10point9

The return to dublin was a solo run (Daniel’s staying for an extra week of training, the lucky git). Up at 0750, showered, dressed, final bit of packing (toothbrushes!) and down to the last breakfast with everyone.

And then it’s off to the taxi, which arrived three minutes early (a bit of a shock here, where 0930 means 0930, not 0929 or 0931 ). Half an hour of a drive through gloomy drizzle to Senajoki train station (and say what you like about stereotypes being wrong, but how many Irish taxi drivers can be comfortably silent for half an hour and not think it odd?). A brief wait and then onto the train and out of the station at precisely 1038 (see what I mean about times?) and I got to sit down at my PC seat (meaning you get a small table and a power socket for your laptop) and write up my notes from the last few days for the blog.

We arrived in Helsinki promptly at 1352 (again with the time!), and after checking in the luggage into lockers and storage, it was shopping time for a few hours (there’s a birthday party for a friend’s daughter the day after I get back and I was successful in finding her a nice moomin, but not a pink one ). And of course some nice Nordic stuff for herself indoors, who sent me on this course as one of the better birthday presents ever After the shopping, it was onto the bus (Bus eireann, take note – LCD displays on bus stops showing the three next incoming buses. How hard can it be in Ireland if they can do it in the sub-zero temperatures they get here? And their website has a google maps type of arrangement where you can see the route of the bus so you can see where the best stop is for you).

Check into the hotel, leave the rifle in secure storage, and up to the room to nap for a half-hour. Then dinner (reindeer carpaccio and steak… lovely, medium rare, pink-in-the-middle *steak* that tasted of something! oh, the simply joys…) and a walkabout to a local coffee shop for coffee and a slice of passionfruit cheesecake. Where you find a passionfruit in Finland I don’t know, and frankly, after the week, I don’t care either Then back to the room to finally get to post the blogs. And tomorrow, KLM. Again…

Day three started better than day two in terms of aches and pains. No panadol needed for ‘muscular aches/pain’ this morning, and no headache from dehydration either – for which we had blue powerade to thank. We were chugging that stuff like there were no side effects Breakfast was the usual bread, cheese, ham and frankfurters (protein, protein, protein), apple juice and coffee that was the staple for the week.

Then off to the range and this morning Kimmo had me working on trigger control, or more specifically, taking the shot faster. Everyone who’s ever coached me is now thinking “yeah, right, good luck with that…” because if I have one problem apart from hold, it’s over-holding on the target. “Take the f*&@@$#! shot Mark” has been a refrain of Geoff’s now for some time…

I won’t say Kimmo succeeded. I will say that during the camp he was able to point out actual figures using the Noptel machine that quantified what we all knew – I’m too damn slow on that trigger. Average human reaction time is 0.2 seconds, so you can’t reduce your delay much below that amount; mine is currently at 0.44, over twice that. So I have much work to do here. On the noptel, it was somewhat easier, so maybe I should put in some Rika time back home – but the temptation to play with the damn thing is high, or to ignore the actual impact point and watch the hold statistics.

After two hours of this, I was in some pain – the muscles that had been nice and quiet before breakfast were now getting quite shouty. So the break for lunch was very welcome, and after lunch I took a page from everyone else’s books and crashed into bed back in the room for an hour before heading back to the range a bit more refreshed.

Back on range it was time for more trigger control exercises. I went through about 80 live shots and I lost count of the dry-firing ones. I thought I was getting good results, including one particular 10.6 which was the best shot of the camp to date – deliberate hold, saw the ten, took it positively instead of waiting for it to come to me and the trigger to somehow go off magically.

After the training, the inevitable finally happened and we took out a few golf clubs and knocked a few golf balls down the range. This year I was far, far better than I was last year. Last year, I only managed to slice through 90 degrees and hit the wall facing me instead of the one we were aiming at: this time I managed to get the ball to go through 180 degrees and hit the *back* wall.

Yes folks, golf. Not my sport.

After that, we went back to the hotel’s gym in order to do some work with swiss balls (and yes, we made all those jokes too). I will say this much – for a giant inflatable ball, they make for a great bit of gym kit for core work. I’m quite impressed (and sore). The balance element they bring is good too – I was being pushed hard to maintain my balance while kneeling on it and only Neil Stirton was able to stand on them.

