To understand where you are going you should probably know where you have been.
I took up archery entirely by accident in October 2010, at the start second year of undergrad at Warwick university. It was one of the many sports clubs that had a stall at the annual sports fair (when i say many, check out Sports Fair 2012), but I happened to go along to the taster session and was hooked pretty quickly.
As it turned out UWAC was and remains a very good club, and without realising it my gradual climb through the novice and experienced teams in the first two years provided the perfect challenge, creating a habit of steady improvement (make the novice team, win a medal, beat an experienced archer, make the experienced team, win a league match etc) that would serve me well in the future.
I'm not sure exactly when I started to plan out competitions 6 months in advance, or when the "Archery" folder on my dropbox became the most frequently used. By 2012 when packing for a 3 month exchange placement to Singapore it seemed perfectly natural for me to use my clothes as padding for my archery gear, and ask permission two months in advance to join the local club.
Things accelerated in 2014 after a surprisingly good outdoor season (just) gave me the scores required to enter the selection shoot for the 2015 World University Games. At the shoot itself I once again made it by the skin of my teeth, and 3 months later I found myself in South Korea at the entrance to the Gwangju world cup stadium, surrounded by thousands of athletes and tens of thousands of spectators, live TV cameras, fireworks and light displays.
[caption width="3840" id="attachment_73" align="alignnone"]
I'm the goofy one wearing the flag in centre foreground, in case you were wondering...[/caption]
It left an impression.
So somewhere along the line I made the jump from amateur to athlete. Hopefully this blog will help me keep track of what happens next!