Dogfish Juggling

The end of the school year has certainly kept me busy for the past few weeks. 

Between end-of-the-year banquets and the added workload of graduation, I have had my hands full at the paper recently. 

With everything going on, I have more or less abandoned the notion of making any real juggling progress for most of this month–and that is a pretty good explanation for the lack of posts recently. 

This has really been a growing trend lately. But even with these time-constraints I have still managed to do a good bit of juggling–it has just not been as goal-driven as in the past. 

Most of the juggling I’ve done has been in short bursts. 10-20 minuets or so a few times a day. 

I have been under so much stress and had some many obligations that I just haven’t had enough long, uninterrupted bits of time to have a long session. 

I have been having a lot of fun with four balls though. I can feel the pattern getting more and more solid, even after having it comfortably in hand for months now. 

I can manage a nice little transition from 3-4 (starting with the fourth held, tossing in a few stacked multiplexes, and then moving into a asynch fountain). From there I can make a nice transition to a synch pattern, manage a few simple placement tricks, and then move back into an asynch, and then back into a 3 ball cascade. 

It is nothing impressive, but it is very fun to work on stringing a few tricks together, and it is something that i haven’t really attempted in the past. 

I’ve also started working on a similar string of tricks with 3 clubs, but this usually takes me a bit longer to warm up into. 

From a cascade I start with an over-the-top tennis, go into a half shower, into a reverse cascade, into mills-mess (this part is ugly), then work a double toss on the underarm throw of mills mess and use that to go into a doubles cascade, back into a regular cascade, and then throw three 1.5 spins to end up with an all fat-end cascade, then back. 

I don’t think I’ve ever finished all of that, but writing it out makes it a bit more real in my mind, and I think I will be a bit more dedicated to getting it all together in the coming days. 

I’ve also done a bit of work with 3 balls, and I finally managed a few decent runs of a clawed mills mess. It is  very fun to juggle. I’ve also started working on the factory, and I managed a few catches of it.. although they were ugly. 

My shower is still ugly, too, and I would like to see both of those improve a bit. 

Other than that I have not done much. I haven’t dedicated any real time to progressing with 5, but I usually end my short sessions with a few flashes, just to keep the feel and form fresh. 

Hopefully in the coming weeks things will be more juggle-freindly. 

Owing to the egregious lack of free time in my schedule over the course of the past few weeks I didn’t expect to see any real progress when, last Firday, I decided to hop on my unicycle and take a few laps around town.

Just to give me something to do with my hands, and in an attempt to casually further my goal of juggling clubs on the unicycle, I brought along two clubs to toss around during the ride. 

After about 10 minutes or so of this, I was surprised by how well I was doing, so I swung back by the house and swapped out the pair of clubs for a set of three balls. 

Now, let me back up here to just review my last attempt at juggling on the unicycle. It was about a month or so ago, and it was terrible. I could barely manage a cascade beyond four or five catches. I am a bit better at the reverse cascade, and I was able to keep that going for about 8-to-10 catches, but with a total lack of control on the unicycle-end of things.

The moment I pulled out of my driveway Friday afternoon I started a cascade that was as well-controled as anything I’ve juggled on two feet. I kept the pattern going and rode down the block, turned up the road and started rolling around the elementary school beside my house. Within the next 20 or so minutes I was doing mills mess and almost any trick I could think of. 

I spent about 30-45 minutes enjoying my new and unexpected skills before heading back home. I grabbed my clubs and took a short spin around the block, and I managed to get better than a qualifying run in before I smacked myself in the face and decided to call it quits for the day. 

I went out again Saturday, just playing with balls, and happily discovered that, no, i had not, in fact, been possessed by some strange juggling-disposed deamon, and that my skills were my own to do with as I saw fit. 

I didn’t make much more progress with clubs, but I also didn’t work much on them. 

On Sunday I took another, longer ride, and brought all 7 pounds (3198 g for you metricly-inclined chaps) of my Exerballs along with me. Just as before I found an unexpected and inexplicable level of success. 

What’s more it was probably the hardest-core (hard-corest?) workout i’ve done in a good long while. I was very pleased. I made it around the entire walkway of the school with only 2 drops (at the two tightest, pole-lined turns). 

I even had a chance to showcase my talents, and I took my unicycle and props out to the local Relay for Life. 

I am not really sure what can account for this sudden breakthrough. I don’t really feel as if I am appreciably better at either juggling or unicycling since my last attempt to wed the two, but something has certainly clicked. I find it much easier now to keep either activity going smoothly while shifting my focus from one to the other. 

I still am more comfortable with the reverse cascade, and i usually drop into it whenever there is a difficult patch or a sharp turn coming up. I have the feeling that making the tosses in toward the center of my body, instead of out and away from them, and having all of the balls heading toward my center really adds a lot of stability and control to my pattern. 

It is an interesting point, and one I have been thinking about for awhile, juggling on the unicycle seems to have re-emphasised it in my mind. 

I really think that a well-controled reverse cascade is an inherently more stable pattern than a traditional cascade. The props cross at different places in the pattern, and it seems to make collisions much rarer. Even on a wild throw, the reverse cascade seems more salvageable. With everything moving into the center of my body, I can usually manage to cradle a mistake between my arm and torso–a much easier feat than reaching out to grab a 2.35 pound ball while perched atop a unicycle. 

For a while I thought this might just be a personal bias. Since I learned to juggle with the reverse cascade, I thought that this explained my higher level of comfort with it. 

I am not so sure now. I think there are some legitimate advantages to the pattern in terms of sustainability and resistance to degradation. 

Now, of course i realize that it is much less well-suited to higher numbers. The accuracy and height requirements of five make the regular cascade seem like a better and more natural choice. But when it comes to regular old three ball juggling, anything I do feels a bit more stable with a reverse cascade. 

Claw catches especially go much more smoothly for me in reverse, and I can juggle the reverse in a much, much tighter, faster pattern. 

I think that this goes back to the issue of where and how the balls cross. In the reverse my props’ trajectories cross as they are falling, meaning any collision is less likely to cause an unrecoverable disruption. 

Also, it seems like the pattern just keeps the balls farther apart in general. I wonder if there has been any experimentation with these issues by jogglers. 

At the very least, it warrants some further exploration.