Once the gym work was done, it was back off to hydrotherapy. This time around Kimmo decided to show us the Finnish way to do things and demonstrated the plunge pool. Allow me to explain, for those who’ve not done this. The idea is, you go to Finland in late Autumn/early Winter, when the average temperature is between 5C and -30C, you change into swimming trunks and you get into the normal hydrotherapy pool, which is about 5’6″ or so of comfortably warm water, and after a moment or two, you get out, walk up to this smaller pool (about 3′ by 5′ by 4′ deep) that’s filled with ice-cold water, and you get in. And immerse yourself fully. And stay there for up to two or three minutes. After which, you get back in the hot water. And you do this repeatedly.

And the really insane part? It feels good. Well, not the first time you get in, that’s a bit of a shock to the system. I think I lasted 30 seconds before legging it to the warm water again. But after that initial shock, it’s a very remarkable feeling. All the capillaries in your skin have shut down and then start to reopen in the warm water, so you get a feeling akin to pins and needles, but different and not as intense and not painful. It’s like a deep tingling all over and it’s quite pleasant, you find yourself grinning like an eejit. It’s disconcerting in that the cold water does stick to you when you get back in the pool so your skin does eventually say “I give up, I don’t know what the hell you’re doing to me” and starts feeding nonsense signals to your brain so you don’t know if you’re in hot or cold water anymore. All in all we were back into the pool three or four times tonight. And after that, the obvious thing to do is spend a few minutes in the jacuzzi and then hit the steam room.

By the way, the steam rooms in the gyms back home in Ireland? Pale imitation. The steam in these were so thick you caouldn’t see clearly across the room. And it really heats you up after the plunge pool, and forget dehydration, this thing gets more moisture into you than a danish chicken breast water injector. Your skin feels better, you feel warmer, you feel utterly hydrated, and completely decongested to boot. Wonderful stuff. You can see why the Finns make such a big deal about steam rooms and saunas.

Dinner after that was a bit of an anticlimax really. Chicken with rice and salad and some nice bread and a yoghurt&pineapple dessert. Nothing terribly fancy. Then back to the rooms, write up the diary and the notes for the blog for the day, skype home, watch a little tv and hit the hay. Well, almost. We did try to do a load of laundry tonight.

Travel from Helsinki to Kuortane was calm and peaceful by comparison to the flight to Helsinki. A nice fast train ride (~160kmh) north to Seinajoki (the tango capital of Finland apparently) and then a taxi ride west to Kuortane. We arrived around half five or so, two hours after sunset, and dropped the gear to the rooms, had dinner and then fell into bed.

The next morning we were a few minutes late to breakfast (still not adjusted to the two hour time difference). Ham, cheese, bread and pickles with water and coffee. Definitely not a greasy fry-up Then up to the lecture hall for a brief introductory talk by Kimmo Yli-Jaskari, the head coach for the coures (and the head coach for British Shooting as well as a few other things, including an international level Golf coach. Sports is seen as a real career over here instead of being the eternal PE teacher it is back home). The talk was the same as at the last course, with some small extra data thrown in, but basicly went over the three components of shooting (hold, aim, trigger for those wondering) and then how those are statistically analysed and how various shooters show up in the statistics. You can pretty much predict an air rifle shooter’s score from their hold statistics as measured by Noptel (or RIKA or SCATT), for example. There was also a section on training plans and a sample one given out by Kimmo that he uses for training.

Then it was over to the range.

We’re in the golf hall again as you can see, using megalinks at 10m and 50m. Today I was the only person shooting air, all the others were shooting 50m prone.

When they weren’t monkeying about at the start, that is

Fun and games over, we got down to shooting and by 1000h, we were well underway and I was dry-firing my way though Kimmo’s MDC (Maintainance-Development-Competition) training programme exercises. For the amount of rust on me, the hold felt surprisingly good, the position robust, and so long as I didn’t look at the performances of any of the others there, I felt rather good about my shooting. Of course, that didn’t last. All morning was dry-firing, then lunch (rice, steamed beef stew – don’t ask, and yoghurt for dessert), and then back to the range. At which point I started to put lead downrange (and two other shooters started shooting air rifle so I’d feel even more discouraged by their constant tens ).

I couldn’t group at all. It took a shot or two to figure it out – it was the same problem I’d had at Bisley every time I’ve shot there. Brightly lit target, dark background:

Which leads to lousy sight alignment because of a lousy sight picture:

Can you see the edge of the outer black circle clearly?

