Progress Being Made

I've found over the years that I've been flying, as no doubt everyone else has, that there are times when I make great leaps of progress, others when it inches along, and still others where it seems like I'm regressing rather than progressing. But with the way the Tuesday class is set up (at least for me) I can work on so many things that even if I'm not progressing in one area, strides are made in another.

After my usual warm ups, I thought that I'd finally try to learn the force-out turn around, in my quest to work the tricks requiring a turn then set a little differently. Here's one of the many attempts:


So obviously I'm hurrying to turn, and not finishing my force-out (turning too early) But over the course of the evening, I improved incrementally - slowly getting it closer to where it needs to be before I turn. It's certainly still not there, but strides are being made.

In contrast to that is the mod. Am I making progress? Hard to say, I'm still tweaking it, as I've been doing for months and months. As Dino pointed out, it's hard to believe that I caught and returned the mod in the spring of 2007! And so I went back and looked at that mod, to see how it's different from the one I'm doing.

So here's the vid from June 14, 2007:



and here's my best almost catch with Manny from today:



Now, obviously the swing is better, the uprise is tighter, but what about the mod itself. Is it less travelly and less whippy? My inexperienced eye can't tell. I can't tell if I've made any progress at all on that part of the trick, though in my gut I feel like I have - I'm aware of where I am. I can stop the drive when my feet are up vertical, release earlier or later, drive faster or slower (to some degree) and yet, I'm still not catching this regularly. It's still too whippy. While some of the whippiness was dealt with today, new timing needs to then be factored in.

Interestingly, though, I have absolutely no desire to walk away from this trick. Even though I've been trying to figure it out for nearly two years, and even though I still haven't mastered it, I don't want to walk away from it. This in direct contrast to the layout, which I've done on and off for the past 3 years, I think, but never commiting to it.

Until now, that is. There's no reason for me not to have this trick. So I've been every so diligently working on it, and have reached a point that I look forward to doing it, though it's still not improving, though the same things seem to be wrong every single time, or at least the same family of problems. Today, though I went up and did 4-5 layouts, there was really no improvement, the break was still too weak, and then the drive too... so I left it to go back to the force-out turnaround, which was showing a bit of promise.

At catch time, I worked my splits with angel returns, catching the return bar each time, though not managing to make it back to the board,(I'm really happy with how quickly and relatively painlessly that skill has been progressing. Finally something without too much of a struggle!) and then, when I was feeling brave enough, decided to do the planche to my regular returns, since I haven't been turning for the return bar for months! Well I got my returns of the planche twice tonight!! At least with those, I'm back to where I was in September or October.

So progress was made on several, though not all fronts - in some areas a lot, in others a little, and in some not at all. Overall though, I'm thrilled with tonight's work.