#811: 2x Olympic Archery Medalist Jake Kaminski — Behind-the-Scenes Stories of Coaching Tim, What Archery Teaches About High Performance, and Excellence Under Pressure

0:00:04 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of
0:00:08 The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, to tease
0:00:14 out how they do what they do, the routines, the belief structures, the training programs that you
0:00:17 can apply to your own life. And I say training programs because my guest today is one of the
0:00:25 best teachers and trainers I have found in the last several years in any discipline whatsoever.
0:00:31 His name is Jake Kaminsky. Jake Kaminsky is a two-time Olympic silver medalist in archery and a
0:00:35 longtime member of the U.S. archery team with more than a decade of international competition
0:00:44 experience. He is very well known for his technical precision. He is meticulous with gear and tuning,
0:00:49 also with biomechanics, his deep knowledge of the sport. And with all of that, Jake helped lead the
0:00:57 U.S. to team silver medals at both the 2012 London and 2016 Rio Olympic Games. Since retiring from
0:01:01 Olympic competition, Jake has become a leading voice in the archery world through content creation,
0:01:07 product innovation, and educational events. He runs a successful YouTube channel, which is kind of the
0:01:13 de facto archery technical channel. People from all over the world have seen this over and over again. He is
0:01:21 like the Taylor Swift meets, you name it, Brad Pitt of the archery world when I’ve gone to events with him
0:01:27 because he was my coach and is my coach in archery. I had my first competition end of January. We’ll talk
0:01:33 about that. So he, in addition to that, writes training guides and develops high-performance gear,
0:01:40 which he manufactures in Austria. It is as precise as you expect Jake Kaminsky to be
0:01:48 under the Kaminsky Archery brand. You can find him on YouTube, Jake Kaminsky at Jake Kaminsky Archery.
0:01:56 Kaminsky is K-A-M-I-N-S-K-I. Website, jakekaminsky.com. And on Instagram and Facebook,
0:02:01 Jake underscore Kaminsky on Instagram. Facebook, Kaminsky Jake. We’ll link to all that stuff,
0:02:06 but really the big two are the YouTube channel, Jake Kaminsky Archery, and then the website,
0:02:14 jakekaminsky.com. And we go all over the place in this conversation is really a close examination
0:02:21 of real world learning because he and I had to work around and towards all sorts of things together.
0:02:29 I’ll explain how I chose him, how I found him and much more in just a second after a few words from
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0:06:06 Optimal, minimal.
0:06:11 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
0:06:13 Can I ask you a personal question?
0:06:15 Now would it seem like a perfect time?
0:06:17 What if I did the opposite?
0:06:20 I’m a cybernetic organism living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.
0:06:24 Me, Tim, Ferris, so.
0:06:30 Jake Kaminsky.
0:06:32 Nice to see you, man.
0:06:33 Yeah, nice to see you, too.
0:06:38 So glad to be doing this. We’ve had, I was joking before we recorded, that we could just
0:06:42 treat this like conversation 678, something like that. We’ve had a lot of conversations.
0:06:43 Might be double that.
0:06:46 It might be double that. It’s probably double that. If we count texts and the many, many
0:06:51 thousands and then videos, it just goes on and on. So let’s give people some context.
0:06:57 We’re going to do a deep dive into the world of archery. We’re going to do a deep dive into
0:07:02 the world of high performance, which transcends archery. So if you think to yourself,
0:07:06 archery, man, I’m not interested in flinging arrows, still listen, there’s going to be a lot
0:07:13 here. And we’re also going to talk about your coaching and our experience, coach and student,
0:07:20 and what we did with that, which I think is pretty special and fun to unpack. So we’re going to go in a
0:07:26 lot of different rabbit holes, but let’s start for people who are not familiar with Olympic
0:07:31 recurve. What does that mean? What is the sport?
0:07:38 Sure. So the sport of Olympic archery, as I grew up, it was just called recurve because that was the
0:07:42 discipline, but now it’s known as Olympic archery because there’s many different disciplines that have
0:07:49 spun off from that kind of bow. But essentially what it is, is a sport of hyper precision. It’s just how
0:07:54 good can you work with a machine, your bow to produce the exact same result every single time
0:08:00 at an extreme distance. So when I grew up, we shot up to a hundred yards, which is easy to see. It’s
0:08:05 end zone to end zone on a football field. But now the Olympic distance is 70 meters or 77 yards
0:08:10 or 237 feet. So that’s, you know, about three quarters of the way down the football field.
0:08:17 So we’re shooting an arrow that distance, the arrow reaches 12 to 13 feet in the air in an arcing
0:08:23 trajectory to the target. No magnification, zero magnification, no rear sight, in fact. So you don’t
0:08:28 even have something to align up in the back other than a string. You’re using a blurry string that is
0:08:34 very imprecise in your reference. And for people who are trying to get an idea of what it means to
0:08:43 perform at a very high level, the center of the target. How large is that? And what does that mean
0:08:51 for the amount of motion that is permissible at the arrow point? The 10 ring, the maximum scoring
0:08:57 ring is a 12.2 centimeters or about the size of a CD. You have to not only take into consideration
0:09:03 your alignment with that arrow and that bow, but also you have wind. So there’s a lot of factors.
0:09:09 Or precipitation or yeah, anything, anything but lightning. And to hit that 10 ring, that 12.2
0:09:17 centimeter diameter ring, it is the margin of error to hit that repeatedly is the diameter of a extra
0:09:22 fine ball in an extra fine ballpoint pen. So just to put this in perspective, if you’re not watching the
0:09:28 video, you’ll still get it. But if you’re watching the video, all right. So you’re trying to hit a CD.
0:09:36 For those of you remember CDs, it would be like the type of dish you might have under a cup of coffee,
0:09:43 maybe something like that. It’s small. And then the amount of variance at the arrow tip
0:09:52 that will allow you to hit that consistently is smaller than the point of this pen, not the pen,
0:09:58 the diameter of the pen, the actual rolling point in a ballpoint. Correct. It’s insane. Correct. And now
0:10:03 how often or how many arrows do you have to do that for it? It’s because it’s not just one. It’s more
0:10:09 than that. We shoot for a ranking round to seat us in our brackets for the Olympic games. We shoot 72
0:10:16 arrows. Your average, like really high score, you’re hitting that 10 ring probably 40 plus times out of 72
0:10:22 times. Yeah. So it’s insane. That’s the level. I’ll give one more bit of trivia that I did not know
0:10:29 until we were literally just walking down this hallway, which is that you have also hit the 10
0:10:36 ring from three quarters of a football field away while standing on an indo board. Yeah. For people
0:10:41 who don’t know what that is, it’s like a balance board. Imagine a skateboard deck that you could stand
0:10:47 on and there’s basically a huge rolling pin underneath it and you place it on the pin and
0:10:51 then you have to balance as you wobble. And if you see someone try this for the first time,
0:10:57 it’s disastrous and comical. And so to be able to stand on that and hit the 10 ring, you guys can put
0:11:06 the math together. It’s just, it is just an extra planetary accomplishment. It’s wild. So let’s back up
0:11:15 and share some context on how we first connected. So the world of archery is, I’m not going to say
0:11:22 it’s opaque because it’s not opaque, but it can be difficult to navigate. And when I was first trying
0:11:29 to find potential coaches, and I can come back to why I was doing that, I went where? I went online,
0:11:36 I went to YouTube. But one of the challenges, as most people recognize, is that let’s just say for
0:11:41 trick shooters, and there’s some amazing trick shooters, which is not to discount that as a
0:11:48 discipline, but people can take a thousand attempts and then show their best outcome.
0:11:53 And we were talking about this earlier, but when they actually go to retrieve their arrow,
0:11:54 look at the rest of the target face.
0:12:00 Not only retrieve their arrow, just look at the target in frame behind them. Oftentimes it’s like
0:12:03 there’s a burlap wrap over the target because people use bag targets. That’s what they’re
0:12:09 called. And you know how worn out they can get. Yours are nowhere near as worn out as 90 plus
0:12:14 percent of those trick shooters. And yeah, they show you that one impact, but look at the target
0:12:14 behind them.
0:12:19 And what I think what you’re alluding to is that if you’re hitting the center of the target
0:12:23 consistently, you’re basically going to carve out a sweet spot and then you have to replace
0:12:30 that portion of the target face if it’s replaceable. There’s a lot of, I suppose, selection and
0:12:35 highlights online and it can make it very, very difficult, particularly if you’re coming
0:12:39 in as a novice, you don’t know how to sort or separate fact from fiction. You don’t know
0:12:44 where to go. And so what I ended up doing was asking myself a question I ask a lot. And for
0:12:48 people who’ve read The 4-Hour Chef, which is actually about accelerated learning, this approach
0:12:54 will sound familiar, but this is a chance to see it unfold in recent history and sort of
0:13:01 in real time because we’re still training. How can I find an objective measure for this
0:13:08 sport, for this discipline? And there are almost always options. For instance, I’ve had Susan
0:13:16 Garrett on this podcast. She is a multiple-time agility champion. So dog agility champion. She’s
0:13:25 a multiple national-time champion. And that is an objective competition with set scoring, with set
0:13:33 penalties under time, and there’s nowhere to hide. So that is how I ended up having Susan Garrett on the
0:13:40 podcast versus a million celebrity dog coaches where it’s impossible to actually know what you’re
0:13:45 buying because you don’t have any of the outtakes. You don’t have a lot of objective measurement.
