Continuing with training

Well its been longer than I intended between updates. It was feeling a bit of an anticlimax after all the build up to Hanover only to have to withdraw from the competition the week before. However since then I have still been doing plenty of training. Those who follow me on facebook may know that yesterday was my birthday and I did not even get exempt from training on my birthday.

The prone is coming along really quite well. I have had a couple more training sessions where the score was very high. If I can achieve similar scores in competition to what I am doing in training, then there is a good chance I could be competing for a medal in prone. It has slightly caught me out how quickly things seem to have come together once we found a combination of position and equipment which does not cause me pain. Within just over a month my goal has moved from just achieving a qualifying score for the World Championships to actually thinking about competing for medals.

We should not forget about my standing, I am still doing training for that. However as I am much more experienced with that the jumps in performance are much more gradual. In fact I am possibly at a point where I am just pushing a little too hard at trying to improve things and so just applying too much pressure. It may be time to just let me relax and shoot naturally for a little time and then review what needs to be improved based on that.

It may be a slightly quiet time in my shooting year, but I will try and get back to posting more frequent updates.

Time for plan B

Next week will be the International Shooting Competition of Hanover. Unfortunately I needed to make a last minute change of plans as due to some unforeseen delays in preparations I was not able to get everything ready in time.

The problem related to the fact that World Shooting ParaSport only approved vision impaired shooting as an official discipline in their programme back at the end of February this year. Whilst the competition had been announced for some time prior to that, there were certain things which could not be started until WSPS had officially accepted VI shooting. It was always going to be tight and unfortunately I encountered some unexpected delays. So as everything was not going to be ready I made the decision I would have to withdraw from the competition.

This change of plan should not cause any problems in the grand scheme of things for the year as I still have the World Cup at the end of July which I can use for qualification for going to the World Championships. The few extra months should be sufficient time to get everything ready. In fact this had always been the plan B.

One advantage is that this will give me more time to get settled with my prone shooting before going to a qualification competition. Whilst based upon what I am shooting in prone, achieving the qualification score should not be a problem, but may be by the time of the World Cup I will actually be competing to be in the final. That would probably have been a bit of an ambitious goal for Hanover.