" Broken Sights ": "Sleepy race" to 503 points

Just arrived from the SREF ("Sociedade Recreativa Estrelas do Feijó") 40th Anniversary ISSF 10 meter air pistol (60 shoot) tournament. After a "troubled" night with less then 2 hours sleep I managed to pass the mythical "minimum" barrier score of 500 points - reaching 503 / 600 points. The effect of lack of sleep on the brain sometimes help precision shooting competitors on a "perverted" way - making you less permeable to anxiety due to what I like to call "rational numbness". My overall result on today's match as "not that bad" - although it was far from my personal record (525 points) and bellow my last 3 years average score (514 points) . Nevertheless, with my 2 other fellow CPTPP shooters (M. Miranda and F. Lopes Neto), we manage to get 2nd place by teams on this official match for the Portuguese Shooting Federation ranking.

My setup on line # 5 ready for the match
to begin at 8h30 AM, Sep. 25th 2010

I competed with my Swiss-Italian Morini CM 162 EI using German H&N Finale Match pellets, and after a troublesome (and tottaly embarrasing!) 2 point hit on the 2nd series (perfectly aligned on the vertical axis, but on the very top - a miss trigger "hit", mea culpa), I "raced" my best up until the last series - where I standed with a high pressure challenge: the sum of the the 5 previous series was 414, and the top best series was 85 (the 1st and the 5th) - thereby the only chance to reach the mytical barrier of 500 points was that the last series would be better then any of the previous others, a minimum of 86 points would be required. I gained that nice edge of pressure, made my best to keep focused... and exceeded the goal with a 89 points series. It was like a race inside a sleepy mind - but I succeeded!