0:13:50 And in this case, I was like, all right, well, I think Archery’s in the Olympics. Let me look this
0:13:54 up. Oh, it’s in the Olympics. Great. Let me try to use that as a sorting mechanism. And that is how I
0:13:58 found your amazing YouTube channel. You want to give it a plug?
0:13:59 Yeah, it’s just Jake Kaminsky.
0:14:06 I mean, when we’ve gone anywhere related to archery, it’s like trying to move around with
0:14:14 The Rock or Lady Gaga or some combination of the two. You just get mobbed because in a world where
0:14:21 it can be very difficult to decipher what is legitimate, you offer the bona fides and a lot
0:14:25 of really good technical instructions. So that’s how I found you. Then reached out, and then lo and
0:14:30 behold, here we are. And it’s really worked out incredibly well. And my background, just
0:14:34 quickly, it’s not that extensive, but I’ve been bow hunting for at least 10 years, a bit more than
0:14:40 that. Did rifle prior to that. First hunt ever was with Steven Rinella during the writing of The
0:14:46 Four Hour Chef. So thanks to Steve Rinella. People can check him out. Everything Meat Eater. Also an
0:14:54 amazing writer. And I’ll give people a bit of a flash forward, and then we can talk about all sorts of
0:15:01 stuff, including your kind of training regimen for yourself and development and so on. But began taking
0:15:07 barebow archery. We can talk about what that is, but it’s effectively, for the purposes of this
0:15:13 conversation, it’s a competition classification. And it dictates that you basically strip off
0:15:19 all the stabilizers, the clicker, don’t worry about these things, the sight, et cetera, from an
0:15:20 Olympic bow.
0:15:21 Essentially, all the aids.
0:15:21 Yeah, all the aids.
0:15:22 Everything that makes it.
0:15:29 Yeah, you take off all of the performance aids, and then you shoot with that particular bow.
0:15:36 And I became interested in barebow for a few reasons. I saw it online on YouTube while I was
0:15:41 tooling around trying to find something, and there is something called Lancaster Classic.
0:15:43 Happens in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
0:15:44 Or Lancaster.
0:15:54 Lancaster, yes, exactly. And Lancaster Archery Supply is a huge distributor of archery products,
0:16:02 and they hold this competition once a year. And it is, for the barebow discipline, I suppose it’s the
0:16:03 largest in the world.
0:16:04 I think so. Yeah.
0:16:10 I mean, it’s at least the most prestigious, I suppose, has the biggest reach, so it gets the
0:16:16 most exposure, and I think actually the most participation now, at least as of this last
0:16:21 year. And a couple of years leading up to this, it’s taken off, and it is, I believe it’s almost
0:16:24 the biggest, if not the biggest class, as far as the amount of participation.
0:16:29 Yeah. So you’ve got barebow. They also have compound. They also have Olympic archeries,
0:16:30 Olympic recurve.
0:16:31 They have hunting.
0:16:33 They have longbow now.
0:16:33 Yep.
0:16:38 They’ve got all sorts of stuff. So many different classes. And barebow is interesting to me for a few
0:16:46 reasons. I have not done any real physical competition. Well, now I have, but in 20 years,
0:16:52 probably. Last thing was Tango in Argentina in 2004, I suppose it was, a long time ago.
0:16:58 And I wanted to compete. I love competing. But I thought to myself, all right, I want to take a bit
0:17:03 of an oblique approach here, which I think is a misunderstanding about what I do sometimes, or what
0:17:08 I often focus on, even as early as the four-hour workweek. The goal is not to find the cheap shortcut.
0:17:16 The goal is to look for oblique, maybe uncommon approaches to various problems or goals.
0:17:22 That’s it. And in this case, I looked at the number of people competing in barebow. And I was
0:17:29 like, all right, it’s a smaller population at the higher levels. And it is sometimes nicknamed
0:17:37 the struggle stick for folks. And part of the reason it has so much viewership online compared to some of
0:17:42 these other disciplines is, as they would say, like in barebow, anything can happen.
0:17:43 Literally at any moment.
0:17:49 At any moment. And if somebody lets their nerves take control, if there’s any number of issues,
0:17:57 they could really fire on the target, but out of the bullseye, let’s just say, by a substantial margin,
0:18:03 which opens up the possibility for comebacks, surprise turns, reversals of fortune, and it makes
0:18:11 it fun to watch. And I thought, okay, well, that seems like a fun place to bookmark as a possible
0:18:19 competition and ended up competing end of January. We will come back to that and had, I suppose,
0:18:26 about six months of real training, real focus training. And so we’ll come back to what that
0:18:34 looked like. But let’s talk about Jake. So how did the archery thing start? And why don’t you just
0:18:37 take that and run with it? And then I might pepper in questions along the way.
0:18:44 So I grew up in a very small town in Elman, New York, kind of south of Buffalo, New York. And my dad was a
0:18:50 volunteer fireman at the local fire department. And they have a spring and a fall gun raffle every year.
0:18:57 And, you know, they raffle off guns in a canoe full of beer or whatever else. Right. And one of them was
0:19:03 a bow and he won the bow gun raffle. And this was, I was five years old. And of course this was a, you
0:19:08 know, hunting bow for an adult. So there’s no way a five-year-old is going to use that. So we found,
0:19:14 I think we went to Kmart and bought a bear hunting compound for a kid, just fiberglass, super cheap,
0:19:19 very basic. My parents bought me that for my sixth birthday. So on my sixth birthday,
0:19:26 after we got hay bales from a local farmer or whatever, threw up a target. And I shot my first
0:19:32 arrow at 20 yards and 20 yards is more than double the distance that you would really want to have any
0:19:38 person, not just a kid shoot their first arrow. I vividly remember my very first arrow I ever shot
0:19:44 because I literally shot an inside out X on my very first arrow. You should explain what that is.
0:19:50 So inside out X, meaning if you have your 10 ring, like the maximum scoring ring inside,
0:19:55 the 10 ring is a X ring. It’s about the size. It’s like a, between a diamond and nickel about that
0:20:01 size and inside out, meaning I put the arrow in the dead center of the target where it did not touch
0:20:07 the ring of the X. So it was inside of a dime, roughly my very first arrow. We won’t talk about
0:20:11 the next several hundred arrows. I mean, thank God for that first arrow, right?
0:20:16 Yeah. I mean, I was hooked. I mean, it’s kind of crazy. I’ve heard this story to think
0:20:21 like if your first 20 arrows had been all over the place, would it have been a different story? Like
0:20:26 maybe, you know, maybe it’s crazy. Yeah. Who knows? Yeah. Really no way to know. And, uh,
0:20:30 I was with my brother, Matt, he was out there shooting with me. Yeah. I don’t know if he shot before
0:20:37 me, but after I shot the X, he’s like, give me that thing. And of course, yeah. And then it just
0:20:42 kind of started from there. We found that local club that was down the street. It’s a Joe ad club,
0:20:46 a junior Olympic archery development club. There’s many of those around the country and the U S they’re
0:20:52 at local hunting shops. Basically, if they have a junior development program, we found that club
0:20:55 because that’s where the bow was bought for the gun raffle. And luckily it was about a five minute
0:21:01 drive from our house. And so every Saturday mornings they had a junior development program.
0:21:06 And so I’d go there and start shooting with them. And so every Saturday morning I’d be there
0:21:12 no matter what, because I enjoyed it so much. The progression, it went from shooting compound.
0:21:17 So I shot compound for about six years. Let’s pause for a second. Just for people who have no
0:21:22 archery context. And by the way, my not too secret agenda for this is I want everybody to go out and
0:21:30 try archery. It has been such a godsend for me to have that constant for a million reasons turns into
0:21:35 a form of meditation. It can also be just as frustrating, if not more frustrating than golf,
0:21:42 but let’s put that aside for now. It has been such a gift to my life to have archery and to be able to
0:21:49 train with you. It’s really been tremendous. So I have this not so secret agenda of getting as many
0:21:55 people as possible who are listening to try archery, which by the way, is very much within reach for
0:21:59 basically everybody listening. If you have a smartphone and you’re listening to this, you can
0:22:04 try archery. You do not need to buy anything, but let me explain a term. So longbow is about the
0:22:09 simplest thing you can imagine. It’s a, let’s call it a stick. It’s bent. And then you have a string
0:22:16 attached to it. And you’ll see this in many different indigenous hunting cultures. You’ll see it all over
0:22:20 the world recurve. You will also see all over the world because they figured out, well, you can make
0:22:28 the bow a lot shorter and have the ends of the bow recurve out. That’s kind of towards the target
0:22:34 to apply more tension. It’s like a advanced longbow using laminations of wood instead of just a stick.
0:22:39 Right, exactly. So now you have this laminated bow and you see that all over the world,
0:22:45 all over the world. And there are different iterations of that. You’ve got the slightly
0:22:50 different idea, but horse bow, which I’m, of course I’m, I’m in love with. That’s a whole separate
0:22:57 podcast and so on and so forth. So if you imagine like a Robin hood bow in your mind, I think it was
0:23:05 a recurve in maybe the cartoon, at least made out of fancier materials, whether it’s carbon or aluminum
0:23:10 or something else. Then you have the idea of what I’m shooting when I’m doing say a bare bow.
0:23:18 And then a compound has various cams. You can think of them almost like cams on a weightlifting
0:23:18 machine.
0:23:19 Or like pulleys.
0:23:25 Yeah, pulleys, pulleys and cams. So it’s like when you are in a gym using a machine, pushing or pulling,
0:23:32 there’s a strength curve. So the amount of exertion required changes over the course of that full range.
