How are more mature cubers' turn speed and other experiences?

[Mike Hughey]

Yeah, I've been here a bit, and stopped cubing, but I always noticed you've been stuck in the sub-20 topic.
Don't want to sound rude, but I never wanted to ask you, because I thought it did sound rude.
Why have you been stuck there for so long? Like, what slows you down so much? Don't you know full PLL and OLL? I don't even know full OLL, and I'm sub-20. (Not gloating, just trying to put it into perspective.)
Is it your turn speed? Is it your recognition? Your recall? Your F2L?

Sorry if this sounds rude...

Not rude at all. I think it's a bunch of little things. I've known full PLL since 2006 and full OLL since about 2008 or 2009. But many of my OLL algs were terrible. And one thing that did was to encourage really bad finger tricks because I used them for the OLLs I knew.

Recently I relearned most of my OLL algs. That helped a lot with my F2L, because it encouraged good finger tricks, which bled into my F2L moves. But then it's taken a long time for those OLLs to become natural and embed in my memory. They're mostly there now, finally, so it seems like I'm really about to get better.

Lack of practice is really a big factor. I don't have much time to practice, due to the usual reasons us oldsters tend to not have time to practice, and so I get rusty a lot, and spend a lot of my practice time just getting back up to speed. And of course I devote a lot of time to BLD, so that takes away from my speedsolving practice. I think my turn speed is actually plenty fast enough, and with the better finger tricks, it's really not the problem. I am sometimes clumsy with the cube though, which leads to ruining a number of averages - locking up ridiculously, dropping the cube, etc.

Over the past couple of months it's seemed that my lookahead has gotten much better. And now I'm suddenly getting a relatively high percentage of sub-20 solves - close to 50% - which I've never done before. So maybe it's finally kicking in.

 

[stoic]

I was going to post this in the accomplishment thread, but - seeing as I've been banging on in this one about not getting much time to practice - it seemed relevant.
I managed to get some quality time to myself today, and did a bunch of timed 3x3 solves (>200). That's a big day of practice for me, and I broke all my PBs, including smashing 2s off my PB single. (See sig.)
The Weilong was feeling great...it's such a fast cube but I think I've finally got it under control...and lookahead was decent, without feeling like I needed to concentrate too hard to achieve it. It's been a couple of months since I learned much in the way of new algs, and everything seemed pretty well embedded - I didn't forget any like I often do.
All in all, a satisfying days' work. There's hope for us oldies!

 

[newtonbase]

Excellent work there. We'll done.

After having my own best ever session on Thursday I've managed to go backwards this weekend for various reasons including badly lubing my Weilong and learning R perms. I'm off work tomorrow so hoping to get in a decent bit of practice.