The Think Tank

After a hiatus lasting nearly seven full years, I started shooting archery again this week.

I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, but I have been lacking the last push needed to get me over the hurdle and actually pick up my bow and arrow set again.  Last week my friend Debbie Lane gave me the push I needed.

She started shooting again very recently as well, and she registered for the Oregon State Indoor Championships, which is being held at Chinook Winds Casino in Lincoln City on February 26th & 27th.  She also said that I needed to get my sorry butt in gear and shoot it with her.

So I figured, “What the hell?”

The first night back I shot about 80 arrows and discovered that I was very out of shape.  I was shaking like a leaf in the wind from the word go.  I also only had two arrows that were shooting straight.  The others consistently hit the same spots, but those spots didn’t happen to be in the middle.  And to make matters worse, through out the scoring round I had so much trouble aiming steady that it made it very hard to concentrate on my form, so after a while I went to shooting blank-bale.  Without needing to concentrate on aiming for the last 20 arrows or so, my form started coming together.

Yesterday I re-fletched my arrows and I went and shot tonight, though I only got 7 scoring ends in before the shop closed.  But they were much better ends.  I dropped the draw weight  to 48 lbs, which helped a lot.  Thanks to the reduced weight, my shoulder felt better and I was able to hold much better.

I also got to use a cool app for my phone that I bought a while ago in preparation for shooting again.  It’s called Targetmate and is used for scoring and keeping track of your arrow placement.  In addition to making images like the ones below, it also lets you to filter the view by arrow shot (all first arrows, all second arrows, etc), or by distance, allowing you to see trends in your shots over long periods of time. The program is pretty slick, I would recommend it to anyone who shoots and has an iPhone.

As you can see from the two images below, tonight was a big improvement over my first night back.

All in all I don’t feel too bad about my return.  I started wimping out pretty quickly, which could make the 60 arrow round in Lincoln City tough, but I still have a couple weeks to get ready for that, so hopefully things will get a little steadier.