The Witness Drill

This is the drill I do at the start of every Week 01. Six boules. Half my usual arm speed. A five-second pause between throws to replay what the body just did. No corrections. No improvements. Just notice.

The drill

Take six boules. Pick a target you trust. For me that’s the jack at 7m, but any distance you know well works.

Throw the first boule at roughly half your normal arm speed. Slow enough that you can feel the gesture happen, rather than just watch the result.

Close your eyes for five seconds. Replay the throw from inside. The grip. The breath. The wrist at release.

Pick up the next boule. Same speed. Same pause.

Repeat until all six are down.

Then write down one thing you noticed. One. Not “what I could do better”. One observation about what was true.

Why I do it

I went years without ever really watching myself throw. My eyes were on the boule, the target, the result. The gesture was happening in the dark, and the body was making decisions I never saw.

When I finally slowed down enough to look, what I found was arm speed. I’ve written about that elsewhere in this journal. The point is, I couldn’t change what I had never seen. Seeing comes first.

Going slowly is also a brake. It reveals things that pass too quickly to register at full speed. Noticing them is the job. What you do about them comes later, and not today.

Where to look

Pick one of these and keep it for the whole set of six. Don’t try to watch everything, because you’ll end up watching nothing.

The speed of the arm. Does the pace build evenly, or do you notice yourself accelerating to the release?

The release. Does the boule release early, or roll out later from the fingers.

The breath. Where you breathe in, where you breathe out, whether you hold it.

The eyes. Do they stay with the boule after it leaves, or jump straight to the jack.

The finish. Where the hand ends up once the boule has gone.

One per set. If something in your throw has been bugging you for a while, you already know which one to pick.

Where it sits in the journal

This is Mental rewind (Habit 01) folded into Slow-arm practice (Habit 02). The five-second replays are the rewind. The half-speed throws are the slow arm. If you keep a session log, the one observation goes at the end of it, and over a week you start to see patterns you would never catch in real time. The printed Pétanque Performance Journal keeps a page per session for exactly that.

If you try it, run it three times in the same week. Same drill, same target. And if something surprises you, write to me. I would like to hear what you found.