A beginner’s guide to archery

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/sep/25/beginners-guide-to-archery

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The centre of the target is exactly the same size as a man’s head, Marcus Allen tells me. One of the teachers for my four-session basic training course, Marcus is a mild-mannered university lecturer during the week but, at the weekends, he likes to play at being a potentially lethal marksman with his impressive and very technical compound bow. He has clearly been bitten by the archery bug and is enormously informative, adding that sometimes he likes to go off and shoot foam velociraptors in a wood. I wouldn’t like to cross him.

Marcus is one of a small, dedicated archery group called The Plumpton Bowmen, who meet at least once a week throughout the year. I had little experience of archery at the start of my course, other than with a rubbish plastic bow as a child, but I’m quietly confident that I have decent hand-eye coordination and a good aim. I’m a stealth Amazon, I tell myself. Let’s do this!

The first of our four weekend sessions is necessarily slow as we learn the rules of play: wait for the whistle before advancing to the shooting line, and don’t start heading to collect your arrows from the boss – the target – until the “end” has finished. Unless you have a death wish of course: one of my wayward arrows penetrated 7.5cm into the solid wood stand.

We spend a large part of every session being shown how to stand and how to hold the bow itself. This is far harder than I’d imagined. First, to handle a bow with any kind of power in it, I need to be able to draw the string back quite some way. We are starting with learner-level recurve bows of 20-30 pounds (about 9-14kg – archery is still strictly imperial), but muscle-bound archers can pull up to 70 pounds – about the same weight as an average 10-year-old girl. There is a lot of standing around, but part of the appeal of archery is this delightfully calm rhythm, and there’s a lot of time to drink tea, talk through how you could improve and enjoy the view of the South Downs.

The sport itself, while not being the most athletic, has a charm and an exquisite ritual all of itself. Some new signups for the course may have been inspired by Game of Thrones, but archery appears to have a longer-term appeal than that. There are 20,000-year-old cave paintings in Spain depicting hunters with bows and arrows, Marcus tells me. Perhaps it speaks to the caveman in all of us, but it certainly twangs the strings of childhood nostalgia, whether knights or cowboys and Indians.

It’s one of those rare sports that almost anyone can do, from age 10 upwards, and it’s a compelling sport for those in wheelchairs too.

After a few rounds, I begin to settle into a calm, almost meditative process of self-awareness to check that my body is in position for the shot. I stand sideways to the target, relax my shoulders, fit the arrow on to the bow and then raise it. Before I shoot, I check my hand isn’t gripping the bow too tightly (this can actually make the shot less steady), with my thumb and forefinger just meeting around the bow and the rest of my fingers at 45 degrees.

What I feel, in those moments of lining up a shot, is an absolute focus on the here and now. It’s a complete release from the rest of the world. And when everything is together, I let go, my hand pulling back to rest on my shoulder after the shot. The satisfying thud of the arrow as it lands on target – on the bullseye even – is like nothing else. And then I get to do it all again.

By the time of my final session, I’ve settled into this process, but ruled out using a sight – this is the crosshairs viewer fixed on to the bow, which allows you to focus more clearly (most of the group preferred it, but I found it a distraction). I levelled up to a 35-pound bow that meant I could attack a 30-yard (27 metres) target; not quite the 100 yards of the mens’ competition, but progress. For our last few rounds, we start scoring – at which point I have to battle to suppress a feisty competitiveness as I’m shooting with some very able male archers. But they are all, I notice, using sights. So by that reckoning, I tell myself, I’ve won.

Archery lingo

End a round of arrows

Fast! an emergency call that means everyone must stop shooting

Release/loose firing the arrow from the bow

Fletching the stabilising flights on an arrow

Nock the notch at the end of an arrow that allows it click on to the string

To find out more about the Plumpton Bowmen archery club, based in Plumpton Green, East Sussex, visit plumpton-bowmen.org.uk. For information about clubs round the country, visit Archery GB (archerygb.org)