Update

It has been quite a while since I last wrote anything and quite a lot has changed. Firstly, I now keep my own way of accurately recording my progress.

Scoring:
The normal way of scoring is that an inner gold scores 10, an outer gold scores 9 and then the inner red ring counts as 8, etc. However, there is a further small ring marked at the center which is normally only used in competitive shooting, to differentiate between two 10 scores. For my purposes I count how many arrows are in or touching this inner circle, then how many (including these) that would have scored 10. The I count the total in the gold target area, then the total (including the gold) that would have scored at least 8. I do not bother counting anything outside of this. I now have three targets set up with a total of 11 small target faces mounted on them. I shoot two arrows each into 8 of the faces and three arows into my third target which only has 3 faces. Rather conveniently, this means that I can shoot a round of 25 arrows before needing to recover the arrows and score them. 4 rounds gives me a total of 100 which therefore gives me the score as a percentage. I normally shoot 300 per day, usually in three separate sessions. (Sorry if this is boring, but that is how I can keep track of any changes in my shooting.)

When I was last writing, I was just getting used to shooting with a 60lb Hungarian style horsebow. By August of last year I was getting on quite well, my muscles had adjusted and I was consistently keeping at least 70% of my shots within the inner red and gold bands of my targets. Then I noticed that the bow was becoming distorted! The core of the bow seems to be a steel spring and the top and bottom of the bow were no longer sharing the same degree of curvature. So in September I started with a new, take-down, recurve bow. Nominally, it pulls at 55lbs at 28inches of draw. I draw to 30inches, so I calculated that should give me the equivalent of my 60lb horsebow. Miscalculated! Turns out that it was giving my 65lbs of pull for my draw length, so I was a little over-bowed once again! Took me a lot longer than I expected to get fully adjusted to this. I reckon that it took me two months before I could shoot this bow with ease and my scores were about the same as with my previous bow!

Then I decided to increase the distance I was shooting at from 10 metres to 13 metres (the furthest I can conveniently do in my garden). The result was a bigger decrease in my accuracy than I expected! So I am now on a new learning curve!