Bad Habits

Gosh really......not me....surely not!

Oh yes!

Oh no!

Well what do you know?
There I was on Wednesday afternoon happily plonking arrows into the boss at 80 yards still not using a long rod and happy to be scoring 70/dozen. When Dennis, shooting on the next boss (who really does know what he is talking about) said after one shot, "I didn't see where that landed but it should have missed!". When I asked why, he came over and said "shall I show you?", he then waited for me to draw up and then held his lite cigarette about an inch from the back of my hand holding the string, the message was clear, if that hand comes away from your face it's gonna get burned!
He did not hold his hand there while I shot but after I released he said, " Wow that was perfect, your hand came straight back under your ear without me asking, I have never seen someone go from such a dead release to that in one shot before."
 Well to me the that pretty much said it all, I do know how to shoot properly and it may sound big headed but my form is pretty near as good as it can be, but I can still forget it all and shoot like a noob in about 30 seconds flat. The end result of Dennis pointing out my transgression was an intimidate increase of about 5 points per dozen, enough said.  

Watch your form all the time and when you think that you have it all sorted and it is easy watch it even closer because that is when you will start to let things go.

A better perspective.

Just a quick one today thinking about Mike's bow being a bit buzzy and not a quiet as he expected it to be.

While I was shooting on Sunday one of our newer members commented on my "Professional" bow, I explained about the reasons for the strange design of the Revolution and asked if he would like to try a few shots with it. He is a beginner who started shooting in October last year and his current bow is an SF with 24# limbs, he had also spent the last hour consistently shooting four and five gold ends at fifty and sixty yards.
So after I had finished shooting my round I pulled the boss into thirty yards and let him loose, the two things I noticed were that he shot six arrows into a group about six inches across (you know how sometimes you just hate people), the second was that my bow sounded much quieter than when I am shooting it. Just being four feet away made such a difference.

An unstable day.........

Well I was thinking to myself that as I had shot quite well without a long rod last week, I went to the club yesterday  with the intention of shooting an albion with no stabalisation.
So off I went to the club and got setup and things started pretty well at 80 yards I scored 202 with three dozen arrows which is not too bad with my best end pictured below.

(Oh and I think I had forgotten just how nice my Revo' feels when it is bare.....)

At 60 yards I scored 244 and at 50 yards 250, for a total of 696 (only 4 points off a first class score). The only distance I was a bit disappointed with was the 50 yards , as I know I can shoot close to 280 even without a long rod at that distance. 

The only thing that stands out is that by the time I got down to 50 yards my bow arm was really starting to feel tired. Now this is not a problem I normally have shooing even long rounds, so all I can think is that I was  feeling the extra work I was having to do to keep the bow still with no long rod. If that is the case then one of my reasons for shooting with no stabs' (to strengthen the muscles that give fine control) would seem to be working.

My theory is that although it is fairly easy to build strength into the  big muscle groups that do all the hard work such as lifting the bow and drawing the string, it is much harder to build strength into the smaller muscle groups that control the fine movements. But if you take yours stabs' off and shoot with a sighted bare bow you will have to use these very muscles to hold the bow steady, then when you put your stabs back on you should notice a difference.....in theory. 

The other interesting thing was I scored 10 golds in total at 80 yards compared with 9 when I shot a PB on Sunday in the league match. Now this is a one off so far but I am going to shoot for the next three weeks with no stabs and see how my scores go and then put my long rod back on and see how it effects things. 

  

Great weekend

We had a league match against West Essex last Sunday (15th June), after not being able to field a full team  for last months match I was just hoping for a good day and getting five archers on the line so we would have a fighting chance. On the day we did not have the minimum five archers but six! So a good start, four of us were quite experienced with one of the others shooting in their second and one their first ever league match and only the second time they had shot at 80 yards!
The weather was kind with almost no wind, cloud cover to keep the sun off and a comfortable temperature if a little on the cool side. I was shooting with two great guys from West Essex, Brian and Sean and we had a really good time (well I did and think they did too). The long and the short of it was we won by 192 points, of our top five scores (you field a team of up to eight and then the top five scores count), the lowest was Peter who was shooting in only his second league match and scored just over 400, I think he came along thinking he was just making up numbers, but on the day without his score we would have lost, so well done Peter. Our other novice Sheila was shooting with such a low poundage bow that even with the sight reversed at 80 yards she was aiming at the tree tops behind the boss, she had the option  to shoot along side at a shorter distance but decided that she would like to shoot with the team so another well done.
As for me after my last round I was not expecting much but ended up on a personal best of 752, it was just one of those days when things clicked (or didn't) for me. Not much else to add except to say that West Essex as usual were great hosts and I expect the tea afterwards was up to their usual high standards, but I had to scoot off straight away and catch a train to Norwich for an urgent meeting in a bar with two old school friends, which led to a really good couple of days during which we ate far too much drank just about enough and did some things that some people think we are getting too old for....but that's a whole other story.

Unstable

Hi all, I got to the club yesterday in the end (or rather the beginning) nice and early to get in a last practice round before our next league match, against West Essex on Sunday. It did not go well, so not well that after the first two ends at eighty yards I decided that I was not going to get any kind of reasonable score so I might as well just enjoy myself. Off came my long rod and I shot with just the sight on the bow. Now the first thing lots of people will tell you is that without the long rod your gonna get hit by your bow as after the shot it will rotate backwards instead of forwards as modern bows are made to be shot with a long rod on them (if I was cynical I would say that is an excuse for making a badly balanced bow in the first place). But they will then be proved wrong as even with just a sight on it the Revo' (well mine anyway) stays vertical after you release, I also find that my sight marks are much better without the long rod pulling the bow down. To cut a long  story short I ended up shooting 673 for an albion, which I didn't think was too bad with no stabilization (well not after the first dozen which I only scored 53 with) against a personal best of 748.

Once again the thing that really hit me was just how much I like shooting my bow without the long rod on it, I think next year I am going to have a serious look  at doing some bare bow work.

The start of another week and just had another weekend that I did not get to the club to shoot, good reasons though. Went to go to a friends new babies dedication at their church, yarn bombed a library (don't ask ....really just don't) and finally finished sorting out our son's bedroom reshuffle that he wanted. Not going to shoot on Wednesday (my day off in the week) as an engineer is calling to (hopefully) sort out our hot water or lack off, so I thought I would take the opportunity to rub down and re-oil the kitchen work tops. Then this Sunday we are off to Hastings for a nice lunch with my brother in-law, which will be great, really but I won't get down to the club (well if we are heading down late morning/early afternoon on I might be able to get a quick round in). Then it will be another week and I bet there is something that needs doing on the Wednesday and then on the 15th June we have our next league match against West Essex!

Do you ever get the feeling that you are in a time machine and each year some bugger racks up the speed another notch, I swear every year I have less and less time to do more and more things. I cannot believe that in less than two weeks we have our second league match of the season ( that means we will be half way through June, that's six months since my last Birthday, that means it's only six months till my next one......aaaghh!). But so far it has not been too bad a season, even with the elbow thing I have already shot three first class scores this season and set a new personal best. Now I just have to try and get at least five people for each of the remaining league matches this season and try to find some time to get a training schedule to bring on some of our newer members for next season.