It’s 9am, and I’m on the line again. Kind of an undignified time to do anything in Las Vegas. Not much useful gets done at 9am here. It’s dead time. I’ve never shot at 9am before, but there’s a lot of things here I’ve never done before.

I’m back in the same rodeo hall, on the same target, same drill as yesterday. They call us for the first practice end, and the bow feels twice as heavy as before. Uh-oh. I dismiss the practice ends, and start work. That’s when it starts going wrong. The worst is the head.

You know those days where there’s one thought in your mind, and then there’s also an ongoing narrative (for me, it’s often what I’m going to write that day). And then there’s usually a song. Today, it’s ‘Baby Please Don’t Go‘ by Them!. Maybe they were playing it in the cafe. And of course, none of these things will budge. No matter how many breaths you take, whatever you focus on, and ahhhh that one is sunk.

It’s awful. It’s terrible. I can’t get the shots away cleanly. My release doesn’t want to behave. The shot feels clumsy.  I finish on 203, thirty-seven points down on yesterday. It really feels like a testament to how far I’ve come that I managed to score that many. It felt much, much worse. There’s even a couple of wide ones which ‘group’ in the low left six, which is an error I’ve never had before.

At the halfway mark, when the target faces get changed from bottom to top, I rip the horrible face off and put on a fresh one. As an aside, I am grateful to Chris Hill for filling me in on why the faces get moved and the ‘bottom line’ shoot first.

The reason why you shoot bottom target first in Vegas, is because in the old days, the shoot was at the Riviera casino. The lighting was super bad so they had spotlights above the target bales to light them. If you shot the top target, the shadows of the arrows would be all over the bottom target. So most people preferred the top position and most didn’t like the bottom. Since it gave an advantage to shoot at arm height, they made everyone shoot half the rounds one on the bottom and half on top to be fair.

The second half on the bottom is a little tidier, but not much. It’s still all over the face compared to yesterday. I’m glad when it ends. I’m glad for the sympathetic looks from my target mates, who are rapidly becoming my favourite people.

me neither

It didn’t help that last night I was hanging out in Vegas’ downtown; half a world away from the locals-y, folksy South Point stuffed with archers. Downtown Vegas, once the shabbier end of town, has been injected with money in the last couple of decades. It now hovers uneasily and noisily between the drunken spring break atmosphere at one end of Fremont Street and a kind of hipster Brooklynisation at the other, and still all bumping up against the much darker and poorer confines of what is known as the Naked City.

So instead of resting and dreaming of archery, as Ki Bo Bae recommends for staying on top, I was trying and failing to win a silver ten-dollar gaming token with the face of Meyer Lansky at the last Silver Strike slot left at the smoky El Cortez. Shades of a now vanished city. Fire-breathing praying mantises. Watching the disinterested dancing girls at The D. Playing no-limit hold ’em with an extraordinary bunch of extended friends at Binion’s, including a founder member of the MIT blackjack team. I mean, I got to bed at a reasonable (for Vegas) time, but there’s not much left. I thought there was. You can’t do it all.

And of course, I’m paying the price. I’m not the only one – there’s a couple of very high profile archers on lower-than-expected scores who look like they’ve got an all-night casino face on. It does matter. It is important. Not in the grander scheme of things, but as so often, archery is a tool for self-examination. It reveals more to you than you tell yourself. It tells you when you’ve neglected your mental and physical health. It’s a tool that lets you measure yourself, where you have been, and where you would like to go. There’s a magic to that. It’s a reminder that there are no excuses. Just consequences. 

So there’s one day to go here. I’m going to get some sleep. And then I’m off to the practice range.