Just Like Robin Hood

There was a very large amount of archery going on this past weekend. The CVOTC hosted the first ever SoCal Showdown and tons of athletes poured in from across the U.S. but we also had athletes shooting for Mexico, Australia and Canada.

I happened to do a little shooting myself. Except my weapon of choice was a camera, not a bow and arrow. You can take a look at some of the pictures on teamusa.org if you're interested.

Archery is a different kind of sport. Where other sports are challenge the athlete's physical strength, archery tests an athlete's mental strength. Not to say that archers are fat lardballs, they still have to be physically fit, but the test for them really comes from the mind. During the course of a competition, archers will shoot about 300 arrows. Try doing anything 300 times and most people would go insane. But trying to shoot 300 arrows while calculating distance and wind speed, then adjusting your bow for each one and as a timer counts down. Talk about difficult.

Our resident archers are out shooting 6 days a week, sometimes out on the field for 8 hours. This can be very draining, so much so that when they take an 1 1/2 break during the middle of the day, they are encouraged not to read or study. It's too taxing on their brain. All they can do is eat and sleep. Otherwise, they don't have any "brainfood" left when they shoot in the afternoon.

One more thing. Check out the sweet tats. Only the Olympians have them, almost like a rite of passage. Then if they attend multiple times, they'll get the location tattooed below the rings. And it's placed on their shooting arm, so when they draw back an arrow it's like, "BAM. I've been to the Olympics. What now punk??"

Pretty hard core if I do say so myself.