I’ve deliberately waited a while after the competition before writing this post. To say I was a little disappointed when the results were announced is an understatement, hopefully now the initial disappointment has passed I can give a more open minded assessment.
After my third place in Scotland, I was hoping for a good performance at the 3Ds this year. I’ve never done very well at either of the national competitions and missed out on the 3Ds last year as Artemis were setting one of the courses. I was hoping to get more practice prior to the competition but the weather put pay to that. I only managed a couple of practice sessions of around 100 arrows in the garden the week before the competition.
I was under no illusions Saturday morning, I wasn’t in a position to win this competition but I was hoping to be in the top three. I would be happy if I was in the top 5 and realistically, anywhere in the top ten would be an ok result.
The competition itself was a story of two very different days and very different courses. The A course which we shot on the first day was a really clever course with interesting shots and good use of the ground. I was caught out a few times, as well as having a few brain-farts of my own. I ended the day with a score of 652 from the 40 targets on the course which I was fairly happy with. Once I’d got off the course, I heard some of the scores from my class and was disappointed to find out I was almost a hundred points from the top score. I expected this to put me somewhere around 20th place. There were no overnight results posted so I had to wait for Sunday.
When I booked in Sunday morning, the overnight results were printed and posted in the admin tent. To my surprise, despite being 100 points less than the leader, I was still in 5th place and only 10 points from 3rd. The bad news, there were only twenty points separating 3rd to 12th place. First and second place were in a class of there own and barring a complete meltdown they wouldn’t be caught. Third place was up for grabs on Sunday.
We were shooting the B course on Sunday and boy what a contrast to the A course it was. Out of the 40 targets there were only a couple that were stretched past 30 yards. The rest were right on top of you and begging to be hit. This meant the day would be more of a precision round than a big game round. You could see the inner kills on almost all the targets and you needed to be hitting them on a course like this. Unfortunately, I didn’t. Well not enough of them anyway. I ended the day with a score of 734 from the 40 targets and I knew at this point it probably wasn’t going to be enough.
I ended the weekend with a combined score of 1386. I hoped this would be enough to get me a third place, but realistically I knew it wasn’t. When the results were announced I missed the 3rd spot by a total of 32 points. I’d still have to wait until the full results were published to find out my final position. As it turns out, I’m managed to hold on to my 5th place, 14 points behind 4th.
On the whole I was please with my performance over the two days. It’s probably my most consistent performance at a champs yet, although not my best result. It certainly made a change to be shooting for something other than to be in the top 10 on the Sunday. More practice is required before our trip to France in a few weeks though. Still, I can’t wait for the EBHC.