0:23:37 And in the case of a compound bow, very similar. And what makes it such an efficient, amazing hunting
0:23:43 tool, there are a few factors. One is in the beginning, it’s hard, it’s hard, it’s hard. And then
0:23:50 there’s a let off. So you might have, I’m making up these numbers, but 60 pound draw weight. And then
0:23:51 you’re holding, what would you say?
0:23:53 Maybe between eight and 12 pounds.
0:23:54 Eight and 12 pounds.
0:23:56 Depending on if it’s a hunting or a competition.
0:24:02 Yeah, right. So eight or 12 pounds when you’re at anchor. And to define that, that’s when you have your
0:24:07 very simple terms. Your hand that is attached to the string, whether you’re using fingers or
0:24:13 a mechanical release, when your hand is kind of glued to your face and you always glue it to the
0:24:20 same place to set up the rifle barrel, so to speak. And that’s one element of what makes compounds so
0:24:26 interesting. The second is when you have these additional mechanical aids, let’s just say,
0:24:31 the speed of the arrow is just dramatically, dramatically, dramatically more.
0:24:37 The main difference in the compound versus everything else is there’s one string on every
0:24:42 other bow called a single string bow, whether that be a trad bow, a stick bow, a traditional bow,
0:24:48 a recurve, a bare bow, whatever that is. Whereas compound has three strings, essentially. When you
0:24:53 look at it, you can see multiple strings because the string tension, as you pull it back, it builds,
0:24:57 but then it transfers that tension into the cables, which are the other two strings that
0:25:01 the arrow is not attached to. And so that then catapults the arrow at an incredible rate of speed
0:25:02 when you let it go.
0:25:08 Yeah. And when you go to your local range, which we’ll get to, and I recommend, you can try all of
0:25:12 these different options in a lot of places. And if you can only start with compound, great.
0:25:13 Absolutely. That’s where I started.
0:25:14 Maybe you stay with compound.
0:25:14 Yeah.
0:25:19 And at the highest levels, they do some absurd, absurd things.
0:25:19 Yeah.
0:25:24 Actually, I just have to give credit where credit is due. So also have had some fantastic conversations
0:25:31 with Joel Turner, shot IQ, his son, Bodie. Do you want to just explain what he’s capable of doing?
0:25:37 Sure. So, you know, that X that I shot the inside out on my first arrow. So he will shoot that X.
0:25:47 So that same hitting that dime for about 120 arrows in a row, essentially under pressure when there’s
0:25:53 $100,000 plus on the line. And you would not know just looking at the kid, he is just stone cold,
0:25:58 ice in his veins. You’d have no idea that he even had a heartbeat just watching him shoot because
0:26:05 he’s incredible to be able to hit that thing repeatedly with so much precision and repeatability
0:26:10 under pressure. Most importantly, it’s just, it’s ridiculous. We’ll get to talking about a little bit
0:26:15 about compound and how there’s a, I guess, a less deep learning curve. You get really good,
0:26:20 really fast as far as precision, but still to win with a compound in a competition,
0:26:24 it still requires immense amounts of effort and energy and training.
0:26:29 So we’re going to come back to your trajectory in a second, pun intended, but let’s mention that
0:26:36 briefly because I didn’t really fill in the gaps. The compound bow that I used for hunting
0:26:41 was fantastic. I thought it was a great transition for me because I was more familiar with rifle and
0:26:47 so on. It was actually a fantastic transition and I would hunt once a year. Let’s just call it something
0:26:56 like that. Use everything, eat everything for those people wondering. And the hop from rifle
0:27:04 and so on to compound was actually quite easy. I needed to brush up on a few things, obviously learn
0:27:10 some technical details, think about back tension a bit, etc. But for someone with a sports background,
0:27:17 it was pretty straightforward. And if you’re thinking about the target size, right, the kind
0:27:24 of kill zone on whether it’s a deer or an elk, I mean, certainly a lot larger on an elk, but you can get
0:27:31 to a point if you have some kinesthetic awareness very quickly, I would say within a week for a lot
0:27:37 of folks, maybe. Yeah. So to be like ethical as a hunter to, you know, know that when you take the
0:27:43 shot, you’re not going to do the animal any suffering. It will be a very, very painless and fast end.
0:27:45 Yeah. It takes more time to get to that point.
0:27:50 Well, depends. It depends on the distance that you’re shooting. So say, we’ll say 20 yards.
0:27:53 So what I was going to say is 20 yards, just as people can imagine.
0:27:58 So 20 yards, your average person, I could get them to hit that pie plate. It depends on the coach,
0:28:03 of course, and depends on explanations and the individual person as well. But I would say
0:28:08 easily within a week, you’re going to hit that thing nine to 10 times out of 10 every time within
0:28:14 a day, you’ll hit it probably six to eight times out of 10 because it’s just easy, relatively speaking,
0:28:18 to get to that level. Yeah. And there are a lot of reasons for that, right? I mean,
0:28:23 you have the let off, you have the peep, which is a rear sight, which is basically a rear sight.
0:28:28 It’s a tiny circle affixed to the string itself. You have a level on the bow.
0:28:32 You have a level. There are many things that allow you to do that quickly, but then to
0:28:35 get to the highest levels, we were talking about this at lunch. It’s kind of like, okay,
0:28:42 let’s get you down the hill on a snowboard. Yeah. Within a week, we can probably get you
0:28:46 down some easy terrain on a snowboard. Okay. Now you want to compete in the X games. Yeah.
0:28:50 All right. Well, good luck. That’s going to take about 10 years, right? I mean, that’s a rule for
0:28:54 a reason. Yeah. I mean, that’s, that’s, that’s Bodhi and anyone who performs at that level.
0:28:59 Absolutely. So not to take it away from them, like their proficiency level is insane. And to be able
0:29:04 to do it all the time under pressure is even more insane. You know, it’s one thing to do it in your
0:29:10 backyard, right. And be that backyard world champion that so many people claim to be right. But to do it
0:29:15 in front of other people on a stage with crazy lighting, cheering crowds, money on the line,
0:29:20 potentially putting food on your table or not at the end of the day too, that’s just a whole lot
0:29:24 of added pressure. And so it’s different. We’ll probably end up talking about Korea later. And
0:29:28 maybe we can just give a sneak peek. I know we’re going all over the place, but I remember you said
0:29:33 to me at one point, and please correct me if I’m getting this wrong. If each country could field as
0:29:38 many athletes as they wanted for a given sport, that Korea would probably place one to a hundred.
0:29:41 At minimum, bare minimum.
0:29:47 Yeah. It’s basically their, let’s just call it basketball, football, baseball, all wrapped into
0:29:47 one.
0:29:49 Yeah. It is their national sport.
0:29:57 I mean, they are obscenely, obscenely good. And you said to me before, if you or I were scouted and
0:30:01 assessed early on, we wouldn’t have made the early cuts.
0:30:03 No, you would have immediately.
0:30:03 Because I’m cross-eyed.
0:30:05 Because of your eye dominance.
0:30:09 Yeah, I’m right-handed, but my left eye is my aiming eye. So I would have been gone.
0:30:11 And I get a little bit too excited.
0:30:11 Yeah.
0:30:12 So I would have also been-
0:30:13 You’d have been cut.
0:30:13 A hundred percent.
0:30:22 So what are some maybe good decisions or habits that you made early on, let’s just say before
0:30:28 you ended up in San Diego, that you think helped you to perform the way you performed in those
0:30:33 early stages? I think I can think of one example, but I’ll hold it for now, which is where you’re
0:30:36 placing yourself in the gym and how you’re training.
0:30:44 I would say for me, one of the biggest advantages as a human, not just as an archer, but as a human
0:30:49 was the same kind of thing that you saw was a meditative escape, right? Because when you’re
0:30:53 shooting archery, that’s the only thing you can focus on. Because if you’re thinking about anything
0:30:55 else, your scores go down, your groups open up.
0:30:58 Yeah. You know if you’re meditating poorly, very quickly.
0:31:05 A hundred percent. So I think for me, that gave me a place to kind of go to. Like I escaped to
0:31:12 archery. So I feel like that was definitely a big factor as to what led to that. Just it naturally
0:31:18 worked for me. It wasn’t difficult for me. It is hard. It’s hard to stay focused on something so
0:31:25 simple and repetitive over and over again, but it was very enjoyable because it’s just me,
0:31:31 the bow and the arrow. I love competing as well. I used to play baseball when I was a kid and that
0:31:37 competed with my archery time because I was trying out for the state team in baseball or about to and
0:31:41 winning nationals shooting archery. So it’s like kind of had an easy decision there to make because
0:31:48 I was already winning nationals in archery. So I went with that, but the overall just enjoyment of
0:31:53 shooting archery and enjoying that me and the bow and no one else is going to prevent me from beating
0:31:58 someone else. It’s not like they’re interfering with me or trying to prevent me from shooting my
0:32:04 arrow. It’s very nice. And it’s also a hundred percent objective. There is no subjectivity. There’s
0:32:11 no way for anyone to influence the outcome other than maybe at some weird position, a judge to make a
0:32:16 bad call, but it’s almost never happening. It just doesn’t happen because it’s such a small community
0:32:21 and everybody holds each other accountable, which is also another amazing thing about the community of
0:32:26 archery. So I think that was a big factor there as far as, you know, what you’re alluding to and
0:32:31 bringing up and saying is I choose to make things as difficult as possible when I’m practicing.
