One arrow, one life

how do you turn off your mind

I've been working hard on coming up with a solution for my "overthinking" when I'm shooting, especially in competition. Part of the problem is that I've been working on my form in much greater detail than I used to, and I find it difficult to stop working hard on my form even in a tournament. Also, I've been so focused on form that I've neglected my shot routine, which had withered away to almost nothing until I started bringing it back after my last lesson. The mantra I use as a scaffolding for my shot routine is definitely helping.

But what I desperately need is a way to let Self 2 / Right Brain mode to take charge. I know I can't shut off L-mode, but I know that you can manipulate it into taking a back seat, either by giving the brain a task that L-mode can't or won't do (Betty Edwards), or by giving it something to do unrelated to archery. I know what it feels like when I seem to slip into a daydream and shoot on autopilot, but I don't know how to bring it about.

When I think about it, and read Edwards or Galwey, I come up with any number of good ideas which then prove to be difficult to impossible to execute when I'm actually shooting.

But I think I just need to come up with a visualization or a song that I can keep bringing my mind back to, the way you do in meditation.

Last night I set myself the task of coming up with something overnight, while asleep. All that happened was that I had a bad dream about my bow case. This is the small bow case, and the upper half is warped, making it difficult to close. I would never fly with it again, because the slightest bump would cause the latches to pop open, but in my dream I was flying with it, and looking at it gaping open (the latches had been bumped) and thinking, didn't I swear never to fly with this bow case again? But then I noticed that it had also gotten bashed somehow, and had a big dent in one corner, but this had fixed the warp in the upper half and it was now straight.

You could look for some hidden meaning here. Or, you could sigh and say, just another anxiety dream.

a nice shoot

I've been home sick with a cold, and not shooting much, but today I felt better and went to the outdoor range at PSE. Despite the fact that this is a holiday weekend, I had the place to myself pretty much, except for one compound shooter who came, shot a few ends, and left, and a friendly recurve shooting styling himself "Stretch" who also shot a few ends and then left.

I shot 132 arrows, all but the first end at 70m, took me about 2 hours. It was really nice to shoot my longest distance with my heaviest limbs (34 lbs) and not feel fatigued. It was cool and partly cloudy and breezy, very unusual weather for late May. I still can't believe there weren't more people there.

The funny thing is, my concentration is usually impaired by shooting with other people. But today, with my mind tied up in knots about my form as usual, the distraction of another person was just enough to kick me into "autopilot" mode, and as a result, I did my best shooting while Stretch was there. This has to be a first.

I've been working a long time on coming up with a method, or cue, or technique, or formula, or routine, or mantra, or a tune to hum, or a counting song to recite, for shooting on autopilot when I decide to. So far without any success. I can sometimes be completely removed from the field by fantasy, such as thinking about Harry Potter or some such thing, but I don't think being completely gone is ideal. You do need to have some thread grounding you to reality -- for example, how else can you compensate for the wind conditions on each shot? But maybe thinking about Harry Potter is preferable to being all tied up in knots about my form.

some archery photos

me shooting at the Arizona Cup

My coach Mark Penaz

Mark talking to me and Barbara Noblet, another Arizona archer

My first coach, Alexander Kirillov, biting his nails at the Olympic Trials

Alexander with Jenny Nichols, his prize student, who made the Olympic team once again this year

Another Alexander with Jenny

Ben Avery Shooting Facility, where the Olympic Trials were, from a nearby hill. Shooting line on the left, targets on the right. The targets are 70m (about 77 yards) away from the shooters.

This year's Olympic team, 3 men and 2 women. From left to right: Vic Wunderle, Jenny Nichols, Butch Johnson (same age as me), Khatuna Lorig, and Brady Ellison (a Phoenix native, only 19 years old).

The archery team with the coolest logo is the Dine College Warriors (Navajo)

aftermath

I imagine this is a tricky time for our Olympic athletes -- especially the one (Ellison) who hasn't been to the Olympics before. They did it -- they made the team, they're going to the Olympics! But wait, how well are they going to do at the Olympics? Will they medal, or at least make it to the final rounds? Or will they be eliminated early on? What do they do to prepare? How much training can they cram into the next 3 months without overtraining or burning out? How do they prepare for the mental and emotional stress of competing in the most renowned arena of all, the top of the top?

As for me, the aftermath consists of a big jump in motivation and energy, and I'm redoubling my effort to improve my performance. Meditation, visualizations, and stretch-band exercises are back in my daily routine, and I've started shooting with my 34-lb limbs (my highest poundage so far). I don't have a lot in the way of tournaments coming up -- just the California State Outdoor in June, then nothing until the Duel Trials in October -- so I have a chance to regroup and plan what I want to accomplish in the next few months.

