What no archery

A combination of family commitments, bad weather and a sprained foot has kept me away from the archery field. I have to say that my motivation has dwindled slightly as well. There has been a lot of stuff to do around the house recently and that has had to take priority. It’s amazing to think that there are full time athletes out there. How do they get other stuff done? We’ve still got boxes to unpack and we’ve been in our new house for six months now. I have got some important things done though, like making a gallon of pear wine and got some logs for the winter.
As far as the archery goes I amazed myself by coming second in the Nonsuch club champs despite only shooting about 3 dozen arrows in practise the day before. Having said that there was a gap of about 200 points between me and first place, and the line-up did not include a couple of the top archers. My philosophy is that you have to be in it to win it and I am pleased with my second place. A score of 938 is a personal best for the FITA round (although still some 127 points shy of a Bowman classification).
Still some would say it’s the taking part that counts, and I am applying this to the competition I took part in at Woking last Sunday. I shot really badly (even worse that the Herts County Champs earlier in the year). I should be nailing a Hereford round now but I just couldn’t seem to get a grouping at 80 yards. I tell a lie - my sighting arrows (the only arrows shot during the day that don’t count towards a score) were pretty good as I got a tight grouping which included 3 golds and 3 reds. This led me to a false sense of security believing it was going to be a good day.
How wrong I was. A score of 418 after 6 doz arrows at 80 yards was well short of what I’m capable of. I had a chat with myself over lunch and attempted to focus more for the afternoon session. I did fair a bit better at the shorter distances (60 and 50 yards respectively) but overall it was a bad performance made worse by the fact that Andrew (a long time arch rival and all round decent bloke) scored well enough to get the overall second place silver medal, best 1st class archer score, the best gold prize (arrow nearest the cross in the centre of the target) and won a bottle a malt whisky in the raffle.
Talk about peaks and troughs. Monday night saw the first indoor practise night of the season. Our club shoots indoors at Quicks. I was ready to do badly considering how I had done the day before and as I was setting up my equipment I started to wonder, having paid my £54 shooting fees for the first part of the season, if it was going to be worth it. About 16 of us cramped into the tiny indoor range which was extremely hot. Les the organiser had put me on the same target as Dave Morris probably our club’s best archer.
This somehow must have raised my game as I managed to come away with a score of 542 for the Portsmouth round. Not a personal best, but close, and 38 points off the club record. It was made all the more amazing as I had to guess at a sight mark being the first time I had shot indoors with my ACE arrows. I’m now thinking about getting a team together for the National indoor competition in January at Lilleshall.
In other news it seems I have an unclaimed club record for the Ladies FITA round. I’m torn between making the claim and publicising the fact that I shoot girly distances.