Well the British Championships finished today. It was good to be there, some interesting conversations and the demonstration of crossbow was also interesting.
Firstly the competition itself. I feel a little disappointed with my score of 590 out of a possible 600, of course in free standing. I think I had been hoping to improve on last year's score, however it was still good enough to win. As I said in an earlier post the lack of anyone from Aberdeen did mean the free standing was a bit low on numbers and so the scores were very spread, second place was down in the 540s so were not really posing much of a challenge to me, probably why its not feeling a great achievement to me.
Supported through up a number of surprises. Well done to Lee from Hereford for winning the supported with 597, particularly good as he is fairly new into the sport. Also well done to him for breaking a long standing junior record I had set a good number of years ago. I just hope Lee will keep going with the shooting. A bit of a surprise from Carole Brown getting 589, very surprising that it still was good enough for second place.
Now to some of the matters which were interesting. Blackburn Rifle Club had come with a crossbow for people to try out shooting crossbow. Having a go with that is the first time I have tried shooting anything but an air rifle. It was an interesting experience, you certainly can feel some recoil on the crossbow and you need to try and keep the follow through much more than you can get away with for air rifle. I don't think I will be taking up the crossbow as a major part of my shooting at the moment, it may be useful to try and improve my trigger/follow through technique which does need improving.
Finally it was good to talk with John from Blackburn Rifle Club and Liz from the disabled shooting project. We covered all sorts of things, possible other disciplines one could try and do, the state of the rules, ways of increasing competitions, my project for my Open University course and other things. On other disciplines I have now at least some ideas on possible things to look at for air pistol, something I really would like to do as it would certainly reduce the baggage when travelling to competitions.
Its been a good day, however long and tiring with that early start I needed to make to get to Wolverhampton in time for my detail. Hopefully if those discussions lead to anything then I will be writing about those developments here.
