In the high-stakes run-up to Nationals and European championships, the search for the “perfect flight” often leads us to make gear adjustments that our bodies aren’t prepared for. I recently picked up a new set of arrows for the competitions,…
—What flies by consent, strikes by measure, gathers strangers into quiet, then leaves a single hole in the character of its testimony? A clear answer emerged through the organising work behind EIAC 2026 in Waterford. Leadership remained visible, with named…
The Mane, Huzken (The Venom State), City Capital Lajo – Typhon Resurgence, Day 15 Despite the disaster that was the culling contract in Vrenki, it was good to be back home, Fergus thought. For one thing they had made a…
Issue 51 arrives packed with exciting material: shoot reports and a winter-league pictorial from Loch Riach; coverage of the IFAF National Indoor Championships; Mailmatch updates from across the country; and Craigavon’s IFAF double round and single round shoot. A Redfox…
Last Christmas, we had the great pleasure of announcing that ETO 2027 is coming to Ireland—news that fills all of us with real excitement. Ireland now joins the wider TAI family with anticipation and hope, and with pride too: pride…
Chapter 3 of Bowhunter
The Acromion Divot A Movement-Based Approach to the Bow Shoulder A Perspective on Movement I want to start by saying that I am not an archery coach, and I am under no delusion that I am. What I do have,…
Lecture on Houdon’s Louvre Diane, where toe-balance and a crescent seam make chastity a crafted law. What runs on a single toe yet makes your own feet grow heavy; what bares a body yet tightens a law; what offers a…
Very rarely in our lives do we meet someone who, through their very existence, inspires in us the desire to become better. No one is born with that gift. It demands sacrifice, and it often grows out of difficult—sometimes dramatic—events.…
Room 044 in the Museo del Prado carried a disciplined brightness, the sort a ministry might approve, as the building’s stone drank the street and returned it as a pale, steady radiance. I stood where the wall surrendered to Titian’s…
What travelled farther: the bolt that left the string, or the hand that held the string and trembled, deciding, for a heartbeat, whether mercy had any jurisdiction over hunger? Quid longius it: telum an animus? A question suited to a…
Quae avis post mortem longissime volavit, dum caro iuxta focum mansit, ossa iuxta fossam quieverunt?What bird flew farthest after death, while its flesh stayed near the hearth, and its bones stayed near the ditch? A frost had sat on the…
Which servant flies truer than any oath, drinks the heat of a living wrist, obeys a boy’s tremor and a god’s vanity, and yet carries a sovereignty that begins at release and ends only where the point decides? A glove…
Issue 50 (January 2026) of TIFAM – The Irish Field Archery Monthly is out, and it’s a landmark one. You’ve got Andrew Wayland’s big “look back at 2025” (with that end-of-year energy and a proper archery-season scan of what mattered),…
In archery, the follow-through is arguably more critical than in golf or tennis, because the “engine” of the shot is the tension in your own body. While the arrow leaves the bow quickly, any collapse or movement at the moment…
Author: Dr. Antti Rintanen The paradox of archery performance lies in its demands: absolute physical stillness paired with intense mental alertness. Research demonstrates that elite archers who maintain lower heart rates during competition tend to score higher than those with…
TIFAM Issue 49 (Dec 2025) mixes club news, interviews, competition coverage, photo specials, and seasonal fiction: it opens with a Christmas message from the team and features editor Shelly Mooney (historian/artist/writer and longbow archer with Dunbrody Archers, Wexford) plus her…
Dear Archers, this time I bring you something a little different, written especially with those of you shooting the IFAA European Indoor Championships in March 2026 in SETU Arena, Waterford in mind; the article “Holding Focus In Waterford’s Arena” is…
A pale field, washed like chapel plaster after incense has settled, holds its own weather, and in that weather a severed head—half mask, half reliquary—floats as if a saint had been converted into an instrument, while the word Ariette (petite…
The first bamboo bow that entered my life never breathed Indian heat; it lived inside a grainy photograph pinned above my crowded desk in Portlaoise, between a postcard of Velázquez and a stained reading timetable. The photograph came from an…
