On the (continuing fail?) of the physical training situation and training in martial things (winning?)

NB: Skip my explanation/excuses if you just want to get to the archery bit heading. It’s fun.

So, it’s become apparent to me that at least until a solid routine is in place, the training will not be… well, routine. And with the kids, school runs, extra dance classes runs (for the one kid), work, the farm, and general crap that happens always, 1 it’s not really going to happen… or at least not immediately.

I go to bed exhausted, and want to still maybe have a conversation with the wife, or watch a piece of Dexter Resurrection with her (in 5 minute stints, because she passes out as soon as she relaxes, poor thing), and I have always been a light sleeper so…I also get woken through the night, (one kid has a bad dream, another coughs, another gets up in the night to go to the bathroom, the little one wakes up for a change or some boobage, and so on) then wake up and hit the computer, or whatever needs doing, after sorting the school run, and breakfast, together with the wife.

So yes… always being on the backfoot will do that, but it will not always be this way, and even if it is, so what? The point is: find a way.

So… I have felt that just some generic movement will be good, so I looked into Tai Chi a bit, and I think I like it, I can see it being something worthwhile for the first time, but I struggle with the concept of it only being related to health and I can’t see the martial application of it, and that… I have come to discover, presents a problem for me. I mean in a way it’s just like karate katas but in some kind of slow motion and far more flowing instead of the staccato type movements common to katas; and it’s true that nothing quite relaxes me as doing things martial. Except that… my ignorance of Tai Chi means that I don’t see any of the movements as relating to anything martial.

Which leaves training alone in Systema, which aside some bag work, is mostly fitness exercises, so again, the mindset is different as there is no opponent to synch or “push” against with. Even if not actually fighting each other, training with other people is helpful, there is a sense of a kind of “resistance” even if it is not an opponent in a real terms, it is still something or someone to give you an intent. For some it can be just teamwork, and while there is a sense of camaraderie with people you train with, for me it was always mainly the fact of having what I suppose is an “opponent”. Not in a competitive way with the other person so much as a way to measure my own efforts against multiple other points of reference.

The kids have been asking me to teach them, so I do a little tiny bit of instructing and pad work with them now and then, but teaching is not training, it’s teaching, and them being little, it is not even any kind I can really get active in, plus it just eats into my time too.

But… I bought myself an early Christmas present and it came early.

The Archery Bit

Mine has the name SHARROW, but in the USA I can’t see any functional difference from what is called GLURAK there . The only difference I think is that mine came with almost all all the accessories you actually need to start:

• The bow stringer tool
• The string protection/silencer strips (which I didn’t know what they were for until now when I saw the picture when I did the search for the bow on amazon.com instead of the Italian site, so I now need to unstring my bow and put them on)
• String silencers (again, I had no real idea wha these are for until now I saw the name of them)
• And finally string nock markers (I got two but no special pliers, which I am not sure you need)

I also didn’t get any of the gloves and finger protection things, and though I have bought a bunch of them now, so far, they all suck, so not willing to recommend any of them, but I will once I find what works. For now I will say only this:

• You definitely need both some kind of finger protection for the hand you pull the bowstring with, as well as some kind of arm/hand protection for the hand/wrist/forearm that hold the bow itself.

And having just pulled and released the bow-string right now at 3 am in the silence of a house with everyone but me asleep, and without any of the “silencers” mounted on the bowstring, I didn’t realise how loud a noise it makes, since I only fired it outside for now and wasn’t really paying any attention to that.

Anyway, while I realise merely shooting a bow is hardly any kind of physical exercise at all, it is having a VERY salutary effect on my mind, and probably achieving the same kind of mental state I would achieve if I knew more about the martial aspect of some Tai Chi movements and could relate them to some combative aspect.

I of course knew absolutely NOTHING about archery before I bought the bow and did only a minimal amount of research before buying the bow I did, mostly to try and understand what kind of draw-strength/weight I should go for.

All the videos I saw of pasty British individuals, emaciated by the lack of firearms in their police-state, multi-cultural, pedophile-rape-friendly state, invariably told me a beginner should get a weaker draw-strength bow so as to get proper form, blah, blah, blah. The American videos primarily made by steroid infused would be ninjas, had robot-like compound bows of up to 100 lbs or more draw strength, using some mechanical thing to release the bowstring.

So I made a few decisions right off the bat.

I was NOT going to go for a compound bow. While I am sure they can provide a lot higher draw-strength that can be accurately fired, the main point there, to me at least, seems to be to have the highest draw-strength you can pull in order to have the most “powerful” bow possible, that you can still shoot accurately, because once yogurt past the heavy point of the draw, with a compound bow, the pulleys make it only a 15 lbs or so pull to keep it there as you aim.

