How to win

There are two things that will make you successful tossing a caber; one is form, since the judging is done by direction, and the other is energy.Tossing a caber, like tossing anything, takes kinetic energy. The Scottish think they invented kinetic energy. Like the Greeks they find a way to have invented everything.

But energy is sort of abstract for most people to understand so we instead think in terms of work, like how much weight can be moved in some period of time. Car commercials, for example, commonly talk about horsepower but what does that mean? The classical definition of a horsepower is 33,000 f *lb /minute, but caber tossing doesnt take a minute so if we divide by 60, we have 550 lbs. moved one foot in one second, which is a little closer to what we need.

A caber is 150 lbs. so 1 HP would lift it 3.67 feet in that one second but a Caber is 18 feet long, give or take so how useful is 3.67 feet? Since the goal is to get the narrow end being held near the waist pointed directly away from the thrower, it needs to go end over end so it should not go straight up but rather tilted forward. How much is going to be the difference between art and science.

First the science. Well put some more details in the notes but you can see here that getting the height you need to get this to go forward rather than backward means the bottom of the Caber has to go almost to the throwers head, less than 3.67 feet. But a Caber also has to keep going, it wont reach its transition point for 2 or 3 seconds, meaning actually getting that Caber where you want it is around 3 HP of work.