0:32:37 Like say if I’m out at a range, I’ll choose the lane nearest the wall. So I have the least amount of
0:32:43 space. And we’ll probably get into why we do that in a little bit here, but I would suggest you to do
0:32:47 the same thing as we were working together. And you at first were like, why, why would I do that?
0:32:52 It’s much better to just stand by myself out in the open and have no influence. Well, it’s because when
0:32:57 you’re shooting on a line in a tournament, you have 24 inches of space roughly for yourself. And you’re,
0:33:02 the next guy’s 24 inches, then the next guy. And so you’re stacked in there like a can of sardines.
0:33:06 Yeah. We get a photo of me at Lancaster for people who want to see what it looks like.
0:33:11 Yeah. It’s like, it’s like a Tokyo subway car. Oh, you just happen to all be holding bows with
0:33:17 arrows. Yes. It’s very crowded. It is. It is. It is. So anything you can do to make things more
0:33:24 difficult to shoot in the rain, to shoot in the wind, to shoot in the heat, I would do because I
0:33:28 don’t know, maybe I just enjoy torturing myself. I don’t know, but I found it to be really important.
0:33:33 And once I got to the training center, listening to some of the other successful athletes,
0:33:38 giving talks at the training center about their success and how things went and what made them
0:33:44 successful, a lot of them was leaning into the same kind of thing, training hard to make competition
0:33:50 easy. Yeah. Well, it’s very much an echo of the more you sweat in training, less you bleed in combat.
0:33:51 Sure. Absolutely.
0:33:57 Like you, you want to try to make your training harder if possible than your competition. There’s
0:34:00 there are limits to what you can do sometimes. Sure. We’ll talk about that.
0:34:05 But even still like the range I grew up on, I would go there more than just Saturdays and I’d shoot there
0:34:11 by myself because no one else is there and I’m just shooting. And my coach slash mentor at the time,
0:34:17 Harry Stabell would come downstairs because it was down in like a secondary level below and he’d have a
0:34:22 metal ashtray back then everybody smoked and he would just throw it randomly on the concrete ground.
0:34:28 When I’m at full draw and I have to regain composure and shoot a shot. Right. So there’s all sorts of
0:34:32 weird stuff that happened all the time. Mr. Yagi. Yeah. Action going on.
0:34:38 There’s a lot of stuff that happened that definitely would not fly in today’s day and age. So it’s like,
0:34:42 oh, you’re dropping your bow arm. That’s like a thing that when you shoot the shot, you have to
0:34:47 maintain the bow up. You don’t want to drop the arm. So he’d take his pocket knife out, flip it open,
0:34:53 turn it upside and say, don’t drop your arm. Put it under your arm. Under my arm. Or you’re grabbing
0:34:58 your bow. Something else you don’t want to do is hold on to it. There’s a grip on a bow, but you don’t
0:35:03 want to grip it. You just saddle it. Right. And you’re kind of pushing into it. Correct. And so you’re
0:35:07 grabbing your bow. Guess what? Thumbtacks were double-sided taped on the front of my bow. Didn’t
0:35:13 grab it anymore. That’s so intense. Yeah. And it worked. I mean, look, I’m not recommending people
0:35:19 do that with their kids, but the also supplement to our conversation, we’re going to put a number of
0:35:26 videos up on my YouTube page and we’ll link to Jake’s YouTube page with Archery 101, both Archery
0:35:32 Gear 101, just laying out the anatomy of a bow and then Technical 101. So you have a couple of
0:35:38 pointers, which you may not get at some ranges so that when you have your first, second and
0:35:43 subsequent lessons, you’ll have some really good solid fundamentals at least to use.
0:35:51 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:37:04 All right. So you mentioned Thumbtack Billy. I forgot his name, Harry, right?
0:37:14 And if I’m skipping any important chapters, let me know. But I want to know when KSL entered your life
0:37:20 and who or what is KSL. Sure. So quickly, before we get into KSL, I started shooting compound.
0:37:21 Yep.
0:37:28 Easier sport to get into. Shot that for six years. And then some other of the friends that I developed at
0:37:32 the archery range that I was going to were going to the Empire State Games. It’s like a mini Olympics,
0:37:37 and it’s for all of the regions of within New York State. And they compete against each other,
0:37:41 different events. You go to a place, there’s opening ceremonies, closing ceremonies.
0:37:42 They have this for a bunch of sports.
0:37:48 It’s amazing. I wanted to do the archery thing, but compound wasn’t in it. Only recurve. And I had
0:37:53 really debilitating target panic, basically dealing with aiming in the middle and the irrational fear
0:37:56 to aim in the middle with the intention of shooting the shot.
0:37:57 Which is quite common.
0:38:02 It’s a common thing. So I wanted to shoot recurve because it’s a change, something different. Archery
0:38:06 was starting to become unfun for the compound side of things because of that target panic.
0:38:11 So I picked up the recurve and it has a device called a clicker, which is essentially a psycho
0:38:17 trigger that is both a draw check to make sure your draw length, the distance you pull the bow back
0:38:21 is the same every single time, but it also gives you a cue to tell you when to let go. So it allowed
0:38:27 me to aim in the middle with more comfort to disassociate from that fear of letting go.
0:38:32 Yeah. So let me give people a visual that might help you imagine what a clicker is. It’s a flat
0:38:38 piece of metal that goes on the outside of the arrow. I actually used one for the first time today and
0:38:43 holy God, is it challenging to figure out. But if you were to imagine, let’s say you’re using a
0:38:47 slingshot. Most people know a slingshot, but let’s say instead of shooting a ball bearing, you’re
0:38:56 shooting an arrow out of this slingshot. And there’s a piece of metal that is leaning against
0:39:03 the arrow as you pull it back in the slingshot. Once it flips past the very front of that arrow
0:39:07 point, this is not the perfect analogy, but it works and clicks onto another piece of metal.
0:39:12 That’s when you let go, whether you think you’re ready or not. And what that’s going to do is
0:39:18 standardize how much you pull it back. And it also takes away the decision to let go.
0:39:19 Yes, exactly.
0:39:22 It’s just a Pavlovian response that you train in yourself.
0:39:24 Yes and no.
0:39:25 I mean, it’s more complicated.
0:39:29 Yes, yes. But that is a brief look at it. So I switched to recurve specifically because of target
0:39:35 panic and to go to the Empire State Games. So I literally took a bow off the wall. I still have
0:39:42 the bow that was a club bow and took my stuff from my compound, my arrows and all sorts of other things
0:39:46 and threw it on the bow and started shooting it for a few months before Empire State Games made the
0:39:50 team. I think I won some medals there. I don’t remember exactly, but it was a lot of fun. Good
0:39:55 time, very good experience and ultimately fell in love with archery again because it was enjoyable
0:40:01 again. So there was no target panic involved and just continued to do that. Shot up through the
0:40:07 ranks, started winning nationals as a junior. And then at a tournament called the, well,
0:40:14 actually it was junior world championships at US target nationals. I was shooting against some other
0:40:18 people that had just moved to the training center to work with KSL, who we’ll get to in a second.
0:40:25 And I was the only person to beat the person who was working with KSL. And he came up to me after the
0:40:31 match and said, Hey, you’re pretty good. And I’d like you to come out to the training center and work
0:40:35 with the junior dream team. It was a squad at the time that would go out there maybe once a quarter.
0:40:40 And I said, actually, I just applied to become an RA, a resident athlete. I’d like to move out there
0:40:45 full-time in a couple months. And he said, great, I’ll keep an eye out for your application and keep
0:40:54 it up. And he disappeared. And so KSL is Kisik Lee, my coach, and he is the godfather of archery in Korea.
0:40:58 He essentially left Korea and went to Australia for a few years.
0:40:59 What did he do in Korea?
0:41:04 Oh, he was the national head coach of the Korean archery team and formulated the entire
0:41:11 program that is the current Korean archery training regiment to develop archers.
0:41:17 And to put it as a quick example as to the type of celebrity level that he is,
0:41:23 anytime we would fly to Korea, a limo would show up. He didn’t order it, but the limo would show up.
0:41:27 We flew there for a tournament and a limo showed up and he said, can’t fit the team in the limo.
0:41:33 No, thanks. And I’m at a tournament in Puerto Rico. We’re in a sauna, me and another archer with some
0:41:39 other random Korean. He looked Korean and he ended up being from Korea. And he said, oh, why are you guys
0:41:44 here? We’re here shooting archery. Oh, did you know archery is a national sport in Korea? Yeah,
0:41:50 we do actually. And our coach is actually Korean is Kisik Lee. Kisik Lee. Oh my God. Do you have any
0:41:57 idea like the level of celebrity and how important he is to the country? Like culturally, just random
0:42:03 sauna in Puerto Rico, you know, I don’t know. So that kind of level. And so he left Korea,
0:42:10 went to Australia, worked with them to develop a national program. I think before he was working with
0:42:18 them officially, he went to biomechanics school to try to apply more efficient movements to his method.
0:42:24 And he also, prior to that, to jump backwards, part of the development of the Korean national program
0:42:29 was looking at the US program back in the eighties. We were dominant worldwide and hadn’t lost a world
0:42:35 championship for decades and were just powerhouses on the international scale. And so he mimicked the
0:42:39 program that we were doing, or at least the movements, positions, that kind of thing, and
0:42:43 implemented that in Korea as a national system that would start from grassroots from day one,
0:42:47 no matter what. And then that’s why we would be thrown out because we didn’t fit the mold.
