archery!
Apr. 15th, 2025 06:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_shoshannaGeoff found a local archery club that offers adult beginner lessons, and we are taking six weeks of basic archery!
He did it briefly as a teen, I think; I had a toy bow as a child, but that's it. Lessons are held once a week in the basement of a church(!) about a half-hour walk from us, and as it gets warm I hope it will be an absolute pleasure to walk there and back in the evenings.
We've had one lesson so far. There were about a dozen students and two teachers: we were probably the oldest people there, and it went down to a couple university students. Seems like a nice group; there wasn't a lot of chatting, since we were there to listen and learn and do, but everyone was fun and friendly -- and the teachers were fun and friendly and also absolutely no-nonsense, as is appropriate. They showed us how to tell which eye is dominant, distributed bows and armguards, and told us that there are twelve steps to shooting, and each week we'll learn two more; week 1, unsurprisingly, concentrated on correct posture and on the rules of the range, i.e. not shooting anybody. We got to shoot at targets from a ten-yard line, and I was pretty good! Some people were all over the map, even missing the target entirely: I ended up with one in the bullseye and a couple in the first ring around it, as well as several further out. But, as I said when someone complimented me, in week four they'll teach us to aim, and then I'll lose it completely :)
By the end of the lesson, Geoff was already asking about buying bows of our own. (The club has loaner bows for lessons, but if you want to join the club itself, shoot on their outdoor range, etc., you need your own equipment.) I doubt I'll want to get that into it; we didn't do as much hiking and kayaking last summer as we wanted to, and do we really want to buy pricy equipment to split our outdoorsy-sport-time even more? But it could happen! Anyway the club offers adult intermediate lessons as well, so we can keep going after this without having to pony up if we don't want to.
This is such a fun city sometimes!
He did it briefly as a teen, I think; I had a toy bow as a child, but that's it. Lessons are held once a week in the basement of a church(!) about a half-hour walk from us, and as it gets warm I hope it will be an absolute pleasure to walk there and back in the evenings.
We've had one lesson so far. There were about a dozen students and two teachers: we were probably the oldest people there, and it went down to a couple university students. Seems like a nice group; there wasn't a lot of chatting, since we were there to listen and learn and do, but everyone was fun and friendly -- and the teachers were fun and friendly and also absolutely no-nonsense, as is appropriate. They showed us how to tell which eye is dominant, distributed bows and armguards, and told us that there are twelve steps to shooting, and each week we'll learn two more; week 1, unsurprisingly, concentrated on correct posture and on the rules of the range, i.e. not shooting anybody. We got to shoot at targets from a ten-yard line, and I was pretty good! Some people were all over the map, even missing the target entirely: I ended up with one in the bullseye and a couple in the first ring around it, as well as several further out. But, as I said when someone complimented me, in week four they'll teach us to aim, and then I'll lose it completely :)
By the end of the lesson, Geoff was already asking about buying bows of our own. (The club has loaner bows for lessons, but if you want to join the club itself, shoot on their outdoor range, etc., you need your own equipment.) I doubt I'll want to get that into it; we didn't do as much hiking and kayaking last summer as we wanted to, and do we really want to buy pricy equipment to split our outdoorsy-sport-time even more? But it could happen! Anyway the club offers adult intermediate lessons as well, so we can keep going after this without having to pony up if we don't want to.
This is such a fun city sometimes!