So this was the Saturday morning clinic session, where the format is that you can ride whichever cable you fancy during the session, which meant that for the first time I came away with footage from both Air and Tech in the same morning — and, as it turned out, rather more footage of me standing on the dock than I’d have liked, because Tech had a technical fault for a good chunk of it and there is only so much you can do about that other than have a chat and wait.
Three entire chapters of the recording are me not riding, which is about seven and a half gigabytes of nothing very much, and the tool now quietly bins those on its own rather than counting them as a session that went badly. What’s left is twenty minutes of footage with eleven and a half minutes of actual riding in it, across two rides on Air and one on Tech.
Having both cables in one morning is the first proper like-for-like comparison I’ve had, and the split is stark enough that it settles an argument I’d been having with myself for a fortnight. On Air: nine airs, best 0.81 seconds, median 0.72. On Tech: eight airs, best 0.46 seconds, median 0.36. Roughly the same number of attempts on each, and about double the airtime on one of them. Air has the kicker and the deeper water, Tech has the box and the pipe, and it turns out that’s not a small difference dressed up — it’s the whole thing. Any session where I average the two together is describing a sport I didn’t do.
The 0.81s is the longest air I’ve recorded, which would be a nicer sentence to write if the still the tool grabbed at the top of it didn’t show me holding the handle with both hands like a man being airlifted to safety.
Because about three minutes after that, the instructor told me to stop trying to grab the handle with both hands before landing, which is one of those bits of coaching that sounds like nothing and then immediately makes everything better. Every landing after it was cleaner. Here’s one about a minute later, same kicker, one hand, rode away from it perfectly happily:
The two big swims of the morning both came before that advice, which I’d like to claim is causation and probably isn’t entirely. One was a jump off the kicker where I landed it and then simply failed to ride away from it. The other was more annoying — I landed the thing cleanly, held it, and then let go of the handle and span around, which bought me a fifteen to twenty second swim back to a handle that was by then somewhere else entirely. My note to myself in the annotation file reads “keep hold of the handle future dave”, so at least the lesson is recorded even if it isn’t yet learned.
The one genuinely hard crash was a failed toe side turn near the end of a corner, where I caught a toe edge and went in properly — 11.3G, the biggest impact of the session by a distance, and then another swim. There was a matching failed heel side turn later on where I carried far too much speed into the corner, which the numbers agree with: I went into it at 38 kph against a session median of about 32.
The tool learned something this weekend too, which is that it had been counting the kicker itself as a landing. Every jump was arriving as two events — the thump as you load and pop off the ramp, and then the actual landing about a second later — and it had been solemnly reporting both. Going back through the clips and telling it which ones were real knocked the impact count for the session from twenty-four down to eight, and the eight that remain are all things that actually happened to me rather than things I did on purpose. It also turned out to be counting the dock start at the beginning of every ride as a landing, which, fair enough, technically it is.
Heart rate came out at 132 average and 161 max across the riding, which is lower than the last session, though so was the effort — a fair bit of that twenty minutes was me watching someone else fix a cable.
I did finally ride the box on Tech, cleanly, which the tool initially filed as a hit until I pointed out it was in fact the whole point.
Still haven’t ridden the pipe.