“In archery we have something like the way of the superior man. When the archer misses the center of the target, he turns around and seeks for the cause of his failure in himself.”
— Confucius
So last February 10 the local archery range here in our city held an archery clinic and I was so happy I was able to attend. I've started my interest in archery around September of 2017 and I stopped around December because I got too busy with other things. While I was still into it and played almost everyday I used to be able to hit 90% bull's eye. Imagine my surprise when I started playing again around the end of January and my arrows were all over the place. It was then that I was approached by one of the staff of the range and he asked me if I wanted to join an archery clinic that was going to be held there. So I went ahead and got myself enrolled. Now I may have been a bit good at it but most of what I learned was mostly self taught and by pestering the other players there so this clinic was exactly what I needed.
I got there a bit early around 10:30am and the coach's arrival was delayed up to 12:30pm so I just strolled around the mall where the range was located. Also took some shots of the mall's rooftop park thing called The Peak.
12:30pm came and the coach finally arrived and we started with a couple of stretching exercises, learning the parts of the bow and arrow, learning the proper posture when shooting and all of the other basic things you need to know when getting into archery like how you're not supposed to grip the bow, that the bow is called a recurve bow, that the recurve bow can shoot up to a range of 70 meters and other little but useful things.
After that we had a little fun competition among the participants. I wasn't able to get pictures from the clinic itself because my friend only showed up during the competition and I had no one else to take pictures for me.So during the competition we were first made to shoot five arrows to adjust our sights. Then we shot 10 arrows for the first set and after taking down the scores we were made to shoot another 10 arrows for the second set. The 4 players with the highest score competed against each other for the rank.
Competition starts! 😱
I have a bad case of stage fright so my arms were shaking the entire time. 😂
I lost~ 😎
Now here are the finalists shooting for top rank~ 😅
#Certificate time! 😂
#Photo op with participants, staff and coach~ 😂
And after that really tiring day at the range time to go get something to eat at our city's night market, which I really need to feature on a future post. ❤️
Here are some of the food we ate:
Kinilaw (raw seafood dish popular here in the philippines)
Isaw (barbecued chicken intestines. Trust me it's very tasty ❤️ )
Pork Barbecue ❤️
A delicious meal and it's only worth around $2 for all three of us~ ❤️
I had fun even though I lost. The most important thing was I learned all the basics so I can improve my archery skills. And for anyone living in the Philippines, Gandiva actually has a couple of branches. Just check their website:
