He's Gotten Faster

Hi all,

I've been cubing plenty the past month, and as many of you know, I have achieved sub 20.  A few days ago, I got a 16.66 second average of 5 with 17 being my high and 14 as my low.  That being said, today was sort of monumental - I achieved three 16.xx second solves.  The overall average of 12 was still only sub 20, but nonetheless, it felt good to get so many good times.

The surprising part of this is not that I all of a sudden learned more algorithms, but instead, I simply slowed down during F2L.  As I've said before, going slow and looking ahead is important - 3tps will get you sub 20.  However, I was not expecting 16's to pop up from going slow.

After my average was finished, I thought back about how I did that, and I realized two things.

1.  My "slow" turning was around 4 turns per second, and
2.  I went 3/4 speed on cross, 4 tps on F2L, and full speed (roughly 6 tps) on OLL and PLL.

A few days ago I timed each step of my solves -
1.  Cross - 1.5 seconds (3 seconds max)
2.  F2L - 8 seconds (11 seconds max)
3.  OLL - 2 seconds (2.5 seconds max)
4.  PLL - 2 seconds (3 seconds max)
This brings my times to between 13.5 - 19.5 seconds.
However, this excludes pauses.  The only place I pause is between each entire step, not each F2L pair.  And I usually get anything from 15 to 23, so you can see that I have around 3 seconds to improve on.

As a current goal - my goal is to get my maximum throwout time to be 20, and thus ALL my solves will be sub 20.  The average will naturally decrease from there, if my maximum is only 20.  Furthermore, I'm going to try to shoot for a 16 second average of 12 this week, and see how I do.

Thanks for reading,
cyoubx