Raced in Valcartier, Quebec this weekend. Saturday's race was super fun. Darrell, the guy starting :30 behind me had a better prone shoot than I did and moved into the lead. 2 k later he was shooting offhand when I arrived at the range and I slotted in the next point to his right. He shoots RH and I'm LH so we were looking right at each other. He was 3 shots in when I arrived and also 3 misses and I dropped the first two targets. I was hoping my arrival might pressure him into mistakes and soon I'm back in it. I go two better then him and leave the P-loop 10 seconds ahead of him but he is still 20 ahead on race time since he started behind me. It's now a ski race to the finish after shooting my way back into contention. I ski like mad with the intent of winning or blowing up big and losing. Uphill I suffer and going down I try to recover and not puke. Darrell arrives but I was too shot to look at the clock and see what happened. He got me by 4 seconds! I was so bummed but the race was really fun. Due to some rule BS we were scored as 2 and 3. The guy who won was in our age group but shooting an air rifle so he didn't have to carry it (not a big handicap for us) but his P-loop was 50 meters per lap shorter so he skied about 300 total meters less then the rest of the field. Darrell was :01 back and I was :05 off the win. Filing a protest would have been whining but I feel we both were ripped off.
After the race I was wearing a Fiocchi ball cap and was asked a ton of questions about the ammo. The usual, where, what, how good, cost questions. One gentleman, King, in my age group mentioned he had shot like crap so I tossed him a box of the 340 to try out.
At today's zero he was all set with his Federal 711B and decided to load the 340 to see how it grouped. He found me and told me how amazing the 340 was, same POI but a much smaller group and he was going to race it even though he knew making a race day change is a no-no. He had a good day on the range. Fiocchi ammo is just awesome and I am fortunate to have their support.
Todays race was fun too but not the nail biter of yesterday. Darrell won and I was second. I had one bad shoot and that was the race. I'm faster on skis but not enough to make up for the error. Good day though. Getting back across the border was a piece pf cake. Maybe sleeping kids in the back seat helps.
I raced well this weekend. I wish I had shot better but this will always be true. Saturday's race made the training, money and effort worth it. The only way to have made it better was to have won.
The next few races will be club events at EABC and one over in Saratoga which is a relay I hope to race with my wife as a team mate. After these races it's off to MN for the US nationals.
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