peebes

Hey Tumas, I had a lot of problems with my early jumps (not AFF, a different schedule). It took me three times for level 2 and level 3 was only a partial success. It got into my head, and I was more worried about repeating the level and blowing money rather than going out of the plane. It took me a while to get over it. I was also told to relax in freefall. I was trying to force my arch, force my leg positions, and it was counter productive. My instructors also quickly corrected my statements that I failed the jump. Having to repeat is not a failure. I had to get to the mindset of not caring if I moved to the next level or not - I just had to say "F" it. That helped. Wind tunnel time helped me too. I had a great instructor that I had fun with in the tunnel. That helped move me to having fun in freefall. I ended up with about 58 minutes of tunnel time by time I was done. You can get there. Consider going to just hang out at the DZ - a good DZ is fun to be at jump or no jump. Once you have your license, you'll look back at your AFF training in a different light.

Like everyone else has said - Congrats on the weight loss. That is a huge accomplishment. It sounds like you have made the right decision (coming from a complete NOOB) given the amount of fear/anxiety you were dealing with. If you aren't having fun and don't see fun in the future, why do it. I will say that tunnel time helped me transition out of my rough days early on. I was unstable, fighting the wind, and generally not having a good time because I was afraid of having to repeat a level. After about 20-30 minutes in the tunnel, I found myself smiling and having fun while chasing my instructor around doing docking exercises. Once I was smiling in the tunnel, smiling and having fun in the sky followed soon after. Between the tunnel and some other reading (Mental Training for Skydiving and Life - John J. DeRosalia), I learned to say F-it and have fun. Your wife should be super impressed and grateful that you pushed through as much as you did. IMHO, this is definitely a sport you need to do for the love of the sport first and foremost.

When I started working towards my A License (almost there), I looked at my Garmin fitness tracker and thought it would be cool if I could use it to log my skydives and do something with it. I ended up building a rudimentary logbook application around it, but I still mainly use it to import my skydive data recorded with my fitness tracker and export to a KML file I could look at in Google Earth. It’s called YANSL (Yet Another Skydiving Log), It’s at the point I feel I can share it in very beta form. I’m sure the fact I’m new to the sport (and a bit naïve) may show through, so suggestions welcome if you try it. Right now, it imports TCX files from Garmin devices that have a GPS on board. I use a Vivoactive HR tracker I’ve had for over a year. It’s a low fidelity solution (hope to upgrade to a Fenix 5 or 5+ someday). If you can get a TCX file from other trackers (I think you can get TCX from Fitbit devices), feel free to send me an example jump recording and I can make modifications required to support that import. Here’s a link to the installer (Windows only at this point, I tested on Windows 7 and 10): http://www.mediafire.com/file/l4egn6tg4h88l5x/YANSL_0.1_Setup.exe/file Here’s a link to some videos going over basic usage (I may up the volume and regenerate them). Overview of what you will see with the Google Earth export - https://vimeo.com/289005955 Intro to YANSL - https://vimeo.com/289006049 Walkthrough of importing fitness tracker data - https://vimeo.com/289006070 I still have work to do on it. If there are useful additions/modifications, please let me know via a reply post or message. It would not be hard to produce a version compatible with Macs. I haven’t decided whether or not to release source code at some point in the future. You can get Google Earth here: https://www.google.com/earth/desktop/ Finally, here are some screenshots from one of my jumps. I also included a graph I built with Excel from the csv export feature of the logbook. Shows pulse rates for student jump 1, 2, and 10. Enjoy!