And by "complicated", I guess I mean, "has a cycle of more than 2 counts".

Anyway, then I did the Feeding Frenzy with Stephan and Eric. I think I've fed it before (maybe with Will and Theresa?), but not much. It's a fun pattern to feed. Our best run was after Martin came back, with his suggestion that I try to separate each pair of passes in time more. We got 4 cycles (or very nearly 4 anyway).

Large - 14 MB Medium - 5.4 MB Small - 3.2 MB

Then Martin and Henry and I worked on Fire a bit. Best runs somewhere around 8 cycles or so, I think. Then Martin and I worked on the 8-club pass-pass-self. We started with me doing straights, since that was what I'd done with Stephan earlier, but after a bit we decided to switch to me doing diagonals, which did seem to help some. Here's the best run we got, which was about 3 cycles (== 6 couplets == 12 passes == 18 counts)...

Large - 26 MB Medium - 5.3 MB Small - 3.0 MB

In other news, I discovered qt_tools which will allow me to automate the process of generating the different sizes of video clips and stuff. Woohoo!

Compressed Mesopotamia

So this week, Martin and I worked on several two-person patterns.

First we worked on the Compressed Mesopotamia, which is a 7-club pattern that we've been doing every so often for a couple years, I think. It's a pretty crazy-hard pattern, mostly because on paper it should be done in doubles, but we do it in singles, so it's really fast. The story behind that is basically just that when we were initially figuring out the pattern, we thought that it was one of those 7-club patterns where in the diagram the passes are "one-and-a-halfs"; there are a number of such patterns, and they can be done either in doubles or singles, or doubles over singles (one person throwing doubles, the other throwing singles). Anyway, so we thought that this pattern was like that, and so we decided to try it in singles... Later, when we diagrammed it, we realized that in fact, they're not one-and-a-halfs at all, they're genuine doubles. Which explained why it was, as we'd noticed, really fast!

Anyway, so our longest run is probably something like 10 cycles or so. This week, our best was about 8 cycles. Martin's pattern is pass-pass-pass-handacross, and mine is pass-pass-pass-self. So you can see the end of each cycle by watching Martin's handacrosses or my selfs. This was a pretty good run, it felt pretty comfortable, at least until it started to get really hectic!

Large - 29 MB Medium - 3.9 MB Small - 1.1 MB

Then we worked on the 8-club 1-count for a while. We've also been working on that for a couple years, off and on. Sometimes it really clicks and we seem able to get some good runs over 20 cycles, and other times, we're struggling to get 10. This week we did pretty well, with two runs of about 21 cycles... (We think our record is around 26.) Here's one of those two runs.

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Then we decided to try the 9-club 1-count. I don't think we've ever tried it before. We did it in doubles, though I'm thinking that maybe next time we should try doubles-over-singles, which is how we do the 8-club 1-count; it would be a little faster, but his passes to me would be better, which is likely to mean my passes to him are better too... Anyway, so here's the best run we got. He made 9 catches, and I made almost that -- I missed club number 7, but I caught 8 and 9... I'm calling this 4 cycles (a cycle being 2 counts, as in the 8-club 1-count), which isn't technically right, but whatever.

Large - 18 MB Medium - 2.4 MB Small - .72 MB

Then we realized we hadn't done anything with only 6 clubs, so we did some squirrel and moose variations; most notably, the left-handed moose...

Fire!

(I was busy over the weekend, so I'm just now on Tuesday finally getting last Wednesday's clips up...)

So last week Martin and Henry and I worked on various patterns... One was Fire. I don't think Henry had done it before (we've mostly done it with Rick). Anyway, we had some good runs, including one of 10 cycles (or maybe a couple catches short of 10 cycles), which is the new world record for the pattern. When we've performed it, we've been glad to get 3 cycles... But of course, now that Martin has gotten this good at feeding it, it doesn't actually look all that interesting on video! Oh well.

Large - 51 MB Medium - 7.4 MB Small - 2.0 MB

Also, I worked on 5 clubs a bunch. I probably won't bother posting many more clips of my 5-club efforts, but this one was pretty crazy. It totally shouldn't have lasted nearly as long as it did...

Large - 29 MB Medium - 4.0 MB Small - 1.2 MB

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...