Flying Faster just got Easier...

I have been thinking about how to fly faster - just mashing the bar and flying the course line doesn't seem to work, except on the most perfect of days.

At the risk of giving away my IQ, I have noticed that the winner of a comp always has the fastest average speed... that thought started the heavy metal cogs in my mind turning, and another Eureka moment happened - if I spend more time flying towards goal, I'll get there faster! Which means I need to use only the strongest thermals to climb, and the time I saved climbing can be used to get to goal sooner....

As the cogs turned faster and faster, formulas started appearing in my head - math symbols I've never seen before but now made perfect sense - Auto-Regressive Integral Moving-Averages and the like, and through these I visualized how polar curves, fluid dynamics, Reynolds numbers, you name it, it all became as natural as pulling the wing up in a perfectly smooth breeze...

By now all the obvious tips were miles back, way before the whirring stream of equations, stuff like be high and upwind at the start, know when to stop racing and start flying like it was an XC, using the power of the gaggle, etc, and then it changed. The math stopped. Sentences started appearing, like: "Good Decisions and a little gambling can put a LTF 2 across the line first..." and "Pimping isn't glorious but can get you on the Team..." stuff like that.

Humm... the math seemed easy, translating straight into flying faster, but these one liners had a bit of irony in them, they suggested there were subjective psychological components to flying fast as well... Things like "Good decisions are proportional to your awareness and level of relaxation", and "Sheer determination is unquantifiable and extremely powerful...". I was starting to question the sanity of the mysterious insights...

And then the last sentence appeared: "At the end of the day, what really matters is that you learned something new, made a few new friends, had a good time and are able to fly off the hill tomorrow..."

Wow, what a strange trip it's been...