Yabusame Competition - Quick Recap

(A quick recap here, much more to come!)

The Yabusame event was this past weekend.  I've been in recovery mode all of this week.  It was a HUGE thing for me to do, on many levels - battling my social anxiety, stage fright, etc., etc., and it took a lot out of me - though it was AWESOME!

In the weeks leading up to it, I'd decided that I had three goals for the competition:

1: Stay on the horse.

2: Don't drop anything (bow or arrows).

3: Fire off all three arrows each run.

Once the event arrived, I added another goal:

4: Run a qualifying time each round. 

After all of that, the cherry on top would be to get points for hitting a target.

I'm happy to say that I did 1-4; I stayed on Toby, held onto all my gear, managed to shoot all of my arrows each time, and ran qualifying times.  What I did not do was hit any targets.  I was missing consistently, hitting about 6-8 inches past the target.  I think it was because Toby was running faster than he does in practice and so my usual point to fire at was going by faster too.  I was dialing it in though and I think with another run or two, I might have gotten one!

For the practice sessions the two days before, and the practice runs each morning over the weekend, I wore a Go Pro on my helmet.  Jeff and several friends were there taking pictures.  As a result I have a TON of video and pictures to go through.  I need to finally stop procrastinating and learn how to edit videos.  (for example: the first practice day resulted in 21GB of video - need to trim that down!)  I can't promise when I'll have videos available, but hopefully soon-ish...?

In the meantime, here are a few pictures from the Saturday morning practice: