Jumping Journal: February 17, 2007

All he needs is another strike to bowl a perfect game, can he do it...

 

Last year I hit jump 300 on February 16th.  I also had taken 115 jumps to that point on the 25 at Storrs Hill.  This was over 40 days of jumping.  This year...

 

I checked out the above information this morning as I was doing some thinking through about the rest of the month of February.  I also noticed that if I could take 11 jumps today I would hit jump number 300 for the season today.  The two big differences would be:

 

1. I haven't jumped the 25 once this winter, essentially all the jumps have been on the between the 50 in Lebanon, the 65 in Salisbury, CT and the 48 in Lake Placid.  They alone would account for 275 of the 300 jumps.  Talk about a change of nature.

 

2. I would have hit 300 jumps in only 34 days this year.  This would increase my average jumps per day from 7.5 to 8.8.  Interestingly enough I would still have almost a 10 jump/day average on the 50 with 236 jumps in 24 days.

 

It was time to head up to Lebanon to see if I could pull it off or not and to see how slow conditions were going to be after the Valentine's Day snow storm dropped a foot of snow on the area.

 

At first it looked like it was going to be a pretty even day of jumping, myself and one junior but Dan Brown showed up and for a little while it almost seemed like Cannonball was going to take a few rides but he didn't.  As has become the norm the masters outnumbered the juniors.

 

The first jump seemed to go pretty decent by normal standard, jumped late and didn't really cock the ankles.  I landed and then ended up crashing big time.  Definitely the best crash of the season.  I'm still not exactly sure where I screwed up at but it didn't happen right at the landing but I was definitely down before the transition.

 

I was pretty much out of it for the first six or so jumps.  It was almost like the plane is flying on autopilot and your not even in the plane.  I tend to think that might have helped out with the first jump crash.

 

Most of the early going I was jumping late, again with the mind being half out of it I wasn't surprised any at all.

 

I have always had a tendency to want to grab my butt on both the inrun and in the air.  Toward the end of the day I was trying to keep the hands loser on the inrun.  Also, I was trying to be quicker about cocking the ankles.  The first jump, the one I crashed, I hadn't even come close to cocking my ankles on any part of the jump.  It seems like I must be coming down with a bit of a cold.  Since I woke up I've been pretty stuffed up, probably why I wasn't with it much today in the beginning.

 

Toward the end of the day I was getting back down toward 35-38 meters.  I had a couple of nice jumps and did seem to be improving quite nicely on bringing the tips up right after getting off the takeoff instead of waiting until I was already halfway through the flight.

 

I ended up taking the last four jumps by myself as everyone else had decided they had enough jumps for the day.  I managed to pull off the 11 jumps I needed to get to the 300 mark.  Hopefully I'll be feeling a little better tomorrow and be a little more lively and quick.

 

Crash