With a traditional bow, when you are at maximum draw, you are also at maximum weight of pull, meaning the longer you try to aim for the longer you have to keep the full weight of the draw steady.

But here was my reasoning… Instinctively, while the killer instinct aspect of me of course wants the most powerful bow, some other instinct in me, the one I would call the hunter instinct, made me realise that having powerful bow in and of itself wasn’t the main point. First of all, I would never hunt with a bow. I saw firsthand what shooting animals with arrows is like (crossbow and bow both) once from my dad who used a crossbow on a chicken when I was little, in Nigeria, and another time years later from a guy we took hunting a single and only time, in Botswana.

I find bow hunting to be cruel. I wouldn’t even use it on a snake. The only creatures I could see anyone reasonably using a bow on would probably be politicians. Even then, I’d worry about them surviving it, so yeah… it’s strictly target practice for me, so there isn’t really a real killing/martial aspect to it other than the mental discipline and physical skill to learn.

I was also reminded, years ago, of when training in karate-do and becoming familiar with pretty much every aspect of Japanese samurai culture, I recall that archery had a whole philosophy of mind when aiming, releasing and striking a target. I had never used a real bow other than a few times as an early teenager when my dad bought my brother and I some simple recurve bows, which I doubt had a draw pull of more than 15 lbs if that. But I have fired a lot of rifles. And to my mind, there is a distinct parallel way of doing that. I think the sense of taking a measured, aim, long range shot with a rifle, and firing an arrow at a target are very similar from the mental aspect of it. And nothing quite relaxes me as much as shooting.

I grew up with hunting. The very first memory I have is of firing my dad’s .38 special at a puddle. Dad was 24 and I was 2. The next memories I have are of helping him clean the shotgun and walking besides him when he and I went hunting. Again I was between 2 and 3 years old. I recall a bird he shot and another time when walking beside him I saw a fox in the distance, which was about as tall as I was then, and pointed to it and shouted to my dad “Dad, a wolf!” I didn’t know what a fox was. My dad raised his shotgun to shoot it, it ran off somewhere and my dad sprinted off to chase after it. I assume now to get to place where he could see it again from and shoot it, but I could not keep up no matter how fast I ran, and my dad soon disappeared from sight in what was afield with some forestry around it. I remember I couldn’t run anymore, because it was pointless, I couldn’t see him anymore and had no idea where he had gone, leaving me in that field with what I thought was a wild wolf roaming around, and I had started to cry, thinking I had no idea where I was or how to get home, we were far, as we had come here by car, and now my dad had disappeared, and it would be night soon, and there was a wolf out there somewhere.

A few minutes later of course dad re-appeared, shotgun over his shoulder, asking me why I was crying. And many, if not all certainly most, of my other childhood memories often have hunting elements in them.

Hunting is different than mere killing.

There is a synergy with nature in it I think, if done properly. And in a way that I think is perhaps similar to Red Indians, even by age 15 or so, when I’d go duck hunting with my dad, I had reached a point where the killing of the animal was something that was felt as somewhat excusable only if you ate the animal. That had always been the case, we never killed for mere “sport” and I always had only contempt for “shooters” who did, whether for a “trophy” or to feel like “hunters” when they never tracked anything and just shot from a car with a scope on their rifle.

I never used a scope on a rifle because if you couldn’t get within shooting distance of an animal with open sights, what kind of “hunter” were you anyway? I only started to use scopes once I started shooting at targets instead of for hunting.

And there is a skill to it, of course. Reading the wind, adjusting for distance, reading the distance in your scope reticle, not the fancy electronic ones, the original mil-dot ones, and so on. It’s truly relaxing.

And I figured archery must be analogous.

I have so far, fired the bow only 11 times, and I can say it is. It is a different set of physical skills, but the mindset is, to my view, almost identical.

Anyway, back to my choice of bow, which that whole interlude was designed to explain to you.

My original first thought was to get this one instead , I am not sure if the link to amazon Italy will work for American readers, so here is a screenshot:

In the end I went for the one I did because I figured if I screwed up on the draw-strength maybe with the one I got I could get a slightly longer string and reduce the pull or somehow maybe just replace part of the bow and tone it down, because hint he end, against most of the advice I saw online, I went for what I thought given my size and so on would be a fair draw-strength, which is 60 lbs.