0:42:55 That’s how strict they are. So he went to Australia, made a better program, and then ultimately ended up
0:43:02 coming to the States. And so he just got hired in 2006 in like January. So just before junior world
0:43:06 championships, I moved out to the training center and started training under Coach Lee in 2006.
0:43:12 Okay. So we’re going to pick up there in a minute, but I want to just pause because you’re already doing
0:43:18 very, very well. So you mentioned a few things that influenced that, right? You found it appealing,
0:43:28 easy to use archery as maybe an escape, right? A meditation. You made training as difficult as possible.
0:43:35 Do any other things come to mind that were decisions you made or things you did differently
0:43:39 that you think contributed to those successes prior to moving out to the training center?
0:43:45 One of those things, honestly, was I did not really mesh well socially with other kids.
0:43:52 And so I didn’t really have a ton of friends. It was a very odd situation. Definitely a lot of it is
0:43:56 I’m an intense person as it is. And so I take things very seriously.
0:44:00 His wife is laughing from around the concrete pillar.
0:44:07 Yes. So, yeah. So I take things, yeah, very seriously. And as a kid that can make things
0:44:14 difficult, even though talented in sports, baseball, just any throwing sport really,
0:44:19 and archery and just didn’t fit in in school. So I basically built a shell around myself,
0:44:23 didn’t talk to anyone in school. I didn’t because I got made fun of and got a, you know,
0:44:30 just overall not attacked because it wasn’t physical really. It just wasn’t something I was interested.
0:44:35 I wasn’t wanting to participate in social life. So I just made a shell around myself and stayed inside
0:44:41 of that in school. And at archery, I didn’t have that identity, right? I was a kid.
0:44:44 Everybody’s like kind of shooting and doing their own thing.
0:44:49 Yeah. Everybody’s doing their own thing. Everybody’s as interesting and different and awkward and normal
0:44:57 and talented and just human, right? And so I didn’t have that aura of that negative experience of school
0:45:03 following me around. So it supercharged my desire to want to do it more because it was just,
0:45:09 I was normal. People treated me like a normal human, a normal kid with respect. It was great, right?
0:45:17 So that was ultimately my life. I think that really is what supercharged my desire to want to do it more
0:45:20 because it was something that I felt happy doing.
0:45:28 Yeah, totally. And I want to, this is as good a point as any, to say that part of what got me excited
0:45:36 about archery was realizing how welcoming the communities are. And there are different personalities,
0:45:40 right? It’s like compound crew is different from the Olympic crew, which is different from the bear
0:45:46 boat crew, which is very different from the horse boat crew. They’re all like different burning man camps
0:45:52 with super different personalities, but broadly speaking, incredibly welcoming. People are happy to give you
0:45:59 advice, give you pointers, help you out. And I mean this in the best way possible. It’s also kind of
0:46:05 like weirdo palooza. I mean, it’s like, and it doesn’t matter, right? It’s like, okay, like there’s
0:46:09 some dude in a kilt. Okay, whatever. And then there’s like some normal emo chick with a mohawk. Yeah. Okay.
0:46:14 Whatever. And everybody’s just doing their thing, shooting. And it’s, of course, that’s not every
0:46:20 archery range. No. But in Brooklyn, Gotham Archery, great spot. You see everything. And those people
0:46:26 will be right next to a dyed in the wool hunter who was born and raised in Montana who’s getting ready
0:46:32 for hunting season. Yeah. And everybody’s cool. Yeah. So that’s, that’s part of what I really have
0:46:44 enjoyed about it. All right. So Austin Powers fade back to KSL. So you get to the training center
0:46:51 and technically you’re perfect. And he’s just like, let her rip son. Just move forth, be bold and
0:46:58 prosper. Or was there more to it? Well, yeah. So perspective is I moved out there, I believe in the
0:47:04 end of August of 2016, world championships, junior world championships, the trials that I met him at.
0:47:11 It’s the first and only junior worlds I’d ever go to. And when we first moved there, we being other
0:47:15 people, because I also had another buddy of mine, Dan Shuler, who moved out there with me and my number
0:47:20 one competitor head to head since like 14 years old. And we just kind of pushed each other and kept
0:47:25 competing and moving up the ladder as we got older and older. So we both moved out to there at the
0:47:29 training center at the same time. And coach Lee said, I won’t change your form at all. Don’t worry,
0:47:35 train and compete through the world championships. And then we’ll work on your form. Because part of
0:47:40 the reason of going to the training center was to learn from coach Lee, to really learn how to be a
0:47:47 real archer. Because up until that point, my shot cycle, which is a thing that you do for archery,
0:47:51 it’s the same method over and over again. It’s like a, like a mantra, but physically,
0:47:56 it’s like a physical recipe, right? In a sense, just like someone who’s, let’s just say an Olympic
0:48:00 diver, right? They’re like, they’re going to have their routine never deviates. They’re probably
0:48:04 toweling off in the same way. They’re putting things in the same place, probably fold it the same and put
0:48:08 it in the same place on the railing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Because all that genuinely matters at a high
0:48:15 level, at least to the routine for sure. And so for archery, my routine prior to that was pull back the
0:48:20 bow, anchor, look at the middle and wait for the clicker to click. There was no activation. There
0:48:24 was no mental talk. There was nothing. It was genuinely pull it back, look at the middle and
0:48:31 wait. That’s it. And so when I was there, there was about that two month time period before junior
0:48:38 worlds. And I started shooting phenomenal, like to the level of I could be easily competitive top two,
0:48:45 top three and the senior division really starting to shoot high level scores and frankly, to be a
0:48:52 threat to actually metal at junior worlds. So it’s very exciting. Yeah. And then about two weeks or so
0:48:59 before the actual event, before we went down to Mexico, everything changed. Coach Lee just decided
0:49:05 it’s time to change your form and not just change my form, change my equipment, which is another part of
0:49:13 it. And so to not exaggerate in the least, the only thing that was the same on my entire setup and in my
0:49:19 entire shot process was my riser, the center part of the bow that’s made of aluminum that the limbs,
0:49:26 the piece that Ben snap into and the riser and my sight bar, which is the thing that moves the sight.
0:49:34 So my sight pin, my finger tab, my arrows, my fletchings, my string, my stabilizers, my entire shot
0:49:41 process, how I stood, how I thought, what I told myself, everything had changed. And my scores went from
0:49:50 nationally competitive as a senior, a threat on the world scale as a junior to genuinely not shooting that
0:49:55 terrible ever, ever. Okay. It was the worst you’ve been shooting. Literally the worst I had ever shot
0:50:02 even before I picked up my recurve that for the very first time before going to the Empire State
0:50:08 Games. So if I took my scores at Empire State Games, I probably outshot my scores at junior worlds in
0:50:14 Mexico. Okay. Why would coach Lee do that two weeks before the competition? He’s an interesting guy.
0:50:19 And his reason was, I can’t take an archer that looks like that to world championships.
0:50:27 In his defense, my technique was atrocious. A completely arched back and just what we would
0:50:33 call a hollow back. So standing very upright, you know, I’m a young kid at the time, just turned 18,
0:50:37 barely strength trained ever. You know, I did some planks. That was my strength training, right?
0:50:43 And yeah, just couldn’t control my body and just didn’t look the part. You know,
0:50:49 he is known for having very specific looks in his archers, a very specific biomechanically efficient
0:50:56 movement with very precise loading of the structure of the body itself to maintain the weight of the
0:51:01 bow. And I was not doing that in the least. I asked him afterwards and he said, I was embarrassed to
0:51:07 bring those archers to a junior world championships. And he was not afraid to say it. Ultimately, I was
0:51:11 there for the Olympic games, not for junior world championships. So how could I ever say no?
0:51:16 My ultimate goal is to make the games, not to do anything at junior worlds, but it definitely had
0:51:22 quite an effect on my overall mental perspective of how things were going.
0:51:28 How long did it take you to build back up to the same scores or superior scores?
0:51:33 I would say probably three to four years.
0:51:38 Oh my God. So what are you saying to yourself mentally over that period of time? Because I would
0:51:42 imagine that would, could be incredibly demoralizing.
0:51:43 Yes.
0:51:53 And you would have, I would think moments of doubt. And I’m curious what kept you going and
0:51:58 how you kept yourself going during that period of time. Because I mean, look, I think I’m a glutton for
0:52:05 punishment and have pretty good pain tolerance, physical and mental, but I don’t know if I could
0:52:05 do that.
0:52:12 To put it in a context. So it took me three to four years to get back to zero square one. Whereas my
0:52:14 buddy, Dan Shuler, three months.
0:52:15 Oh, wow.
0:52:23 Maybe, maybe less. Yeah. So I don’t know why, but maybe three months or so for him. So I see
0:52:28 somebody who went out to the training center with me at the same time. I was at the same level, if not
0:52:35 potentially a little bit better, at least the way I saw it than him. And then extend my timeline times
0:52:41 15 times. That’s how long it took me much longer to take me to get back to zero. And so, yeah, it was
0:52:47 definitely very difficult mentally and emotionally for sure, because it was more than challenging to
0:52:52 say the least. And not only that, adding in physical challenges too, because prior to moving to the
0:52:57 training center, I was maybe shooting maybe a hundred, 120 arrows at the most I could ever shoot in a
0:53:02 single day. And I would maybe shoot that once a month. I would shoot often, don’t get me wrong,
0:53:05 but maybe it would be 50 to 60 arrows a session at the most.
0:53:10 Yep. And I thought I was doing a lot and never strength training. I went to the gym at school
0:53:16 and did planks and I don’t even know what some very basics, maybe wall sits or something like that.
