Otto

Here I am in the Maritim Hotel, Otto-von-Guericke-Strasse, Magdeburg, and it only occurred to me when I arrived that I really should have worn my Otto von Guericke University souvenir T-shirt from the mental calculation world cup in 2010, rather than my much-less-thematically-appropriate Extreme Memory Tournament 2016 souvenir T-shirt. Never mind, I'm sure there'll be other competitions in Magdeburg.

Anyway, when I arrived here turned out to be this morning, since my plane from Birmingham was annoyingly vastly delayed, and I had to spend last night in Hannover and get up extremely early to get the train down here before the competition started at nine o'clock. So, deprived of sleep as well as training, I didn't expect any great results today, and my faith was justified.

The competition starts with my two weakest events - names and faces, at which I'm just rubbish, and images, for which I can't fall back on all the training I did ten years ago like I can with the other disciplines. Then we had the three half-marathons - in 30-minute numbers I found myself very nearly actually falling asleep during memory, so I played it safe and just went for 1000 digits. And I got a nearly perfect recall for a score of 900 (which must mean that as well as two memory mistakes, I must have mis-read or mis-written a digit somewhere). Then in 30-minute binary (after a quick power-nap during the lunch break) I decided to go for the kind of score I'd go for if I'd been training, six full journeys, 4680 digits, and see what happened. What happened was that I could hardly recall a single one or zero, but that's okay, because all practice is good practice. And then in 30-minute cards I just went for a safe, no-stress 12 packs, and I should have got them all correct unless I made a silly mistake somewhere. I probably did.

So nothing spectacular, but it's all good fun. I'm glad I didn't give up and go home when I saw how delayed my plane was - I posted a poll on Facebook and asked people to tell me whether or not I should still go to Germany, mentioning the important fact that I've got a really great book (How To Invent Everything, by Ryan North of Squirrel Girl fame) and haven't had enough sleep lately, so spending three days in bed alternately sleeping and reading would have been awesome. But everyone told me to go to Germany anyway.

Enough of me, let's mention the other people who are here, because it's totally wonderful to see the German Championship back on the calendar! It was always a major highlight of the memory year, and with Klaus back in the driving seat, ably assisted by Hannes and many others, it's as cool as ever! We've got a whole lot of competitors from around Europe - most notably Simon, who's winning everything as usual, and particularly Bastian Wiederhold, another graduate of the German junior competitions, who's getting some really great results across the board!

Day two tomorrow; now I'm going to sleep and read about how to make everything you need if you find yourself trapped in ancient times by a malfunctioning time machine.