Been pretty busy this week so far, so haven't had the opportunity to blog about IVP till now.

It seems that my tradition of messing up during IVPs still stands. Sadly. Sigh.

In Year 1, my finger tab broke and ruined the whole competition, a real waste, especially since I was hitting scores of at least 50 per end at the time.

In Year 2, I was still getting used to the weight of my 34-pound limbs and my clicker and I got tired way too fast.

Now, in Year 3, things are kind of a waste all over again.

The day started out well; I achieved my highest score ever for 50m distance with a 122cm target--285/360 and achieved my highest scoring 50m end at the same time-- 54/60. This actually put me in a pretty good position to win the vouchers that Lim Chee Wee was offering to the winners of each category, provided that they could achieve a certain score for the 50m distance as well.

For C-Class Ladies, the requirements were that the champion for the event had to achieve a score of 285 at 50m with the 122cm target face.

So I hit the 285, but I didn't end up being first. Coz I screwed up my 30m end.

I'm one of those strange people who shoots better from 50m than 30m; although my all-time best for 30 m is higher than 50m-- 289/360-- you realise that it isn't *very* much higher. Which just really proves that Gerri needs to train more for the 30m distance.

So the girl who was placed second at the end of the 50m round (this NTU girl called Shuen Hui) caught up with my score during the 30m end and she wound up first instead. Sigh.

And due to some strange circumstances which I'm still unable to fathom, I wasn't able to shoot two arrows in the middle of the 30m round because of a lack of time. Double sigh.

So I watched my individual gold medal get away from me.

Team event was also kinda screwed up. I still don't really understand how it happened, especially since my team (sans Janice, since she was away on holiday, so she was replaced by Pecilius) had defeated the team which we were first up against for the first round of the team knockout event.

We got beat by 4 points. Damn. Sigh.

Oh well. I'm told that there's always NUS Open. Hopefully we'll all do better then.

We didn't send any of our Standard Class archers this time (although the juniors still turned up in the late morning to show support) since NTU threw a spanner into the mix by suddenly increasing the distance for a Standard Class shoot to 50m. I personally think that they just decided to make things difficult for us coz our Standard Class trashed theirs at the Sembawang shoot, but hey, that's just me. :P

The small team that we sent did pretty well, though. :)

C-Class Ladies: Kristy-- Bronze, Myself-- Silver
C-Class Ladies' Team: Kristy, Pecilius, Me-- Bronze
C-Class Men: Weiquan-- Silver
C-Class Men's Team: Special mention coz Weizheng, Nicholas and Weiquan are fourth place for a fourth time. Don't worry guys, one day you'll overcome that barrier. We have faith in you...! :)
Open Class Mixed: Zhan Tao-- Bronze (for his first competition in Open Class, I think it's pretty admirable.)

(And speaking of Kristy, I've just realised recently that Kristy writes really engaging blogposts. Go see her IVP entry here.)

So, in the end, a silver for individual (again; I'd better not be stagnating at second place this year, especially after stagnating at 4th place for the whole of the last academic year) and a bronze for team event.

And since it seems Lim Chee Wee's standards were too high and no one managed to fulfill both criteria for the vouchers, the $300 vouchers for archery equipment were instead split up among the top 3 placings for each category, so I got a $100 voucher as well.

On the bright side, the 300-point barrier is starting to look more and more breakable to me. Maybe it's my (relatively) new ACC arrows which are doing wonders for my groupings. Maybe it's all the time I've spent tuning and actually learning this time about what I'm doing, which has given me confidence. And the increasing scores are helping too.

Maybe I'll start aiming for a score of at least 290 during NUS Open.

Meanwhile, yet another thing which is making me happy is that a little corner of my table in my hall room is accumulating all this semester's trophies. :)