0:53:20 Like really just not strength training. So move out of the training center, started shooting upwards of
0:53:25 four to 500 arrows every single day, strength training three days a week on the track, doing
0:53:30 morning workouts, six days a week and shooting overall six days a week. So super crazy amounts of
0:53:36 load, develop tendonitis, tendinosis and shoulders and dealing with all sorts of inflammation issues.
0:53:41 Still deal with a little bit of that today. And I have learned a lot of things to deal with that.
0:53:49 But at that time, I’m going to the sports medicine for hours a day. So I do prehab rehab exercises
0:53:55 every single day. And I’m the only one complaining of the pain in my shoulders and all sorts of other
0:53:58 things. Whereas all my other teammates are shooting just as much, if not more arrows than me with
0:54:03 just as much, if not more draw weight, going to the gym, doing all the same things. And none of them
0:54:08 had to go to sports medicine. Very few of them were even sore enough to feel like they needed to ice
0:54:14 or do anything. And I’m there having to do all sorts of different things. It was a big, big struggle
0:54:20 and a challenge. And I don’t know really what pushed me through exactly. I can’t really put my finger on
0:54:27 the pulse of that. But I think a lot of it actually have to attribute to my sister, Liz. She was
0:54:33 approaching things with a different mindset than pretty much that I have ever heard of in the past,
0:54:39 trying to manifest things instead of just going through the motions, instead of just doing it and
0:54:44 hoping the outcome changes, but to try to just overall bring what you want into fruition and to
0:54:49 not just hope that it’s going to happen. And so a big part of that was actually using affirmations.
0:54:55 And I had no idea what they were at the time, but she started bringing me into that mindset of using
0:55:00 positive affirmations to kind of change everything. I was dealing with being on depression medication and
0:55:06 all sorts of other things because if I had to pick one word to describe to you how I felt during that
0:55:14 timeframe, it was apathy. Just a lack of anything. And so fast forward to the positive affirmations
0:55:30 he has I am tattooed on basically, let’s just say the back of the hand, the webbing between the index finger
0:55:34 and the thumb on the left hand, which you’re going to check every time. Correct. Because that’s my bow
0:55:39 hand. I want to make sure my bow hand placement is precise in the grip. And so it’s not just I am,
0:55:45 it’s I am, period. It’s a statement, right? And so what is I am? I am is whatever you want to be.
0:55:53 So for me, it was I am an archer. I’m an Olympian, period. So changing my overall habits and mindset
0:56:00 started with just self-talk. And would you do that at basically that point in your shot cycle?
0:56:06 Yeah, it’s like trying to when you’re shooting an arrow, there’s a difference between trying to hit
0:56:12 the 10 ring and trying to not miss the 10 ring. There’s also a difference between fighting for
0:56:20 position and owning a position. And so ultimately, how is your approach? And so if you approach from
0:56:27 the stance of it has happened and you are, you are that person, then your habits just change.
0:56:34 And so genuinely, it was like, I am an Olympian, period. Okay. I’m not yet. I’m not using the
0:56:38 standard thing when I ask people, so what do you want to be? I want to be an Olympian. Okay, great.
0:56:43 You’re going to always want to be one. Let’s change that thought to be, I am an Olympian because then
0:56:49 your habits change. And so my habits change to be more of a, an approach of looking at myself
0:56:54 from an honest perspective of, am I doing the right thing? Am I getting enough sleep? Am I strength
0:57:00 training enough? Am I putting in enough effort? Am I being honest with myself? All of those things,
0:57:05 because if a champion would do whatever it was and I wasn’t doing it, I changed that. I made a decision
0:57:12 to make that change. I think a lot of it that took me out of that spiral, that negative spiral was just
0:57:17 believing. And using the present tense affirmations, positive affirmations.
0:57:22 Never a future tense. Because the future tense is just, you’re just setting yourself up to continue
0:57:27 to want that. It’s not done. If it’s done and you shoot from that position of,
0:57:35 I have arrived, I am that, I am what I want to be, then everything else can click.
0:57:39 And for people listening, this is not the first time that affirmations have come up on this podcast
0:57:44 with people who are top performers. It can be a really powerful tool. And to this day, I mean,
0:57:50 I’m still kind of like chasing the dream here, but my best ever day of shooting was a day early on when
0:57:58 I started using affirmations. And for me, it was, I am a top Lancaster competitor. And it was every
0:58:08 single shot. And we’ll talk about practice scores versus competition scores at some point, but it is
0:58:14 remarkable what that can contribute to, like what it can do. All right. So you’re rebuilding,
0:58:19 rebuilding three to four years. Good God. I mean, it’s an entire college experience, basically.
0:58:25 Talk about brutal, but you’ve made all of these decisions. You’ve had all this training. You’ve
0:58:33 got Coach Lee’s input. You have the positive affirmations. You’ve developed, maybe fine-tuned
0:58:38 your shot sequence, right? You’re no longer just staring at the middle of the target and waiting
0:58:44 until the clicker clicks. When does it all come together? Ultimately, it really came together in
0:58:50 2012 at the Olympic Games in London. So put it in perspective, as we talked about Korea already,
0:58:56 Korea is a powerhouse now. What the US was in the 80s, Korea is today. Just dominant for decades at this
0:59:01 point. Yeah. So just to put that in perspective, like if we take, could be the women’s team or the
0:59:08 men’s team, like how dominant? If you look at their medal record over time, what does it look like?
0:59:14 With the exception of the Korean men, the Korean women haven’t lost a gold medal individual or team
0:59:22 round. And I think like 28 years or something crazy. It’s, I don’t know exactly. It’s an absurd statistic.
0:59:25 I mean, it is as impeccable a record as a country can possibly have.
0:59:30 Correct. The only reason that I say with the Korean men as an exception is because they didn’t have an
0:59:35 individual male Olympic gold medal for quite some time. They just recently got one, finally.
0:59:36 Why is that?
0:59:37 I don’t know.
0:59:37 Yeah.
0:59:39 Maybe the pressure.
0:59:39 Yeah.
0:59:44 I don’t know. There’s a lot riding on it. There’s also a lot of benefit for them to perform well,
0:59:45 but there’s a lot of pressure.
0:59:49 Well, I would also, for sure, I didn’t really think about this because I guess on one hand,
0:59:53 you could say, well, wait a second. They’ve been shooting 700 hours a day since they were a fetus.
0:59:58 Why can’t they handle the pressure? But at the same time, you told me, I can’t remember who it
1:00:04 was. You don’t need to mention them. But what did someone say to you to calm you down before one
1:00:07 competition? I can cue you. Do you remember what I’m talking about?
1:00:07 Yeah.
1:00:08 What is it?
1:00:10 Yeah. No one gives a shit.
1:00:10 Yeah.
1:00:13 Meaning in the US about.
1:00:14 Meaning I’m not LeBron.
1:00:15 Yeah.
1:00:17 I’m not Kobe. I’m not Michael.
1:00:17 Right.
1:00:19 Right. No one’s watching. No one cares.
1:00:21 Right. So relax. Take some pressure off yourself.
1:00:23 I believe he actually said no one cares.
1:00:31 So in contrast, right, if you’re a top Olympic competitor in Korea, you are LeBron. You are
1:00:35 Kobe. Everyone cares and everyone is watching.
1:00:35 Yes.
1:00:37 So it’s a tremendous amount of pressure.
1:00:38 Oh, for sure. Yeah.
1:00:38 Yeah.
1:00:39 It’s a lot of pressure no matter what. Okay.
1:00:40 So 2012.
1:00:45 So 2012, the Korean men then because of the team. So we’re leading into the team rounds
1:00:47 because that’s, that’s where we’re heading here.
1:00:53 And how does that work? Is it like the cumulative points of three people who go round robin?
1:00:58 So we do round robins head to head, single elimination for elimination. We do that individually.
1:01:03 We also do that as a team. So you, you seed yourself in the ranking round. There’s 64 men
1:01:08 competing one through 64, one verse 64, two verse 63, and so on. And that’s how you decide
1:01:11 the individual. Correct. That’s how you decide the individual champion.
1:01:17 Team round. It’s your three archers combined score that ranks you as a team amongst the
1:01:23 other teams. And then it’s, there was 12 teams at the time. And so you then same thing, just
1:01:29 like the, uh, March madness style bracket, it’s single elimination and head to head. And so
1:01:33 you shoot three archers together as a team, you shoot in rotation. So you step on and off
1:01:37 the line and you have a very limited amount of time to shoot your arrows. So there’s no time
1:01:42 to second guess, no time to let down and you have to be a well-oiled machine to execute
1:01:47 properly. Yeah. Let me just say, so let down for people who may not get that. If you pull
1:01:54 back and you make a mistake or you didn’t set up properly, doesn’t feel right. You can choose
1:02:00 if you’re practicing, let’s just say to let down, which means slowly bring the string back
1:02:03 to the bow and start over. You essentially abort the shot. Yeah. You pull back. You’re
1:02:07 like, eh, something doesn’t feel right. Right. The wind’s blowing harder. I had a negative
1:02:13 thought, which is what I had to do over and over again today because I overdrew and click the
1:02:18 clicker when I was not prepared to release the shot. Yep. So not having any wiggle room,
1:02:23 no wiggle room. There’s just really no time to second guess and you just have to go for
1:02:31 it. So after the ranking round, Korea was ranked first and the United States was ranked either
1:02:37 third or fourth. So that means that we would meet in the semifinals. And so that meant whoever won the
1:02:43 semifinals would go for gold. And then the loser of that match would have silver. And then the loser
1:02:48 of the semifinal match would have the chance to win bronze in the next match. And so we were seated
1:02:54 to meet Korea in the semifinals. And so the first question that we got asked as a team and the coach
1:02:59 included coach Lee was, so how does it feel to be shooting for bronze tomorrow? Because that’s
1:03:04 that’s just the assumption. That is the assumption. That’s such a dick question.
