Someone knows me!

I had a photo taken today for the local paper who are doing a little write up on me and the photographer said to me "I know your voice, weren't you on radio 4 talking about this stuff!" My first fan..............well, the first person to know me without knowing me.......if that makes sense............I think I should go back to my hole now.

Bank Holiday Blues

I always feel depressed over the bank holiday. I think it's because I know they won't last forever and real life will kick back in sooner than I think. To cure the depression I immersed myself in some hardcore memory training which went really well today. I had a good practice on www.memorise.org with the flash numbers, displaying 4 at a time for 4 seconds. I missed some of them but I'm getting much better at picking up digits in blocks of 4 now. Practiced 5 packs of cards too which went OK. The Simpsons was on in the background which is always a bit of a distraction.

Tonight I'll read through 2,000 random numbers which I've got formatted in excel and divided up in to blocks of 4. Feeling pretty good about the numbers events now; I know I'm faster even since the championships which is a satisfying feeling.

I've still got no idea what to do for this charity event??? Some quiz game memorised? A huge book of some sort? I'm sure it'll come to me in a dream or something.

2 Saturdays after the Saturday before the World Memory Championships 2006

What an amazing weekend! So much work to do before next year. The goal posts are constantly moving up in this game and good year of practice is defiantly needed before the WMC 2007.

This blog is something for me to post my training results to and hopefully inspire some more people to get involved in this amazing sport. I have some plans this year to do some newspaper slots and perhaps a bit more local TV to drum up some interest in the UK. Out of 33 competitors only 5 of us were British!

I have some crazy plans to do some charity work and do some memory demonstrations there which hopefully will amaze people so much that they have to know more! Team UK will grow, slowly but surely.........

Thanks to everyone at the event: James Ponder, James Patterson (the Welsh Wizard!), Daren Denholm, Ed Cook, Boris Konrad, Joachim Thaler, Corinna Draschl, Joshua Foer, Leung Chun Kit, Palvinderjit Dhesi, Daniela Collado, Andi Bell etc. etc. etc.!!! and of course, the legendary Ben Pridmore. It was commented numerous times how humble Ben was and what a great asset that is with such amazing talent. I know all of team UK agreed with that.

In the mean time, I'm working on my binary by creating cards with the combinations of 6 digits on there to build speed and accuracy. Will keep working on my visualisation and practicing hard with the cards too. I'm going for a perfect recall on a deck in under 2 minutes next year. Got a loooong way to go but I expect to produce some pretty good results so on that note, back to the training!