Archery!

Yesterday, Fritz, Peanut and l went to the Redwood Bowmen Archery Range! It’s behind Chabot Science & Space center (which I’ve never gone to) in Oakland. It was a beautiful, beautiful day.

We shot loaner recurve bows, while the more experienced archers (such as Fritz’s family friend, Neil) shot their compound bows. Peanut and I started out on 20-pounders and then shared a 25-pounder between us (that’s what… she said?). Fritz borrowed Neil’s 50-pounder recurve bow, but he’s gone shooting more than we have (my second time, Peanut’s first), so he’s had a chance to develop the relevant muscles. Fritz made a face I’ve never seen him make before the first time he drew back the 50-pound bow. It was hilarious. I could draw it back halfway… barely, but I did loose an arrow and it did hit cardboard, so hooray! Muscles!

Peanut and I shot at the nearest targets for a while (10 feet), and then moved on to the 15-foot targets. I worked on keeping my left shoulder down and rotating my arm so that the inside of my elbow faces sideways, not up to the sky. I also learned that I’m not supposed to grip the bow with my left hand, because that’ll torque it (and make the arrow go to the side), which is hard to get used to because you think that you’re gonna drop the bow. I also found that when I was drawing back, my right elbow didn’t go high enough, so I changed that. Sometimes my body would do everything right and a shot would feel pretty good and fly pretty straight. Most of the time my arrows floated to the left or bounced lamely off of the target, haha.

We saw gamer Jon from Eudemonia, who is as new to archery as I am. Neil and another archer took the three of us on the big field range, too, which was awesome! You hike on a trail through the forest on the hillside and shoot at printed animal targets. They’ve got a solid black circle on their heart, and a ring around that to represent a kill shot (piercing a lung). I don’t think I ever hit an animal, but I got cardboard sometimes, so that’s okay. The hike was super nice, though. It was good to get out of the sun for a while.

Damage sustained:

• My elbow bends pretty far, so I twanged the inside of my elbow repeatedly. (“Twanged” is my own word for “when I released the bowstring, the bowstring hit me omg ow”. I don’t know if there’s an actual name for this in the community.) I moved my forearm protector up to my elbow and promptly twanged my forearm. There are bruises. Yesterday the bruises were really raised and red. Today they are still raised (less than yesterday at least!) and fading to purple.
• I twanged my boob twice. It stung. It stung worse the 2nd time. I’m not really used to my boob being in the way of stuff.
• During the hill course, I tried to climb on the horizontal trunk a fallen tree that was suspended my height above a hillside. I reached up and grabbed a branch that was coming out of the top of the trunk with my right hand and wrapped myself around the tree. I was holding the trunk with my legs and left hand, suspended under the tree, when I moved my right hand higher on the branch so I could pull myself up to the top of the trunk. Of course the branch snapped (it was old, I should have seen it was dry) so I fell into some bushes on my back. It was really sad. I have some scrapes and my back hurts. But I’m not paralyzed.
• Everything hurts and also I didn’t really sleep the night before because I was using railstutorial.org to create a a website. haha. So everything hurts

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I’m pretty clumsy. At least I only hurt myself, not anyone else. Going outside is dangerous!!!