After talking with Kimmo and Jozef about this, we tried a few things (half a dozen colour filters, rear iris wide open through to shut tight, with and without my shooting glasses, and with and without the mirror I normally use on the rear iris), with no decent results. A lot of fustration and shots ranging from 9s to 5s later (and one of those fives hit just before a floodlight failed and I couldn’t help saying “Oh come on, it wasn’t that bad!”, which has lead to a bit of joshing over dinner about how I shot out the lights – which I didn’t! ), and we weren’t too much closer to a solution. We eventually gave up for the afternoon’s shooting, with notes for myself to get an eye exam for both a general prescription update and a contrast sensitivity test when I got home.

There was some work on the rifle itself though; Jozef pointed out how the Anschutz 2002CA stock has a flaw – the buttplate, viewed from above, is not aligned with the boreline correctly, it’s a centimetre or so off to the right, pushing the rifle into you if you’re a right-handed shooter.

This puts pressure on my position, so he wanted to move the MEC buttplate left to compensate; but the MEC buttplate it seems can’t do that (there’s only a horizontal slot for adjustment of position at the top of the buttplate, not the bottom, so it can rotate but not translate — which, by the way MEC, is forbidden under the ISSF rules, 7.4.2.1 (pg.289)!So a new buttplate needs to be bought when I get home.

Another reason to buy a new buttplate is that while talking to Jozef about this, the rifle fell off the table while we were both distracted, it landed on the bottom tip of the buttplate and knocked it flat – and I didn’t realise it until later, but that sheared off a locking pin on the buttplate, which means the bottom heel of the plate can’t be properly adjusted anymore. So DURC get an equipment donation and I try to find a buttplate that can be adjusted according to ISSF rule 7.4.2.1 properly.

After the afternoon’s shooting, we stashed the kit and hit the main hall for an hour of physical training, mostly an hour of floorball, a sort of finnish indoor hockey thing with lots of rules about high sticking and handball and kicking the ball and so on. Pity they had a Corkman on one team and a Kerryman on the other (Kerry won 10-9, in case you have no faith). Next year we’re getting Kimmo a hurley, a sliotar and a bit of video of how hurling is played in an attempt to show why shoulder checking someone into the wall on the far side of the court from the ball is really just how you’re meant to play the game

After that was the steam room (and this was a proper Finnish steamroom here, as in three feet of visibility and temperatures well north of body temperature, not the lame versions we have at home), and then the hydrotherapy pool (picture a pool about 5’6″ deep, filled with warm water, and several pipes dumping more hot water into the pool onto its occupant’s heads, backs and feet (underwater pipes too), all at about 3bar of pressure. It’s like being massaged by warm water and for sore feet it’s unrivalled.

Dinner after that (rice, potatoes, salad, steamed burgers and some odd gloopy chocolate dessert that tasted like chocolate yoghurt with bourneville cocoa stirred in) and then off to bed to get the energy to face day two…

A few weeks back, just before the NTSA AGM, I resigned from the board. I guess ten years is about as much as anyone ought to do on a committee, in fact I personally think I left it a few years too long. It means I get to go back to shooting again. But, like after any long slog at any job, I found I was rather burnt out, and was having a lot of trouble getting back to the line again. Enter Herself Indoors, who for a birthday gift, is sending me back to Kuortane for the training camp this year.

I went before, in 2007, and would have gone in 2008 but it didn’t run; so I’m looking forward to this. I’m hoping it will act as a mental reboot, and let me recapture some of what I lost sight of during all the legislative and political bleepstorm we’ve been dealing with for the last few years in Irish target shooting — namely, actually shooting!

Myself and Daniel have been talking about our preparations and post-trip plans, Daniel’s done all of the travel logistics (thanks Daniel!) and I’m hoping that with the benefit of the 2007 trip’s experience, we’ll take away more than we did last time and recover from the return-home shock better than I did last time round.

There is something about going to a place like Kuortane for a training camp like this one that is deeply satisfying on a level that’s hard to explain — unless you’ve done something that demands absolute consistent perfection of you, and which pushes you to your absolute limit in some area. And if you have done something like that (whether it be Michelin-level cooking or high-level martial arts or really deep mathematics or whatever), then I don’t need to explain it, because you already know what I mean better than I can explain it.

For the first time in a long time, I’m really looking forward to getting back to the line again