Lost the ability to Play - Reason for absence!

Hi Guys

I'm very conscious that i haven't posted in a while and for that i apologize.

Basically i have tried to actively avoid all things darts and darts related (including watching on television).

The reason for this is that i have been trying to completely purge darts from my mind, and body in an attempt to 'reset' myself.

Now this may sound mad however it is basically a necessity.

I'll set the scene. About 4 months ago i was practicing well and hitting averages near 70. I returned to my old team and everything looked good. I won my first singles match and despite playing badly i was confident about the darting year ahead.

Unfortunately the seeds of what was to come were manifesting themselves as early as that match!

A few days after my dismal but winning effort i went for a  practice and it was like i'd never thrown a dart before! Now we've all had sessions like that so rather than get frustrated i put the darts away and gave myself off, knowing i had  a few weeks until the new season.

This is usually the bets thing to do as spending 2 hours winding yourself up achieves nothing.

Anyway, i picked them up again a week later and it was even worse. It took about 6 hours to go around the board on singles, doubles and trebles! something was clearly wrong!

There was no fluidity, no consistency nothing. They were literally going all over the place. not just a small veer from T20 into the 1, were talking off  board or into 12!

I took another few days off and over the next week i tried

• stretching
• warm bath
• warming the area
• avoiding caffeine

Unfortunately things were still no better and if anything  were getting slightly worse.

I tried to change:

• Position
• Throwing speed
• Grip
• wearing glasses again
• stance

At best some would work for 6-9 darts and then back to the same. Nothing would kick-start my play!

After 3-4 weeks of this i was forced to drop out of the team (my decision) and had to do alot of soul searching.

I love playing darts and competing however i hadn't just lost confidence over the shot, i'd lost confidence that id even get near what i wanted.

The climax came in my last session where i had 100 darts at bull and hit 5!

In these situations what do you do?? there isn't a pill you can buy and i wasn't able to play my way out of it??? do you just trudge down to your darts room every night and spend an hour frustarting yourself silly???

It was at this point that i realized that something in the 'head' wasn't right!

maybe i was:

• obsessing about darts too much
• watching too much
• studying it too much

I came to the conclusion that i was maybe putting myself under too much pressure subconsciously, and because i want(ed) it so bad i'd developed a mental block?

I spoke to my wife and decided that i needed to try and completely remove darts from the equation in my life (inc this blog). I needed to completely stop thinking about it which meant no practice, watching or purchasing.

I'm hoping 6-12 months off will rid me of whatever has caused the issue and i can relearn everything from the start

Anyway just wanted to give everyone a heads up and thank everyone for their emails of concern

Keep playing and watching, its the best game in the world

Take Care

Luke