1:03:11 God. Yeah. So like, I don’t even know who, who the actual media outlet was, but it’s like,
1:03:15 so how does it feel to be shooting for bronze? It’s like, have you been watching at all? We are
1:03:19 at the U S men at that time, we’re ranked number one in the world as team, as a team round, because
1:03:24 we were winning world cup events, which are world ranking events leading up to that and doing quite
1:03:30 well. The Koreans were ranked second in the world and we had beat them several times on the world cup
1:03:35 scale. But of course, everybody’s just assuming that they’re going to be dominant because they had one
1:03:42 for the last decade straight or more. And so it was a interesting wake up call all of a sudden to be
1:03:48 like, what can you ask that question again? So it was just a shock to say the least, but
1:03:56 the power of positive affirmations. By that time I started changing my thought process and talking,
1:04:03 not just, I am an Olympian period. It became much more powerful and actionable and timely. So tying
1:04:12 smart goals into positive affirmations of I am an Olympian or I am 2012 Olympic champion because I run my
1:04:17 mental program more than any other archer period. So it’s not just, I am not just, I am an Olympian.
1:04:24 I am an Olympian at this specific time, at this specific event for this specific reason. And that
1:04:30 specific reason is something that I’ve identified as a absolute crucial thing to do every single shot
1:04:35 in order to succeed. That’s how I ended up talking to myself at that timeframe, to that level of detail.
1:04:41 So of course, whatever our response to the media was at that time, I’m not exactly sure.
1:04:42 What did Coach Lee say?
1:04:46 Well, we had a lot of opportunity to talk to a lot of media leading up to the event.
1:04:54 So we get to London 15 days before the start of the competition where they’re training and media’s
1:04:58 there asking us questions during sessions that we book. And so the Korean media was coming in asking
1:05:03 Coach Lee questions about basically the same kind of thing. How does it feel to win silver before we
1:05:08 haven’t even shot an arrow yet, essentially. And he started saying things in Korean, responding to them
1:05:14 as their questions were in Korean as well. And you could just see the shock of this reporter’s face,
1:05:20 right? And even the cameraman’s like, just this response. And so after the media left, we asked
1:05:24 Coach Lee, so what did you say to them? And he said, let’s just put it this way. I don’t think I’m
1:05:30 going to be welcome back in Korea. So I don’t know what he said. He didn’t really fill in the details
1:05:40 there. But the idea was essentially that the power that we had as a team of the confidence, not just
1:05:47 the archers individually, the archers as a team, because we were really the first and only team to
1:05:53 compete as a team in that tournament. So normally it’s individual. It’s an individual sport. That’s what
1:05:58 it is. That’s what the prestige is. And you happen to have three individuals that come together to compete
1:06:03 as a team, but they’re just still shooting as individuals. If somebody shoots say worse than
1:06:07 the others, it’s easy to kind of point fingers and be like, that’s the reason why we didn’t win because
1:06:12 it’s an individual sport. It’s like, we’re a team. We win as a team, we lose as a team. And so we had
1:06:18 that genuine change. Our main focus was team rounds. It was not individual, the three of us, because
1:06:24 there’s 12 other teams and there’s 64 other individuals. You only have to win three matches to be in the
1:06:29 medals and team rounds. Whereas you have to win five or six matches to be in an individual medal.
1:06:35 And so statistically much easier to medal as a team than as an individual. So we genuinely trained
1:06:41 every day. Once we selected the team leading up to that event as a team, encouraging each other,
1:06:48 learning each other’s shot, not just learning each other’s shot, but during this head-to-head match play,
1:06:53 there’s no time for equipment failures. So if your equipment breaks, you can’t go fix it.
1:06:59 So usually you have a backup bow and the backup bow is just there and it’s kind of working. You do
1:07:04 your best to make it as good as your primary bow, but it’s your backup bow for a reason. It’s just
1:07:10 doesn’t shoot as well for whatever reason. And coach Lee basically said, backup bows are pointless because
1:07:15 if your main bow breaks, you’re mentally just going to be shot. So what’s the point? Don’t even bother
1:07:22 setting up a backup bow. And so we actually shot each other’s primary bows as our backup. So I shot Brady’s
1:07:24 bow and I shot Jacob Wookiee’s bow.
1:07:29 Well, hold on a second. Hold on. So how similar are your draw lengths and like your ape index,
1:07:30 right? In terms of like…
1:07:32 Not at all. But the thing is I’m using…
1:07:37 Ape index is… Anyway, you guys can look it up, but it’s just like your physical proportions
1:07:39 are not the same.
1:07:39 Correct.
1:07:41 And at that level, certainly everything is…
1:07:42 Everything matters.
1:07:46 For sure. Not just that, the balance of the bow, the feel of the grip, the sight pin, all of
1:07:52 those things. And so the thing that is constant is our arrows. So we use our same arrow. And
1:07:58 our clickers, the device that’s a draw check, was roughly in the same place. I think the only
1:08:02 exception was one of us and Brady chose to not even bother with a clicker when he was shooting
1:08:06 one of our bows as a backup. He would just pull back, control the shot and execute good shots
1:08:13 and deal with that. Whereas I used their clickers. And essentially, I learned that… I think Brady’s
1:08:19 bow, maybe I hit low eight. So about eight, 10 inches low at 70 meters. So I would just aim high
1:08:24 eight with his bow. And Jacob Wookiee’s, I’d have to aim like low right blue or something crazy to
1:08:25 actually have the arrow land in the middle.
1:08:34 So we just played this game, right? And so it was just this level of intimacy per se as a team that
1:08:38 no one else had in the world because they all trained as individuals, not as a team.
1:08:43 So a quick couple of questions then, because I guess to even me listening, I’m like, well,
1:08:48 it’s still kind of an individual thing. I used to wrestle way back in the day. And it’s like,
1:08:53 okay, yeah, you’re a team and you want to be supportive. The backup bow using someone else’s
1:08:56 primary as your backup is super interesting. This is the first time I’m hearing of it.
1:09:02 Are there any other strategies where let’s just say, I’m making this up, but okay, it’s like the wind
1:09:06 disgusting. And the first person up is going to have to deal with the brunt of it, you think. So
1:09:12 you pick the person who seems to be best in high winds. I’m making that up. I have no idea. But
1:09:18 are, is there any other strategy that you can build around the team?
1:09:23 Yes. I mean, so for us, the wind is actually was part of it. We’ll get to that in a second. But
1:09:27 if you approach team rounds as an individual, you’re working on your own shot and that’s it.
1:09:32 So you, you either shoot a 10 or you don’t. And your teammate who’s also your opponent
1:09:38 and individuals either shoots a 10 or he doesn’t. And that’s just how it normally works. But what we
1:09:44 did was we worked with each other to understand a little bit more about each other’s shot cycle,
1:09:50 each other’s mental approach, what makes someone better than doesn’t. Like, do you want to hear
1:09:54 your name when you’re at full draw? Like, come on, Tim, shoot a 10. Or do you want just,
1:09:59 all right, strong shot, something that’s general, but not specific to you. And so there’s little
1:10:05 things that you learn, but then also there’s a supreme trust in each other. And so in team rounds,
1:10:11 you have to communicate with each other how the shot went. And then ultimately, where did the arrow go
1:10:17 compared to how the shot went? And then the next shooter makes adjustments based on that because the
1:10:23 wind is always changing. I see. Right. So each person is a feedback mechanism for everyone else.
1:10:28 Exactly. Yeah. And also the coaches too, because he has this third person view. He’s not shooting,
1:10:34 but he’s able to look at stuff, the wind blowing in different areas. And actually the very specific
1:10:39 thing that coach Lee did with the wind that we couldn’t as archers because of a piece of clothing
1:10:45 choice that he made different than us at that day. The day being when we shot for medals. If we just
1:10:52 fast forward to the actual medal rounds, we are in the semifinal match against Korea. We almost lose our
1:10:56 first match. We’re very close to actually losing and just barely squeaked by by a point or two.
1:11:02 And, um, but there was no doubt that we were ever going to lose, at least in my head. I had no fear
1:11:08 of that. I was so supremely confident because of this affirmation, the power of it, that there was
1:11:12 never a doubt. Even when we were behind in the match, it just was like, it’s supposed to happen
1:11:19 this way. Apparently, you know, and once we got to the semifinal against Korea, everybody said that
1:11:24 was the gold medal match of the games actually, because everybody wanted to see that Korea was
1:11:28 powerhouse. U S is ranked number one. It’s the Olympic games. What’s going to happen. Everybody’s
1:11:34 watching. We actually had, I think the highest viewership of any Olympic sport at the 2012 Olympics
1:11:39 during that match. That’s why they put us on TV because we were the first metal of the U S our
1:11:44 first chance to get a metal. And, you know, back then it was Twitter and I had comments saying, I
1:11:50 love my sports team, whatever it is, the Sabres or the Buffalo bills or whatever, you know, people from
1:11:55 my hometown. And they’re like, I have never stood on my couch and screamed at the TV, but I did when I
1:12:02 saw archery at the Olympics. That’s incredible. Yeah. So cool stuff. So the wind, we usually we
1:12:07 have a wind sock. The wind sock is not a calibrated wind sock. So meaning if it’s at a certain angle,
1:12:14 it’s a certain speed. We don’t do that in archery for whatever reason, but it’s always at 50 meters.
