I had a great time at the Great Lakes Championship. Nathan Dwyer (and the rest of the staff, including all the great delegates we had there) ran a fantastic competition! I'm very sorry I wasn't able to meet Phil there - Phil, I hope I see you at another competition sometime soon!
Donna Krueger (another oldie like us) made some good over-40 attempts - a 4/7 multi that was really 5/7, but she accidentally left a logo on one of her cubes and so had it disqualified. :-( She got 2 successes in 4BLD, and came in 8th at 3BLD! Her son was quite obviously very proud of her; he was hoping she would get 7/7 since that would have been state record.
As for me, my BLD efforts weren't great, but I guess they weren't terrible, actually. 5BLD was a disaster for me, but it also was for everyone else - no one got a successful solve at the competition. :-( I had one off by 3 pieces, one off by 5 pieces, and the third looked like I did a D' instead of a U' somewhere by accident, so it came out looking awful. My first 4BLD wasn't bad at all - only 4 seconds off my PB in competition. 3BLD was pretty bad; I wish I could have gone to the finals, but I had to leave the competition early (my daughter had a wonderful dance recital this afternoon that I was attending instead).
My multi result was not so impressive, but it really wasn't too bad, all things told. I did a 13-cube attempt in 55 minutes, and the memo was quite solid, except that I discovered I had forgotten a few sets of flipped edges. I remembered what they were but couldn't remember what locations they were in. :-( Should be easy to fix that in the future. That means it was a truly credible 13-cube attempt in 55 minutes, which means 14 should be quite doable. If I can get my 3BLD speed back to sub-minute like it was 5 years ago, I should be able to do 15 and maybe even 16 easily. So it's really just down to finding time to practice 3BLD for me to get to 16 cubes.
I had a pretty decent mean in FMC, 33 2/3. A good bit off my PB, but my PB was when I was practicing really hard for it (back then, I studied a lot of Heise and it really helped), and I also got really lucky on those solves. This time I had no lucky solves - I worked for it and got some decent results despite lack of practice, so it really felt good - it felt like I really earned it.
Speedsolving was fun for me at this competition. My first chance to use all my new hardware, and it was very helpful. I got 6 PBs - 3x3x3 average (my second sub-20 in competition - my first was 5 years ago!), 4x4x4 single, 7x7x7 single and average (I got 2 sub-6's in competition, and sub-6 was required to do an average - and I had only had one sub-6 ever in practice at home!), and skewb single and average (my new skewb results make me the fastest over-50 competitor on Logiqx's list!).
I did regress from freeslice to AvG for the competition. I tried it out a few days before the competition and discovered that AvG gave me a much better chance of making the cutoff, so I couldn't resist switching back. But practicing freeslice seems to make be better at both methods, so I intend to go back to practicing freeslice now. I'll just keep doing that (switching back to AvG right before competitions) until it stops helping.
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