The Think Tank

I felt pretty confident coming into this shoot, but after only 21 arrows my cable guard on the PSE broke off.  I grabbed the Hoyt and switched the sight bar and stabilizers over, but the Hoyt wasn’t sighted in and my first arrow was a 6.  I aimed my next two in the blue and pulled an X and a 10 out of them, but moving forward I continued to have left and right issues at the two longer distances. I wound up shooting a 3 and a 8 on the next end because I moved my sight the wrong direction.

Mom took the PSE to the Nock Point and got a new cable guard, but she didn’t get there until the lunch break.  I switched everything back and shot 50 and 30 with the Dominator, but things still continued to go left and right all day that I didn’t really understand.  I started getting pretty frustrated by the time we started shooting 30 meters.  I dropped three points in the first two ends, and that really ticked me off.  I took my binoculars off and started just shooting for form.

I decided that I wasn’t going to let anything down and I was only going to focus on hitting my form.  I only broke that rule once, when my sunglasses slid down my nose and blocked my ability to see the target.  I also decided that I wasn’t going to move my sight any more.

I cleaned the last four ends and actually shot some decent groups, although it felt like I grouped in a different spot every end.  I finished with a 1342 on the day, which wasn’t too bad I guess given the issues, but I was still disappointed, especially with the 334 I shot at 50.

I had high hopes for Sunday, but those hopes were quickly quashed.  We shot the 50m OR round, and right off the bat things were not working well.  Almost to a tee, every shot that I thought felt good would miss – hitting four cardinal points and most of the ones in between – and every shot that I struggled through or crept on would hit tens and X’s.  Four or five ends of that, and I got really frustrated.  I’d been trying to keep my attitude good, but I finally lost and acted a bit of an ass, I’m afraid.  Everyone could tell that I was unhappy, which is pretty much the opposite of what I want.

During the eliminations, I shot OK for the first few ends, but by the gold medal match I was pretty much all over the place.  I remember one end in particular, around end three of the match, that I thought to myself that all I really needed to do was just stay in the gold.  Immediately, on the very first arrow, I bobbled, collapsed and damn near shot a 6 on the first arrow.  I backed that up with a 9 and an 8 for a whopping 24, which completely wiped out every bit of the lead I had to that point.

That really ticked me off, but I didn’t know what to do to avoid it in the future.  I was so frustrated, and every time I tried to hit my form, the arrows avoided the center as if there were a force field over the ten ring.  When I can’t buckle own and shoot good form and get results, I don’t know where to go.

In the end, I won the Gold Medal match by shooting only two tens and a 136, which pretty much tells the whole story.  On that day, against those people, it was good enough for the win and that it is all it was.  I can’t imagine ever winning another round by shooting 136, and certainly not a medal match.

After everything was all done, I lined up the string with the center of the bow, and I noticed that my scope was way off center, about 1/2 inch outside of the string.  I do not remember it being that way prior to the cable guard issue.

I made a minor adjustment to the cable guard, and shot some arrows at 70 meters.  After sighting in, I put 8 of 11 in the ten, with two of the three misses coming from shots that I knew were going to miss when I shot them.

I figured there would be additional tweaking of the cable guard required.  I felt a little better after I figured that out, but all in all, I was still disappointed in my performance this weekend: both mentally and physically.

Here is the elimination bracket: