Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Performance issues
Giles Catchpole seeks the advice of a true shooting legend as he prepares to compete in the British Side-by-side Championship
I MENTIONED IN a recent piece that
I once led the 16-bore class at the inaugural British Side-by-side Championship by virtue of turning up early enough to hand in the first card (Serious matters, 25 May). That every subsequent card shoved me further down the scoreboard is of no concern whatsoever to me. Like an exploding star, I shone ferociously but briefly before vanishing into the black hole of competition.
That comment, however, inadvertently lit a fuse among certain friends of mine and the upshot is that we are all now entered in the
2022 Championship, which is slated for early September. A fact that I let slip in the vicinity of the Editor, who pounced upon it much as the ravening lion seizes a limping gazelle.
“Great,” says he. “Training regime. Diet. Strategy and tactics. The lot. On my desk first thing next week. And do try to keep your fingers out of the photographs, won’t you?” So here I am, in training.
Strategy first. I will be taking the 16-bore William Powell for this outing. This 1869 damascus beauty is the gun that turned me on to this neglected calibre. At least I hope it’s still neglected because the plan is that the ‘sweet 16s’ should be among the smallest classes in the competition. Probably not as small as the hammer 16-bore class, of course, but since my hammer 16-bore is a muzzle-loader I’ve plumped for the modern version.
There are few occasions that can’t be improved by a bit of flame and fury, but competitions are one of them. Rods and wads tend to slow matters down in the high-pheasant sequence and clouds of smoke do tend to make the all-important second-target acquisition trickier. I did wonder about the 28-bore class, of course, but the folk there tend to be real aficionados of the guns and experts to boot.
Which brings us to the elephant in the room. Grey, creased, dusty and somewhat baggy in the middle is how someone described me only the other day and that was after I’d bought them a pint. There’s gratitude. At least they didn’t mention the ears. The rest is true, however. Lockdown has not been kind to either my figure or its readiness for competition. Mark you, we’re shooting these clays, aren’t we, not chasing them with a net?
Easy option
Purely in the interests of research you understand — and because you apparently need to know this stuff
— I did try a press-up the other day. It didn’t go well. I made it to the floor all right and even managed to lever some of my carcass upwards a couple of times — not enough to impress a US Marine drill sergeant, I venture — but the energy expended left me marooned on the grass like the proverbial beached whale. I wondered if pull-ups might be an easier option, but I couldn’t jump high enough to reach the branch. That tree must have grown since I was last there.
Now I guessed that the Editor would take a fairly dim view of these somewhat dilatory preparations, so I thought I would beef up the bona fides by talking to a real expert. I went to see John Bidwell. If you are not familiar with JB, he has been winning things for simply years.
In between times, he entertains the crowds at shows and fairs with his shooting demonstrations, where he demolishes many and varied targets from clay pigeons to cabbages with a pair of five-shot Remington pumps — mostly from the hip. He has won almost everything there is to win and had just returned from Italy having collected his umpteenth
FITASC World Championship.
Specifically, he won the Masters class for competitors over the age of 73, which means that he is the only individual to have won a FITASC World Championship in every accessible class. A full house. Across the board. Impressive, eh? I should say so. So I took a seat and set about pestering him for some tips.
“Technique is the key, of course,” he says. “Get your foundation technique right and everything else
“Like an exploding star, I shone ferociously but briefly and vanished into a black hole”
follows.” His technique is famously ‘move, mount, shoot’ as documented, with Robin Scott, in the book of the same name first published more than three decades ago. However, John is not wholly dismissive of other styles and techniques.
“I’ll lay odds, as a game shooter, you swing through, don’t you?” he suggested. I nodded. “Uses a lot of time and energy. Move, mount, shoot reduces your length of swing and so gives you more time to focus on the target and consumes less energy. Which is increasingly important at our age, wouldn’t you agree?” I did.
He doesn’t practise. Not in the pallet-load-of-cartridges-a-month sense some top shooters advocate, although he admits that teaching at High Lodge, his shooting ground in
Suffolk, helps in a roundabout sort of way. “Watching other people shoot and explaining the mistakes that make their lives so difficult reminds me to avoid those pitfalls,” he says.
Seeing clearly
“Fitness training?” I asked, more in hope than expectation. “Not these days.” But he doesn’t party during competitions and he doesn’t start the day with a full English. It was above 40°C on some of the stands in Italy, so the only rule is plenty of fluids.
I asked about sunglasses. He admits that seeing targets clearly is a consideration, but finds that given the colours of the targets, the varied backgrounds to the stands and the weather conditions, there isn’t a consistent answer.
What about attitude, then? How do world champions think? “You do have to want it,” he says. “I don’t have a routine when I’m on a stand, like some people, but I don’t call for a target until I am ready to smash it. Speed in motion — the distillation of move, mount, shoot — needs a sighting point where you see the target, a pick-up point where the gun meets the target and a kill point where the shot meets the bird. Only when I have those clear in my head, I call.”
And, he says, you have to be able to manage missing a few. “No one’s perfect. You don’t get them all to win, you just miss fewer than the other guys. And if you let one getting away distract you from breaking the next one, you’ve had it.”
I’m not wholly confident I have a championship mentality, but I am doing some rigorous arm exercises. I am drinking left-handed. We came up with this wheeze at the rifle club. We all lost key strength in our left arms over the pandemic, so we are doing left-arm workouts. From early tea, through elevenses, to manly pints in straight glasses — for grip, you understand — all left-handed.
Oh, I’ve entered the British Open .410 Championship, too. For practice. I’ll let you know how it goes.