And I am glad I did. It is a pretty hefty draw, and the first time I fired the bow, (without any glove or sleeve protection, the tips of my three fingers I pulled the string with certainly felt it. Not so much on the pulling, but on the release, the string has a tendency to want to slice off the tips of your fingers, and on the hand holding the bow, the string will leave a mark when it makes contact after the arrow has shot off and the string strikes the left hand. So yeah, you need gloves. I have since been using the same leather work gloves I use on the farm for working in the field and they work fairly well, though I still feel it on the fingers after a few shots.

Of course, being novice I got the wrong arrows. They should have been with feathers at the back instead of the plastic version, because with a traditional recurve bow, as the arrow shoots past, the feathers flatten, but the plastic fin does not, so it bounces off the bow and screws up the arrow’s flight path. I even experimented with cutting one fin off all together and that arrow certainly went straighter than before, and it made me wonder just how important the little fins at the back of the arrow actually are. I mean I am sure there must be some utility to them, given the centuries of firing bows and people putting them on, but in my one test, I couldn’t see that the arrow flew any differently with only two of the fins instead of three. In fact, in my case it seemed to be a net improvement. And sometimes, I find, being new at something nd thinking differently bout it, you find a way of doing things that others haven’t tried just because “it’s not done that way” and no one ever tries to see if it really is the only or best way of doing things. So I will experiment more.

But anyway, I am pleasantly surprise with myself and the initial ability with the bow.

Even though I have the wrong arrows (better arrows have been ordered), I have been able to realise I tend to shoot high and to the left, and adjusting for that have found I can be more consistent despite the undoubtedly many errors I am still making. So at about 40 metres (Roughly 120 feet) I can probably hit a man-sized target half the time. I was aiming for the yellow leaf and of the 10 shots I fired, these two came closest.

The target was the yellow leaf at Cicci’s elbow (my nickname for Piglet, who just turned 5).

And this was the best shot so far:

Given that’s at roughly 40 metres/120 feet or so, am using the wrong arrows and I still haven’t put the arrow nock markers on the bowstring yet (mostly because I wonder if there is a science to where/how to place them) 2 it’s not too bad I think.

There is also to be said that with eh bow I bought, because it came with all the necessary bits to put it together nicely, I feel more confident that I probably di ok for a first bow. And besides, if I really like this activity, I can always get the one whose look I like better too. They make them with a 60 lbs draw strength too.

I am still trying to find the most suitable thing to use for the hand-protection, because the stuff I got so far is either hobbit-sized, so doesn’t work on my hands, or somehow removes too much sensation for my liking from my fingers and so being able to have a good “feel” for the bowstring. Which… maybe is supposed to be meaningless or you’re supposed to sense it in a more general way or something, but for me right now, feel very relevant to my ability of being able to release the string properly and with as little variance as possible.

I’ll update you when I eventually settle on a way to achieve that without losing my fingerprints permanently on the right hand.

A funny thing is that I noticed over the last few years, one of the guys that does Systems at a high level that I met in Canada, with whom I don’t have much contact aside seeing his Facebook posts over the last twenty years, has obviously taken up archery a few years ago. He has won some competitions and so one and I saw those posts over the years. He’s Greek, and I liked his way of teaching as well as generally his philosophy of life. I wondered if it was just a kind of middle-age search for meaning, or something else for a few years. And I didn’t make the connection until after I had fired the bow and thought about the mental aspect of it, but I get it now. Maybe old warriors just get more meditative in their training and aspects of things martial. It makes sense. It’s a kind of return to the purity of hunting but without the killing of anything.

And it certainly stills my mind. I find myself thinking about the bow, and shooting the arrows late at night, first thing in the morning, and so far the kids, the girls especially, seem to like watching and helping me retrieve the arrows when I miss. None of them can even budge the bowstring on my bow of course, but we have lots of bamboo, so I’ll make them all their own versions and see how they do.

The boy is somewhat less interested in watching and I also think he would prefer the immediacy of guns, patience not being one of his virtues (then again he has my and his mother’s DNA, so he was doomed from the start on that score).

Maybe it’s the elegance of it, but the girls so far seem to be into it, which is another unexpected aspect of it all.

So… I am not sure this post qualifies as a fitness/training one, and I keep failing miserably on the eating front too, though I have cut down a lot on anything sugary/carbs based, I inevitably find it near-impossible to feel satisfied with my eating habits while in a family context. Then again, while there are aspects of monastic life (in the SŌHEI sense) I crave, I also realise I would never trade family life for it.

The right way, as my grandfather always said, is to find the balance in all things.

And I find that archery may just give me that sense of balance that may allow for balance enough to navigate the daily chaos in such a way that I will be able to slot in more of the type of training I know will be beneficial than I am now. At least, it feels that way and I think it is early days but it’s having an effect already.

I will certainly keep you updated on this.

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