- The time has come, with weeks and weeks of preparations I think I am ready, we fly in 2 days.
Getting ready to travel is something that I don't enjoy doing, thankfully I have my mum who does my packing, otherwise I would suffer greatly. This was my first flight but I wasn't scared or anything like that, I was just excited.
The day came and me and my teammates gather, the team consisted of 4 people: Agron Mala, coach and the team leader, Bardhyl Luzhnica, recurve archer and the founder of the sport in our country, Atdhe Luzhnica recurve archer and me as a recurve archer. We had a smooth travel from Prishtina to Instabul and a catch flight from there to Antalya for the 47th World Archery Championship.
Antalya is gorgeous!
I wanted to start by saying that because I was impressed at how good everything looked. To me pretty much everything seemed amazing, the food, the rooms, the surrounding area of the hotel, everything... Then came the shooting fields and most importantly the archers. 'In my country we don't have good shooting fields, we try to improvise football pitches and use them whenever possible, so the change from that to going in Antalya where the shooting fields were hundreds of meters long took some adaption, you can get lost on those fields'.
One of my lifelong dreams was turning into a reality, I was competing with the best of the best, representing my country and doing something I love. Meeting amazing and inspirational archers was a huge motivation and seeing them shoot, trying to understand the way they shoot, analyzing everything helped me/us grow as athletes.
In this tournament we shot a FITA Round, which is basically shooting 36 arrows at 4 distances: 90, 70, 50 and 30 meters, and trying to reach as high a score as possible. I probably don't have to mention how hard FITA Round is/was (this particular round isn't being used anymore in World Archery events) but I'll try to explain some of the difficulties of shooting at these 4 different distances.
First you shoot 36 arrows at the furthest distance which is the 90 meters, that distance is quite far away even for days with perfect weather, but the competition day didn't have a good weather, actually when I remember it was quite terrible, the winds were huge (my first time seeing a world class archer missing the target completely in the elimination rounds happened the very next day, a day with similar probably slightly stronger winds) and the pressure was on.
Then comes 70 meters, for me this is my preferred distance, for starters we use this distance in all outdoor tournaments so I was quite used to it. I use glasses since I don't see very well in distances and shooting in 90 meters even with glasses wasn't the easiest thing for me but at 70 meters everything is much clearer and I feel at my best there.
50 meters in my opinion is the most difficult of the 4 distances, or at least it was and it has always been my worst. This distance isn't short and the target is significantly smaller compared with 70 and 90 meters, I always had trouble with this distance.
Finally came the easier distance, the 30 meters. On a normal day for me I would shoot a very good score in this distance but this wasn't a normal day, the winds picked up on the late part of the 70 meter distance, grew on the 50 meters one and became extremely difficult to shoot in the last distance, my score wasn't bad but it wasn't what I hoped for.
This was pretty much my experience with this tournament. The rest of it was the best learning experience I've ever had, having the chance to see the best compete against each other in head to head matches, being able to watch the best teams shoot together, communicate was something amazing.
The tournament had some pretty incredible results and the finals were among the best and most thrilling ones. This was an experience that I will never forget, for what I learned, did and what came out of it, I believe that this was among the highlights of my life.
I attached three photos of the National Team in this blog, see yall at the next one.
Getting ready to travel is something that I don't enjoy doing, thankfully I have my mum who does my packing, otherwise I would suffer greatly. This was my first flight but I wasn't scared or anything like that, I was just excited.
The day came and me and my teammates gather, the team consisted of 4 people: Agron Mala, coach and the team leader, Bardhyl Luzhnica, recurve archer and the founder of the sport in our country, Atdhe Luzhnica recurve archer and me as a recurve archer. We had a smooth travel from Prishtina to Instabul and a catch flight from there to Antalya for the 47th World Archery Championship.
Antalya is gorgeous!
I wanted to start by saying that because I was impressed at how good everything looked. To me pretty much everything seemed amazing, the food, the rooms, the surrounding area of the hotel, everything... Then came the shooting fields and most importantly the archers. 'In my country we don't have good shooting fields, we try to improvise football pitches and use them whenever possible, so the change from that to going in Antalya where the shooting fields were hundreds of meters long took some adaption, you can get lost on those fields'.
One of my lifelong dreams was turning into a reality, I was competing with the best of the best, representing my country and doing something I love. Meeting amazing and inspirational archers was a huge motivation and seeing them shoot, trying to understand the way they shoot, analyzing everything helped me/us grow as athletes.
In this tournament we shot a FITA Round, which is basically shooting 36 arrows at 4 distances: 90, 70, 50 and 30 meters, and trying to reach as high a score as possible. I probably don't have to mention how hard FITA Round is/was (this particular round isn't being used anymore in World Archery events) but I'll try to explain some of the difficulties of shooting at these 4 different distances.
First you shoot 36 arrows at the furthest distance which is the 90 meters, that distance is quite far away even for days with perfect weather, but the competition day didn't have a good weather, actually when I remember it was quite terrible, the winds were huge (my first time seeing a world class archer missing the target completely in the elimination rounds happened the very next day, a day with similar probably slightly stronger winds) and the pressure was on.
Then comes 70 meters, for me this is my preferred distance, for starters we use this distance in all outdoor tournaments so I was quite used to it. I use glasses since I don't see very well in distances and shooting in 90 meters even with glasses wasn't the easiest thing for me but at 70 meters everything is much clearer and I feel at my best there.
50 meters in my opinion is the most difficult of the 4 distances, or at least it was and it has always been my worst. This distance isn't short and the target is significantly smaller compared with 70 and 90 meters, I always had trouble with this distance.
Finally came the easier distance, the 30 meters. On a normal day for me I would shoot a very good score in this distance but this wasn't a normal day, the winds picked up on the late part of the 70 meter distance, grew on the 50 meters one and became extremely difficult to shoot in the last distance, my score wasn't bad but it wasn't what I hoped for.
This was pretty much my experience with this tournament. The rest of it was the best learning experience I've ever had, having the chance to see the best compete against each other in head to head matches, being able to watch the best teams shoot together, communicate was something amazing.
The tournament had some pretty incredible results and the finals were among the best and most thrilling ones. This was an experience that I will never forget, for what I learned, did and what came out of it, I believe that this was among the highlights of my life.
I attached three photos of the National Team in this blog, see yall at the next one.
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