My coach is holding a series of three seminars over the next month or so up at Ben Avery. The first one is tomorrow, 8am to 11am. I'm really looking forward to it, it should be a lot of fun to train in a group and hopefully get to do a bunch of fun and wacky exercises. I expect we'll spend part of it on the balance boards, which I enjoy immensely. I very much hope there is some kind of fun competition included. Scoring arrows always stresses me out, I need all the practice I can get at it so I can train myself to relax properly.

USA Archery finally issued the press release about the selection of the team, you can find it here (pdf).

Olympic Trials, Final Day

The 2008 Olympic Archery Team:

Jenny Nichols
Khatuna Lorig
(alternate: Karen Scavotto)

Brady Ellison
Butch Johnson
Vic Wunderle
(alternate: Jacob Wukie)

Of these, only two (Lorig and Ellison) are resident athletes at the OTC in Chula Vista -- in other words only those two are under the tutelage of National Head Coach KiSik Lee, and shooting his trademark B.E.S.T. form. And, of course, Lorig was an Olympian long before anyone ever heard of Lee. So it's really only one of five that can be said to be the result of the High Performance Program. Which does not bode well for Lee and his program. But it's not unexpected. The RAs have been performing in a respectable, but not spectacular, manner ever since the program was founded.

Naturally, theories abound as to why they aren't flourishing under what one would think would be ideal conditions. My personal feeling, and I'm certainly no archery insider so this is just speculation, is that they work them too hard and don't give them any emotional support. They need a den mother out there to balance out the slave-driver nature of the program.

Personally, I'm thrilled with the team. All of them are incredible archers and will perform really well. Whether or not they will medal is another topic for another day.

As for us late-bloomers, let me just point out that although there's no one on the team as old as me... Butch Johnson is only 5.5 months younger than me. Born in 1955 like me, he is 52 years old. Woo-hoo!

Olympic Trials, Day Two

Today I persuaded the Partner to come watch the women's medal matches of the single elimination rounds. There was really only a handful of spectators today, maybe 30 total, as opposed to yesterday, when there were basically none. I did finally see some media person with a big video camera, towards the end of the gold match, which was between Jenny Nichols and Khatuna Lorig. Other than that it's just been a few photographers.

Lori Ciezlinski was among the spectators, raising cheers, or trying to. I don't know how many of the spectators, if any, knew that she is one of the Olympic contenders.

It's so empty here. How can people *not* want to watch a real, live Olympic trial? It's not like Phoenix is a small town. I think the Partner came because she knew I wanted her to, not because she really wanted to see it. I felt bad for Khatuna Lorig, she's an incredible archer, and there were so few people cheering her.

It made me think about how, as an archer, you can't rely on receiving a lot of support. You pretty much have to be self-sustaining and self-contained, like a turtle with its house on its back. You have to have it all inside of you, already, because that's all there is. What's inside of you.

In the afternoon, the local boy Brady Ellison made it to the gold medal match, and he had a fairly robust cheering section, including a crowd under a canopy sporting a "Brady Bunch" banner. He and his opponent, Jason McKittrick, tied, and the match had to be resolved with a one arrow shoot-off. Brady won, and he was instantly surrounded by a crowd of kids and adults wanting him to autograph their posters, hats, and T-shirts. The crowd and the signing lasted a good 10-15 minutes, and everything Brady said made the crowd laugh uproariously, regardless of the intrinsic humor content. It helps that Brady is very young (19) very blonde and very good-looking. I thought to myself, this is more like it! But it only lasted a moment, and it was more a local-boy phenomenon, rather than a love-of-archery thing.

At least it wasn't windy.

Olympic Trials, Day One

Eight women and eight men are still in the running for the Olympic Team. Two women and three men will be selected about 48 hours from now (Sunday afternoon). This is the final in a series of three trial events, and is at the Ben Avery Shooting Facility, north of Phoenix just off the Carefree Highway.

I am working at the event as a volunteer! I get a special T-shirt and a badge! I'm like about 11 years old, emotionally!

The team selection will be made based on cumulative points earned at all three trials. It's a complicated system, designed by National Head Coach KiSik Lee, and involves not only placings in ranking rounds and elimination rounds, but also raw scores, and wins or losses in head-to-head matches. Contrary to what I thought (and posted here earlier), there is no "coach's choice" or "coach's discretion" -- the team will be based on the point system, period.

