Today I was shooting at the ESSU competition at Bisley. It was an early start, leaving home at 5:00am. Being so early on Sunday morning there was little traffic and we arrived around the time we hoped. My assistant was going to be shooting prone rifle on the first detail at 8:30. As my call to the line was not until 10:00, I went to have some breakfast in the meantime.
Once my assistant had finished shooting, time to start getting me ready to shoot. We knew it was going to be tight and in the rush I forgot to do some stretching exercises.This combined with the rushing and nerves, meant at first I was not quite as settled as I would have liked and there was more movement than I wanted. Unfortunately this did show itself in my scores, with the first 10 shot series being the worst. As the competition went on I started to settle and things started to pick up. The nerves did seem to be impacting upon some of my technique, I just need to find a way of keeping relaxed in these competitions.
My score was 550.0, which is lower than I had been hoping to do. As it is possible to see how my scores improved as I relaxed, I am sure that if I can learn to control my nerves a bit better my score will improve. Also as we have some video of me doing my competition, we should be able to learn quite a lot from this competition. So it has been useful for training even though I would have liked to have done better.
