Intershoot recap and what's coming up next

I'm back home now and somewhat adjusted back to Pacific time zone. Those quick trips to Europe always feel too short and definitely take some adjusting. There and back. Plus training and competing 4 days of the week while I was away is a lot. Typically going to an ISSF World Cup you would do pre-event training 1 day and competition the next day for a single event.

My first day went well with the 565/600 and missing Finals by only a few points. The following days were more of a challenge. I shot a lot of 9.9's which in 10m pistol and the integer scoring they're counted as "9" even if they are a hair width away from scoring "10".

It was great to catch up with old friends from around the world there and to meet some new ones as well!

Me and Ramon Suarez (@olympicpistol)

Me, Nikhil Kumar, and Saurabh Chaudhary (@SChaudhary2002)

The Netherlands is beautiful, I'll aim to be back for Intershoot 2021 next year! Hopefully I can stay a few more extra days!

Sun setting outside the Sherlock Holmes pub

Packed and ready to fly home!

Up next will be:

• Mar 6-8: BC Airgun Champtionships - Vancouver, Canada
• May 22-24: Canadian Airgun Grand Prix - Toronto, Canada

Then in June I'll be back in Europe for the ISSF World Cup Series stages in Munich, Germany and Baku, Azerbaijan.

Intershoot has started!

Inrtershoot is officially under way. 270 competitors at Intershoot across men's pistol & rifle and women's pistol & rifle disciplines. 3 days of competition has begun!

Open training at Intershoot

All setup for some precision shooting!

Today I shot a 565 with 22 x's. My 'x' count was the second highest out of the male pistol shooters so I'm pretty happy about that. I did have a few flyers though which dropped my score from where I should have been given the volume of 10s I was shooting. Lots of good deep 10's but have some flyers I need to work on also. The area where those two 7's landed mean I was anticipating the shot.

My 565 from the first competition complete with 22 x's

Complete scores can be found here but if the link doesn't work I have a screenshot of them from the first match below (open to make larger):

Day 1 results for men's 10m pistol

My teammate Stuart Burns finished 29th and Robert Katz finished 33rd.

Tomorrow's match starts at 4pm CET, which is late in the day so my team and I will just be taking it easy before the competition. Tomorrow's scores will also be used for the team score. Go Canada! On Saturday we shoot at 8am CET and then will do a little sightseeing before our flight Sunday morning

Arrived in the Netherlands

I arrived in the Netherlands! It was a bit hectic just getting to Amsterdam. My original flight plan was to fly at noon Sunday from Vancouver and arrive to Amsterdam Monday morning and meetup with my teammates Stuart Burns and Bob Katz. That flight got delayed however so I needed to take an earlier flight from Vancouver to Toronto to make my connection.

Outside of the Rijksmuseum

In the library at Rijksmuseum

Ship!

Plane!

Beer!

me and Stuart Burns

Standing in front of cool light up bottle display

Nice ice cold Heineken at the end of the tour

We got to Amsterdam early to be able to get adjusted for the time difference... +9 hours difference for me! Powered through most of the first day and today is our only full free day so we went and did a bit of sightseeing! Rijksmuseum, wandered around a bit, and the Heineken Experience!

Tomorrow we will check-in at the Intershoot competition and get our equipment checked, fees paid, and get some pre event training in. We compete Thursday, Friday, and Saturday this week, then fly home Sunday morning.

As always, you can follow along @alharding on Twitter and Instagram!

Stay tuned for more ...and thank you for the awesome emails!