I've Never Done Archery

In the words of Elizabeth Bennett (the pink bible version), "I do date. I do." However, as much as I'm sure everyone would love to hear the details of my dating life (I have some crazy stories I could tell you), this post is just about a time where I got taken to go archery shooting! This guy wanted to do something I could blog about so here it is. Turns out I'm not great at this whole blog thing though, so this post is a bit overdue.

Just getting started

We just went to a little indoor archery shooting place up in Orem. When we first showed up, we were the only ones there which I was grateful for. Not that I really have a problem with embarrassing myself (my sisters would probably say I'm never not embarrassing), but I figure the less people who I can accidentally shoot with an arrow, the better. The guy working gave me a little arm guard and a three-fingered glove-thing to make pulling the string less painful and then gave a super short tutorial about how to use the bow and arrow. When he left, I just stood there like okaaaay…I still have no clue what I'm doing.

Probably the first time most of the shots landed on the board.

One weird thing about me is that I'm technically left-handed but I do a lot of things, especially sports, right-handed. Amy actually has this weird thing against lefties, so I'll refrain from going off about how difficult it is to live in a right-handed world (love you Amy!), but basically I'm just kind of all over the place as to which hand I use. The guy there told me I was apparently right-eye dominant and so made me shoot the bow right-handed. I never tried the other way so I'm not really sure if it would have been easier or not for me. In any case, my first few attempts were COMPLETE fails. The arrow went about 5 feet before slamming straight into the floor. I just couldn't seem to pull it back far enough (the string was really stiff and also, I'm just really weak) and I guess I wasn't aiming high enough.

I even hit the center target

I ended up switching bows to one that I think was a little heavier, which was actually way easier to fire and was more powerful. Eventually, I got the firing thing down and then I was basically ready to quit my job and become a professional archerist (that's not actually a word but I'm using it anyway).

Basically a pro now

I never did fully get the whole aiming thing figured out. I ended up becoming fairly consistent - all of my shots would end up in the same general area. However, that general area would just happen to be nowhere close to a bulls-eye but that's okay, right? I felt like I had to aim way high and way to the right of where I actually wanted it to go but mostly it just felt like a guessing game. I was probably just doing something wrong because otherwise, I don't see how Robin Hood could possibly have had such precise aim.

Look how consistent I was!

All in all, though, archery really wasn't that difficult. It would definitely take a ton of practice to actually be good at it, but I'm not really planning on going hunting with a bow and arrow anytime soon so not a big deal.