[Archers] and more congrats....Re: [MR] Royal Court Report - Royal Archery

[Charles Sprouse]

        First off, thank you to all who have sent their congratulations.  :)  As far as what I did to prep myself, the answer is fairly basic but important.  I think the key feature is being able to look at your own previous performances, especially at Kingdom Archery, and be able to be honest with yourself as to what is keeping you from going farther.  For me, both of the last two years I made it to the final tournament and both times was knocked out in that second round of four.  And both years for the same two reasons.  My major reason was that I kept coming up against my kryptonite, small ground targets.  The second reason was that I just could not compete with my peers when it came to speed.  As a crossbowmen, I am naturally going to sacrifice speed to the handbow shooters, that is the give and take (especially to the likes of Mr. Seamus 'shoot 17 arrows in 30 seconds and they all hit money' McCray), but I was sacrificing ALOT
 of speed to the handbow shooters as well as not even keeping up with the major players in the crossbow side, and that meant death in the finals, period.  So all year, along with the normal variations of practice, I made it a point to focus on those two things and made drastic improvements on both.  To fix the small ground target issue, there is no fancy fix, just get something appropriately small, toss them on the ground at ranges both medium AND REALLY SHORT, cuz those are deceptively hard, and shoot at them, over and over and over.  Also, I got a little lucky.  Two years ago, at Samuel's shoot that Miles won, the thing that killed me were his candles, the short pool noodle sections wrapped in duck tape.  Last year at Miles' shoot it was the snakes.  So two weeks ago on my way to Friday practice at Jonathas' house I stopped at Wal-Mart on a whim, bought three pool noodles for $1.50 a piece, cut 'em into 15-inch sections wrapped 'em up and shot
 at them for two weeks straight.  Laying down, standing up, short distance, long distance, whatever.  Then we get to the finals on Saturday and lo and behold, what does Mors pull out, several pool noodles.  I only missed two shots on pool noodles the whole time, and they were both on the last one before the baloon hit.  
        To fix the speed, Baron Jonathas had me sit down with every single bolt we could scrounge up in the house, mine, his, loaners bolts we had laying around, all of them.  So I had a pile of something like 80-100 boltsa sometimes sitting next to me.  And then he told me "Start shooting as if it is a timed round, keep that pace up like you only have 30 seconds, but just keep going until you run out of ammo, and don't aim at anything, just shoot, as long as they go that way you're good."  Man, let me tell you, shooting a crossbow with a 145 pound steel prod in rapid succession like 80 or 90 times makes you more tired than you can imagine, but that's the point.  He just kept telling me it's all about making your muscles think this crap is normal, then when you're 'just' doing it for 45 seconds or so, no big deal.  And I imaging this would work equally as well for the handbow shooters, you just need a crap-ton of arrows, who cares if they're
 accurate or not, you aren't actually aiming at anything, just shoot shoot shoot until you have no more arrows.  Doing this every couple weeks the whole year I increased from getting 5 shots off comfortably and 6 if things went smoothly in 30 seconds to being able to get off 7 comfortably, eight if things went well, and on rare occasions 9 when I'm smokin' in the same 30 seconds.  And more importantly, I can keep up that pace much longer.  And that is what saved me when I faced Jonathas in the last round, cuz it's not like he misses very much to leave me any spare shots.  If you aren't keeping up with him, you lose, period.
        So to sum it all up, I think most people out there could really benefit from the speed training, but other than that the important things is to break out of your normal practice routine and learn to be able to identify your weaknesses and tailor your practice to those aspects.  If you never get points on the clout, then I am going to make up ground on you there, so find somebody somewhere where you can practice 80 90 100 yard targets.  Whatever you're weakness is, there is a way to fix it.
 
        Thanks again to all who have sent me their congratulations, and I hope I can even come close to the amazingness of Mors' shoot next year.  (Planning started about a mile-and-a-half down the road after leaving the event when my wife said 'so what are you gonna do for a theme, when are you gonna spike the date, what site would you like to use, have you thought about what kinda targets you wanna use, is the theme gonna be silly or period, who are you gonna get for autocrat...   Now I undertsand what Mors meant when he told me Lady Esperanza was the real reason the shoot went so well)
 
Yours in service,
Karl


________________________________
From: "loreleielkins at aol.com" <loreleielkins at aol.com>
To: mobishob at yahoo.com; archers at seahorse.atlantia.sca.org 
Sent: Monday, May 14, 2012 1:51 PM
Subject: [Archers] and more congrats....Re: [MR] Royal Court Report - Royal Archery


Karl,  I'm with Fen, please share that story.  And, you can now say in your best Darth Voice "Once YOU were the Master, but now I am the Master."  Only a master of Evil Karl  (Since you do shoot an X-bow, after all. heh)  It was truly amazing to watch the final shoot out.  Well done.  Karl was also selected as the King's Archery Champion, as it should be. 

I want to also congratulate the two newest members of the Order of the Yewbow, Lord Ghijskijn Van den Vaerst and Lord Ivar Thorgislsson.  As well the various other deserving awards handed out this weekend.

I'm so proud to be in the Atlantian archery community.

Cheers!
Lorelei


-----Original Message----- 
From: Fen & Michelle <mobishob at yahoo.com>
To: archers <archers at seahorse.atlantia.sca.org>
Sent: Mon, May 14, 2012 12:41 pm
Subject: Re: [Archers] [MR] Royal Court Report - Royal Archery


 
Echo.  Congrats Karl!  You shot really well.  I heard you explaining what you did to get ready for this. I wish you would share that with the list, so everyone can appreciate how hard you worked (for almost the entire year?) to train for this.  Well-deserved. 
 
And didn't you depose your Mentor in the finals ?  How is that going over?   :)  

Esperanza & Mors: excellent shoot. Almost perfect. It was great to have so many targets outside of 40 yards!  

House Wolfhou: we all owe you thanks for hosting His Majesty and retinue. I think it was important to him to stay with archers so he could get a sense of our er.. "unique" community.  And from what I've heard, you were most gracious and hospitable.

Cheers
Fen  


Atlantian Archery. Nothing exists within 100 yards without our permission.


_______________________________________________
Archers mailing list
Archers at seahorse.atlantia.sca.org
http://seahorse.atlantia.sca.org/listinfo.cgi/archers-atlantia.sca.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://seahorse.atlantia.sca.org/pipermail/archers-atlantia.sca.org/attachments/20120514/9f9030d0/attachment-0003.htm>