If you're retrieving data from the Request object, you can access it in two different methods: either directly through the Request object or through one of the collections of the Request object. While either method works fine, if you're looking to gain a bit more speed, select the particular collection directly so that the system doesn't have to search all the collections for the data you want.
In addition, accessing data from the Request object is more time-consuming than getting data from a locally-defined variable. If you need to retrieve data more than once, create a temporary variable for the field, copy the data to it, and then use that variable whenever you need the data.