I've finally reached my old Qwerty speeds, so I figured I'd make another post. It took me about two months to reach my old typing speeds, practising far less than some of the others on this forum have.

One thing that I find a little interesting is that learning to touch type with the Qwerty layout felt very similar to learning with the Colemak layout. The end result feels different because your fingers are not moving nearly as much, but committing words and letter combinations to muscle memory feels more or less the same.

Another thing that definitely feels different is how fast I feel typing. Because of all the extra movement required to type with the Qwerty layout, I felt like a speed demon when I was typing at 50 WPM. With Colemak, I still feel like a fumbling butterfingers. I think this is probably a good thing because it is clearer to me that there is still a lot of room for improvement.

Anyway, I'll continue to update the graph in my first post as I continue to make progress.

Now that I'm typing over 60 WPM, I figured I'd make another post. I've heard a couple people around the internet noticing that their typing speed seems to peak at 60 WPM. I think the logarithmic way my (and possibly others') typing speed increases may give that impression. I predict my speed won't exceed 70 WPM until I double the number of races I've already completed, so someone whose skills are comparable to my own, who did not have a fancy graph behind them, would probably get the impression that their skill had peaked even when it had not.

One depressing thing to note: If I continued to improve the same way I have for the rest of my life, I'd probably never exceed 130 WPM. On my deathbed, there would be people a quarter my age typing faster than I could only dream of typing, even though I had spent more than sixty years practising. Well, I suppose that means that if you want to break world records, slow and steady will not win you the race.

I think that changing layouts from Qwerty to Colemak can improve your speed but not much. The maximum speed does not depend on keyboard layout, but on your speed of your brain nerve and your finger and arm muscles.

So you can be happy with your own progress. Don't compare yourself with anyone.

By the way, I guess all of us should be depressed because we are much poorer than Bill Gates, we are typing much slower than Sean Wrona, and we play tennis much worse than Novak Djokovic.

I decided to make a post regarding dips in my speed. There have been three major dips in the past 1000 races.

The first, around the 1700 mark, was probably because I was drunk when I performed my ten daily races. The relaxing effect of alcohol could not counter its negative effect on my motor skills. Still, it was a fun experiment.

The most recent dip, around the 2400 race mark, was likely caused by the flu. My joints, especially my left wrist, were achy. Combined with a general feeling of terribleness, my speeds really suffered.

The second dip, around the 1900 race mark, is completely unexplained. Probably just an unlucky combination of several small factors.

Also, I changed the title of this topic a little. I think "experiment" fits this topic a little better than "experience". And, holy Hell, that is a lot of data. I have difficulty believing that I have kept such a regular typing schedule. It's turned into something almost as regular as brushing my teeth.

EDIT:

I've also just had another flu, that turned into a sinus infection, so my speeds seemed to suffer again. I'm just starting to feel healthy again, and my speeds are back to normal as well.

I passed the 70 WPM mark a while ago, so I'm excited to reach the 80 WPM mark now. I have to roughly double my total number of races to increase my speeds by 10 WPM, so this will not occur for some time. However, I now hit 100+ WPM for a sentence or two during some of my typing tests, and it feels crazy. My keyboard uses loud, Cherry MX Blue switches, so when I hit 100+ WPM, my typing starts to sound like water rushing out of a fully-open tap.