Not late to reading this thread, just been away from my laptop for awhile and my skills at replying are not great on my phone.
When I first started reading the posts I agreed that alot of the DCs that I had seen appeared more challenging than what I recollect seeing in Starter Stakes at Champs (though recollections are always iffy). And Amanda wrote that she was working hard on making bigger and closer DCs. And I believe her. My gut feeling was that a lot of these people (including myself) just hadn’t seen those “bigger, closer” distance challenge lines YET. With YET being the operative word. Every course set every week is not a brand new “created this hour” set. They get shared around different zones over different weeks.
So anytime Person A starts sharing about what they have seen or not seen, and Person B says – don’t know what you’re talking about – that’s not what I’ve seen … well it’s highly likely that they are BOTH right. Has a lot to do with what zone(s) you trial in, how often you trial, how long it’s been since your last trial, etc. Since it appears that Amanda has been working on this recently, it is highly likely that there might be trials that haven’t seen the “bigger/closer” lines … YET.
When I first started reading this last week I was in that camp. I hadn’t seen any bigger/closer boxes. And then lo and behold at a 3-day trial this weekend I saw them on all 6 regular courses that were set.
All of them were no more than 45 feet at the furthest. Definitly some tricky things to handle in between “here” and “there,” but that’s true in Chances as well. And the Chances line was 35 feet at one point, though sending to a tunnel not that tricky … lol
Were there places that I thought – hmmm we might could do that, and might not? Yes. But they were all within the realm of possibility. And that’s all I want. Something that is somewhat possible. Even knowing that we wouldn’t get it in flow at this point in time, it sure makes it fun to try it knowing that if I kept working on it, someday we might get it. And that turned out to be the case. Those areas that I knew would be tricky for us, were tricky for us. Those areas I thought we could do smoothly, we did smoothly. But the fun of attempting those tricky parts and getting some of it (even though without flow) were so much fun. Makes you want to keep trying to push that boundary just a little bit more each time.
So if you haven’t seen any “new” (sorry Amanda) distance challenges yet, keep your eyes open. You probably will soon.