I feel at liberty to write about my impressions of archery in the secure knowledge that any decent archer will quite rightly not bother to read them, you have been warned.

I do love the sport though. It’s a perfect combination of the mental and the physical. When you watch world class archers repeatedly hitting a target about the size and colour of a large grapefruit at seventy meters it makes you realize how far you have to go. It’s quite a solitary sport in that you cannot (or at least should not try) to influence the performance of your competitors. The only way you can win is to focus on your own performance.

I shoot a compound bow. Currently it’s wound up to its maximum 52lb draw weight and I’m thinking I need to replace it soon to work up to 59lb (60lb is the maximum weight allowed in FITA competitions.)

So much of archery is about repetition: learn to shoot a 10, repeat. But in order to achieve that repetition you need to build up a routine that is much more mental than physical. The ability to repeat is keyed on minituae of hand and body position, and how do you remember from shot to shot, let alone from week to week, exactly where your hand touches your face or exactly how the bow sits in your hand?

A lot of that comes down to shooting form. Where your hand touches your face is called your anchor position and it is very important to be able to reproduce that. For a compound shooter with a release aid it is recommended that you straddle your jaw bone between the first and second fingers of your hand, then the peep sight can fine tune that position. But it’s very important that the peep sight is set to where your anchor position naturally falls, otherwise your hand will be wandering around your face trying to make the peep sight fit.

On that note, today I reduced the draw length of my bow by a whole inch, and what a difference! It’s like taking an ill-fitting suit to the tailors and having it fitted. I’d alredy adjusted my peep as discussed above, but something was still not right. basically the angle (back corner) of my jaw was between the tips of my second knuckles. Taking an inch off the draw length means my first and second fingers straddle the ridge of my jaw and the angle of my jaw sits neatly just in front of my first knuckles (nearest my palm.) It feels so much more stable that I can’t wait to try it out. Unfortunately we couldn’t shoot today because of high wind.