Discussion: Yeah

AP has been great for me this past year; I am much more in touch with O people. And I get practice dealing with feeling embarrassed, which is fine. And I can keep a sort of diary which is important now that my memory is quite obviously failing. And AP spurred me to set and even meet some training goals.

It's cool that you've been on AP for so long.

Hey, no fair, that was what I was going to write. Well, sort of....

I agree, it's really cool, thank you, Kenny. I've been afraid that the various added clusters would somehow make it less useful or appealing, but that hasn't happened. And with any luck, Kenny's Google payments are larger every month, and pretty soon will be large enough that he can quit work, hire a nanny for Samantha, do some good training, and have a chance once again to excel at O' events that don't involve beer.

I use it for several reasons: to keep in touch with friends, to motivate myself to train, to have fun, and, and Barb says, to keep a diary about more than just training, or just orienteering. The latter is quite weird. I think diaries are supposed to be private, though maybe that is an old-fashioned concept. Much of what I write is not of a particularly personal nature, but some is. And sometimes it's a bit scary just putting stuff out there, opening yourself up to who knows might come reading.

But then it's there, in black and white (well, maybe white and black) and there are two great joys -- one is the various feedback you get, sometimes flippant, sometimes hilarious, sometimes serious and thought-provoking, always supportive. The other is the chance to go back in time, to see what I was thinking and doing, sometimes just to see specifically how I prepared for an event, sometimes to see more generally what I was doing and thinking. And that is the greatest pleasure. And the more I have written, and the more openly I have written about what I am thinking and doing and feeling, the greater the pleasure it is. And as I get older and remember even less, that will be even more true.

Much of the above is true for me, too, unsurprisingly. But I can also say that AP is probably the main reason I really started to get into orienteering. When I started logging here I could barely complete an advanced course. By reading logs and soaking up all the info from the discussions and, eventually, making friends with AP people, I've found my source of motivation and competition... and learned a lot about orienteering that I wouldn't have picked up from going to local meets and coming home.

(Yeah, I've also spent a lot of money going traveling to meets, but I wouldn't have done that if it weren't for AP, either.)

Wait, maybe I was supposed to puke, instead?

I started posting more diary-like stuff when my mom complained that I wasn't emailing her enough (which was true) and I told her she could always know what was going on in our lives by reading our AP logs. She even got a user name (Pegzmom) so she could post comments (only one, as far as I remember).

It was so cool to post while we were in Russia, knowing people were interested in how things were going, and feeling like we were keeping in touch. And then of course I decided to post about my parents dying; I wasn't sure if I really wanted it all out there but I never questioned doing it, because it was a natural extension to what I'd already done.

I *could* live without AP but it would be a much bleaker o' world, that's for sure.

I found AP by accident about two years ago. I guess there was something here about RG, so I googled here to see what it was. My first impression was can this be true. I could barely imagine something like his can be done, but the fact some "ultimate geek" actually had done it - it amazed me. I knew nothing about the community, people who were hanging here, so the impression was technical only - all the training logging features with comments, discussion board, event systems, split time analysis with java applet graphs and all. And everything done orienteering in mind!

So I had no choice, I got to give it a try, no matter I knew nobody here. Not to motivate myself to practice more, just for fun and to see how this kind of community and site works. I thought I might also learn something - language if nothing else. I know I could log my training in Finnish, but saw no point in it - no-one here could understand a single word and I would learn nothing.

After logging training without commenting for few months I started to write some comments here and there mostly about things related to orienteering in Finland. Original plan was trying AP for one year, but I kind of forgot the whole stopping idea.

I have met about 5 (?), talked with 2 or 3 persons using AP regularly (people who has username but only write random comments are not included, like jankoc or pekvari). So I guess my current AP discussion ranking 20. is pretty well done - or pretty weird...

Nice comments in this thread. I sympathize with many of them, except Cristina's puking remark, which was totally uncalled for. ;-)

BorisGr wrote:
it seemed like adventure racers were about to take over and start dominating, but that somehow passed, though a lot of them stuck around on AP, some of them turning into orienteers in the process...
...it again seemed like they'd take over, but they seem to have integrated themselves into the AP world just fine

Nobody takes over Attackpoint. Attackpoint takes over them.

Nobody takes over Attackpoint. Attackpoint takes over them.

Now I got why I never stopped logging as I planned...

We've even had at least one case of AP overdose.
Big Eddie went cold-turkey on 9/16/06...

And apparently, a few weeks ago (I think?) Swampfox not only dropped out of AP-log-land, but he also got busy with the delete key: http://www.attackpoint.org/weeklyactivityall.jsp/u... Is he back logging on his own site?

Yeah, what is up with that?

Secret training to make a run at another championship perhaps?