It’s been quite a while since I thought about competing in a memory championship, in fact a while is probably an understatement. So I thought I would start capturing my progress from where I am now and see how much I can progress up to the UK and World Memory Championships in 2010. The two I’ve competed in were 1995 and 2008, here are my memory championship best scores that I would like to beat this year. My rank has dropped down to 111, so the goal is to bring it into the top 50, no mean feat.
So where do I begin? How do you train for an event where you’re attempting to memorise 800 digits in 30 minutes or a pack of cards in under 60 seconds!?
Create some leverage
My approach is going to be to create some major leverage (the stick and carrot), some compelling reasons to compete which will help to motivate me throughout the year, pain if you don’t do it and pleasure if you do, partly why I’ve started writing this, now it’s out there, I’m committed!
Agile Learning
I’ve been working on a learning model I’m calling Agile Learning (I’ll dig into this in a different post), based on Agile Development – Scrum. Up until yesterday I thought I was the first one to come up with this concept (in relation to learning), it seemed strange that no one had thought of it before, turns out I was right, someone had, although it looks like my approach and application is somewhat different. If I were to break down the general steps of Agile Learning it would be:
- A backlog of learning stories – each story has a list of criteria which defines what I will have to do to complete that story. For the championships the stories will be geared around the various memory disciplines. Completing a certain number of stories will equip me with the skills to compete in a particular event.
- Estimate my capacity (how many stories I can work through)
- Work in 2 week sprints (cycles)
- Daily Scrum – although with one person it’s not so much a scrum as a check-in
- Run a mini championship demo every 2 weeks
- A retrospective at the end of each sprint to see where I can improve
- Track progress with burn down charts
Decide on Memory Strategies
One of the more difficult decisions are around what strategies to use for various events. Numbers for example, do you use:
- Person and Object (each represent 2 digits)
- Person, Action and Object
- 3 digit images (a lot of ground work)
- Ben Pridmore’s system (again a lot of ground work but it obviously pays off)
Balancing the above with the amount of time I’m going to commit to achieve my target is going to influence my decision, so haven’t decided yet, however Person/Action/Object is probably the current favorite.
You can find a full list of events at the World Memory Championships site.
Relativistic Training
This is a technique I started using years ago when I was tap dancing in London’s West End. The routine I was working on was very complex and pretty fast, so I would push myself to go much faster and try to maintain the proper rhythm and keep on going until I either had to stop with exhaustion, or my legs were tapping gibberish! When I slowed the routine down to the correct tempo I found the steps had been mastered and it all felt within my control.
Tony Buzan gave a good analogy about relativistic training when I attended one of his speed reading sessions. Imagine you are driving a car on the motorway going at 70mph and you exit at a junction, at that point the person sitting next to you puts their hand over the speedometer and says, “slow down to 30″. How fast do you think you will end up going? It’s extremely likely that you will end up at about 40-50 as it feels relatively slow in comparison to your initial speed.
In regards to using relativistic training to improve speed and accuracy of memorization you do the same thing. Go faster and faster until you lose comprehension and accuracy and then slow it down to a speed where you start to retain, you’ll find that this is faster than the point at which you started. This is essential in getting past that plateau stage.
Health and Fitness
If you’re not fit there is no way your going to have the energy to compete at the highest level. For me this is going to mean, qigong, cardio work and more playing with the kids 
I’m also going to be aiming at eating healthier, this one is going to take a bit more work and a bigger stick! Suggestions welcome.
Conditioning
Without strong belief systems about what you are capable of you’re never going to be able to achieve your best. For this I’m going to be working with daily meditations and create some NLP anchors to enter peak states for memorising and recall.
The Competition
Hopefully, all of the above will get me into the top 50 by the end of the year, one step at a time though.
If you’re competing let me know what your training plan is? Or if you’ve never entered and would like too, let me know, I’d be happy to share tips and advice!
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 0 comments… add one now }