By Jason Reid
Rochester, NY -(Ammoland.com)- No matter how much you love archery, archery won’t always love you back. Much like the “Its complicated” status button on Facebook, many archers have their peaks and valleys with the pursuit.
We go back again and again and again to the point where the madness of shooting is the painful love we seek. For those committed to the pursuit of excellence in the craft, your bow might love you back only for a few moments in the entire calendar year.
As the sun beat down and sweat streamed down my face as I wrapped up another humid session of shooting in my backyard, I realized five reasons archery drives us crazy are also the same reasons we love it so much.
OCD: The worst feeling in the world as a bowhunter is to be guessing where your arrow is going to fly. After waiting 11 months since last season, the last thing you really want are surprises. On the range all summer, the journey to hitting the quarter sized dots at every imaginable distance between 10 yards and whatever your max range is, does not help any underlying case of OCD. Even if you are off by a few inches right or left, the drive to make the shot consistently can be darn near maddening.
Yet, while this is a source of frustration, the repetition builds familiarity with equipment which pays off in the moment of truth.
Fairness: Maybe because bowhunting truly evens the playing field and actually puts it advantage wilderness and game, our competitive nature kicks into overdrive with a desire to overcome the challenge. If you pick up a bow you have this buried under the surface somewhere. The feeling of having game be just out of range is a source of contention and heartbreak at times. To be successful with a bow you have to break down the world to say less than 40 yards.
Think of the odds and the excitement we derive from this.
Detailed Oriented: The details on a hunt are enough to fill a laundry list. The high-stakes poker like atmosphere which develops as game approaches compounds the pressure. Wind, the animal’s body language, our own composure etc. This is equally as maddening as sighting in a bow, but is also what we crave.
Time Consuming: Bowhunting isn’t a sport, it is a lifestyle because of the time it consumes. The new generation of health conscious bowhunters take it to the next level of making bowhunting a lifestyle with the year-round preparation of both skill and exercise. You truly have to crave those few moments each year in which you have to keep your nerves at bay and settle the pin behind the shoulder of your target animal. The subsequent adrenaline rush makes it all worth the while. If you didn’t bow hunt or even shoot targets can you imagine what else you could do?
Is life pretty boring for those who do not bow hunt? I’ve always wondered.
Success is Fleeting: Success by way of actually killing an animal can be few and far between. The moment of intense emotion and the food provided from a kill is more than enough to bring one back each season. However, in something like elk hunting where the average success rate is 10%, you had better fall in love with learning and count the experience as success. Success can derived from many different aspects of a hunt through things you may have learned , just completing something like a tough backcountry trek is a victory within itself. I want to notch a tag worse than just about anyone and the idea of not notching a tag drives me crazy. Such is bowhunting.
To learn is a victory and you have to have that talk with yourself before every season.
Standing at the bow shop near my home, I watched as a father brought his young son in for the first time to learn how to shoot. The kid was maybe 10 or 11 and had never shot before his life. The father wanted to get back into bowhunting as a way to spend time with his son and had bought an older youth bow for the kid.
The archery tech set the bow up properly, brought the kid to the wall of foam targets and said, “Ok, shoot.” The kid was no more than five yards away, but this was about building a base of mechanics. Struggling with the emotion at first, the kid shook as he tried to balance the bow and keep it back at the same time. When the arrow flew, he turned to the rest of us with a glow and happily exclaiming how much fun the shot was. I can’t remember ever seeing from someone shooting a bow the excitement on his face.
For as much as the intricacies of bowhunting and archery drive us crazy at times, they are also the little things that make the lifestyle worth every second of sweat and frustration because when you pull those deer steaks from the freezer in mid July, know the effort and time put into what is on the grill before you was not in vain.
About Jason Reid:
Driven to tell the next great story, Jason Reid combines a passion for stories and gear with the written word. Follow his adventures on Twitter for honest reviews, information and unique stories from around the outdoor world.