On Thursday, January 7, 2016 at 10:24:34 PM UTC-5, jfitch wrote:


Some people do push over in lift, and nearly everybody pulls up in lift. If you are near cloud base in a thermal and you expect sink in the ring around it (very common), a correct strategy is to turn sharply 180 degrees from the intended departure direction and dive through the core so that you have maximum speed gain with minimum loss to traverse the sink. This is exactly when a glider entering is pulling up. 1000 ft is nothing in this scenario.

That is so George Moffat 70's right out of Winning on the Wind.
There is very rarely an improvement in speed made good by some very dynamic exit of a thermal. The case that would favor it is very strong lift surrounded by strong sink.
A better technique is to use the lift at the end of the climb to smoothly accelerate the glider to the desired speed before hitting the sink. Rarely would this require more than a few hundred feet at most. Modern gliders get up to speed with very little loss of altitude.
What you are describing may be fun but it is not very efficient.
Pull ups obviously can and are more dynamic but even there smoothness pays off. UH