Today was windy. Very, very windy. It's windy in the desert. A lot. But even so, this spring in southern Arizona has been one of the windiest in recent memory. I shot in three tournaments this spring at Ben Avery, and all three were brutally, miserably windy.

The morning wind was very strong but at least it was a more-or-less-steady headwind, straight north to south. If it's gotta be windy, that's what you, as an archer, want. You can adjust your sight to compensate for the fact that your arrows won't fly as fast, and as long as it's steady, it's not too bad. Cross-winds are bad, gusty/come-and-go winds are worse, and winds constantly shifting direction AND speed are the worst.

There are several techniques archers use to deal with the wind. First, you want really strong core muscles so that your own body doesn't shift or wobble. If a cross-wind gusts as you are just at the point of releasing the arrow, and your body wobbles a bit and your bow shifts a half-inch to the right, it can be disastrous. Second, for a steady wind, you can adjust your sight. Variable winds, don't even bother with your sight, you'll just drive yourself crazy. Finally, there is aiming off, and this is what the elite archers are really skilled at -- reading the wind of the moment and adjusting for it. When I try to aim off? My arrows go way, way off. Sometimes what works for me is to think about aiming off, but not to actually do it.

At first you think, well, it's windy for everyone, so everyone should be equally affected. The wind blows on the just and the unjust alike, right? But then you notice that the really good archers somehow don't seem to be affected as much. That's when you realize that shooting in the wind is itself a skill, and the best archers have perfected it.

Is it windy at the Olympics? It sure can be. In Athens, it was so windy that archers -- Olympic archers -- were completely missing the target on some shots.

better than expected... a bit weird, tho...

Well the lesson went even better than I could have hoped. Coach was very engaged and we did a lot of good work. He modified the grip on the riser of my bow and it's a big improvement, but mostly we worked on form. We did not talk about our big blowup. In fact, the program seemed to be, let's just pretend nothing happened. Which is fine with me, although I do still plan to broach the Expectations topic at a later lesson.

I did get the feeling that he no longer considers me to be on the fast track to stardom, but that's at least partly because I have taken that dream offline for the time being. But I definitely did not get the feeling that he had given up on me, written me off, or pigeonholed me as a quitter and a loser, which was my biggest fear. It was a little strange acting as though nothing had happened, but let's face it, the blowup was a much, much bigger deal for me than it was for him.

Next weekend: State Outdoor!

oh god no

From an article in the NY Times about an Olympic swimmer:

"Even though Lochte has been swimming since he was 9, he has not yet perfected his strokes. “I spend more time on stroke mechanics now than I ever have,” he said. He also spends part of each practice slowing things way down. “The only way to really work on technique is to swim very slowly and really think about every little thing that you’re doing,” he said. “How your body is positioned, what your hips are doing, the positioning of your shoulders and hands and feet.” "

I guess at some point I will have to face the fact that I will NEVER be able to stop working on form. NEVER. oh god no.

shooting in the cold

Well I definitely have had plenty of practice in the last two days shooting off the chest guard while all bundled up in my special shooting vest. A strong cold front moved through yesterday, and the high temperature today was about 50. Yesterday I got hailed on while I was shooting. And whereas I used to think that if it were colder than 50 I couldn't shoot because my hands got too cold, yesterday I wore a warm hat and was able to shoot at about 45. Not that you often have to do that, but in 2005 at Nationals in Colorado Springs, one day everyone had to shoot in a cold cold rain and wind, and I want to be prepared if I ever have to do that. My vest is waterproof and there's a matching quilted hat.

Temperatures will rebound to the 80s later this week, and I expect that for my lesson with Coach in Phoenix on Saturday at 10am, we will be uncomfortably warm.

I've also learned what a huge effect my conditioning and being rested or tired has on my release. The main reason I got the 30 lb limbs was because it was becoming more and more obvious that the weight of the bow has a tremendous effect on whether or not I can do a relaxed release. And to my surprise, doing the SPT exercise with the 34-lb limbs has gotten way, way easier now that I'm shooting with 30lbs. I thought that shooting with 30lbs would make me lose conditioning to the point where I wouldn't be able to do the SPT at all with the 34-lb limbs, but it's just the opposite. Yesterday I was shooting after a grueling 4-hour orienteering course, and I couldn't get a relaxed release. Today, being rested, in spite of the fact I hadn't eaten well today and felt tired and depressed, my relaxed "pop" release was there. Part of it is being old -- or older I should say. It just takes longer to recover from exertion. So it's a really good idea for me to take at least 1 and preferable 2 days of complete rest before a tournament. I used to like to do that, but wondered if I was being a wimp. Now I know it is absolutely necessary.