1:12:20 So the distance we shoot is 70. The flag is, you know, three fifths of the way down range or so. And
1:12:25 it’s always on a specific pole at a specific height. And you have, you know, every so often they’re
1:12:29 placed. And so you have a general consistent reference as to what the wind sock’s doing and
1:12:33 how you can guess where to aim. And that’s ultimately as best as you can do as guests.
1:12:40 And so we were shooting at Lord’s cricket ground and on the pitch where they bowl the ball back and
1:12:47 forth to each other, the people who stand on that, the lawn care people are anointed by the queen to be
1:12:53 allowed to stand on the hollowed ground. The lawnmower is anointed by the queen to be allowed to mow her
1:12:58 grass. But because our wind sock and the stand that held that wind sock was not anointed by the queen
1:13:04 or whatever they call it, it was not allowed to be there. So they put it in a different location
1:13:10 that it ever had been at any other event. We’re also shooting in a stadium within the stadium is
1:13:15 another stadium inside of that stadium where the archery fans are sitting and the stands go down
1:13:21 probably 50 meters. There’s several thousands of people in the stand and it kind of fans out
1:13:29 towards the target. And so we’re guessing, we’re genuinely guessing where to aim ultimately before
1:13:36 that match. Coach Lee was like, trust me, I know where you need to aim. Okay. You’re not shooting.
1:13:43 How do you know? I’m the lead off. Jacob Boogie shoots second. Brady Ellison shoots third. And I have
1:13:48 to do my job when I lead off to shoot a supremely confident shot.
1:13:52 Clean shots that you can depend on so that you can use that to calibrate for everybody else.
1:14:00 Correct. Or be so in tune with my shot when I make an error, I know or can essentially estimate where that
1:14:07 arrow should land and then compare where it actually lands to where it should land and then suggest to
1:14:11 Jacob Boogie where to aim. So to give you an idea as a quick sidetrack, when I let go of the string at
1:14:15 70 meters, I can tell you within the size of about a baseball where that arrow is going on the target
1:14:20 the moment I let it go. Because I’ve shot so many arrows, I verified where it went on the target looking
1:14:25 through a spotting scope and attributed my feeling of how the shot went to where it landed. And so I can just
1:14:31 tell you exactly where it’s going to go. And so that’s my job as lead off. Coach Lee is wearing shorts. We’re wearing
1:14:38 pants. He can feel the wind blowing on his leg hairs. And he’s like, aim left nine. Okay.
1:14:41 That’s wild.
1:14:47 Yeah. So good luck finding any other team that has ever worked that closely together. We ultimately ended up winning
1:14:54 and then went on to lose the gold medal match by a fraction of an inch at 70 meters away. But I mean,
1:14:59 ultimately, everyone came up to us afterwards and said that was the gold medal match, regardless of how the actual
1:15:05 medals end. So supreme confidence in that positive statements, those positive affirmations of just
1:15:14 supreme faith and belief in the process as it’s happening, even if it’s not going well, like our first match when
1:15:19 we were losing, we were behind the first several ends of the match. And the matches are only four ends.
1:15:23 So an end is somebody getting up and shooting a group of arrows.
1:15:28 Correct. So as a team, that would be each archer shoots two arrows. So that’s a total of six arrows.
1:15:34 That’s an end. And then a cumulative score at that time was shot. So whoever had the highest score of
1:15:40 24 arrows after four ends, because that’s the total amount shot that team won in advanced in the match.
1:15:43 It’s an incredible story. That’s crazy. I’ve never heard a bunch of these. This is wild.
1:15:49 Like in all the time we spent together. It’s nuts. Just for comedic relief, because you mentioned the
1:15:56 Korean media interviews and them looking shocked talking to Coach Lee. So I’ll just share a sidebar
1:16:02 on Coach Lee. So I’ve had a little bit of interaction. So flew to San Diego because we did a little bit
1:16:06 of training together and I wanted to meet this famous coach Lee. Why not? And so I made the introduction
1:16:14 and said, Hey, Coach Lee, Tim would like to work with you. Yeah. And so I landed in San Diego and a few
1:16:21 things that are, I think, fun to share. So the first is we meet at this outdoor range and I’m going to be
1:16:29 shooting mostly at 20 yards to 60 feet. Let’s just call it roughly. And we hang out for 45 minutes.
1:16:34 I’m taking copious notes. He’s giving me some pointers. And then we stop and he’s like, okay,
1:16:41 I think you have plenty to work with. And I don’t think you need my help anymore. And I was like,
1:16:47 uh, cause I’d flown down planning to be there for a week or something, five days, something along those
1:16:50 lines. Not just to be there for five days, but to be there explicitly to train with him.
1:16:59 And so at some point I’m like a bit crestfallen. I’m like, Oh man, letting my head hang like Eeyore.
1:17:09 I’m like, Oh fuck. I do feel like I need more help. And we start talking about somehow we get talking
1:17:16 about firearms and guns. And he is very interested in marksmanship and all things, firearms. And so he
1:17:20 gets more excited and we’re chatting, we’re talking about this, that, and the other thing.
1:17:25 And then he asks me, so what brings you to San Diego? And I was like, well,
1:17:35 maybe this sounds strange, but I flew here to train with you. And he’s like, Oh, okay. Tonight’s Korean
1:17:42 barbecue. So we go out to dinner and end up having an amazing time training with him. And he’s really
1:17:50 one-of-a-kind. And also the reason I was mentioning the shocked look on the faces of the Korean media is
1:17:53 you do not worry about Coach Lee speaking his mind.
1:17:55 Oh no. He’s so direct.
1:18:00 You do not have to worry about him sugarcoating things. And to give you an example, later I ended
1:18:07 up driving to his house behind which he has all these targets set up. And basically I was the only
1:18:11 non-Asian there. Absolutely. A hundred percent of the only non-Asian, which is fine. It was just
1:18:17 Korean army and tons of Korean kids. Also some like Taiwanese kids and Chinese kids, but they’re all
1:18:24 12 years old and shooting by my standards, especially at that point, incredibly well.
1:18:29 And I’m off in the corner, like getting some pointers from Coach Lee and just looking like
1:18:35 a total remedial case, which is fine. And then at one point he wants to give like pep talk to the
1:18:40 kids. And he’s like, Tim, Tim, come over here. Okay. And so we all stand in a circle and he’s giving this
1:18:50 very Coach Lee motivational talk, which is like 60% inspiration, 40% you need to shape up or ship out,
1:18:55 cuffing up kids. And at one point, cause I’m wondering why I’m in this circle. And he points
1:19:02 to me and he’s like, he’s like, look, this is Tim. And he is an old man, a very old man. And he’s here
1:19:10 training seriously. And I was like, Oh, I see if I can be a inspirational slash like warning tale for
1:19:14 these, these amazing young children with so much promise. I’m in, I’m in for it. I’m in for it,
1:19:20 but it’s just so endearing. And the guy’s genius. He’s really one of a kind. Okay. So those are my
1:19:28 Coach Lee stories. Thank you, Coach Lee. Let’s talk about your coaching and what we ended up doing
1:19:34 and all the experiments along the way, because you mentioned, for instance, you know, Coach Lee’s
1:19:39 feeling the leg hair and the movement and you’re providing feedback. You’re getting familiar with
1:19:49 one another’s shot cycles. The little things matter. It is hard for me to explain verbally,
1:19:58 just how many tiny, tiny, tiny details make a huge difference with archery. And just the way you hook
1:20:05 your fingers on the string, the exact placement, how far it is from the fold of one joint, the amount of
1:20:13 curl of the fingers, how much you use your, you’re using in this case, index, middle and ring finger,
1:20:22 the degree to which you can see or not see as a coach, my nail on my ring finger and the difference
1:20:29 that makes the angle of the back of the hand and the difference that makes the level of detail is
1:20:35 really unbelievable when you want to start training and performing with precision.
1:20:42 Okay. So I find you, we meet up and then ultimately about six months out from Lancaster,
1:20:49 decide to take it seriously. Now there are a few constraints, right? One is you live in Florida.
1:20:55 I do not live in Florida. So we have limited in-person training. Although I think we did a good job with
1:21:02 that, what would you say maybe on average, was it like a few days a month or like a week every six
1:21:03 weeks, something like that?
1:21:10 Probably somewhere in that timeframe. I think I was maybe there for three to four days once every six
1:21:11 weeks. Yeah.
1:21:19 Yeah. And we’re doing a lot of virtual training. I travel a lot. So if there are awards for most
1:21:23 varied training environments, I think I would win that one hands down.
1:21:24 For sure in the barebow division.
1:21:25 In the barebow.
1:21:29 Absolutely. The only exception would be like your professional archer who is traveling the world
1:21:34 competing. Yeah. But that’s the only exception. And then there’s no one doing that in barebow.
1:21:35 Yeah. I mean, I was not even remotely.
1:21:42 So I ended up bringing my roller bag, which looks like it’s carrying an assault rifle. Customs do not
1:21:46 love this bag. Like, sir, what’s in the bag?
1:21:48 Sporting a gear.
1:21:56 Sporting gear is the answer. That’s how you get your bow and arrow through customs. But I traveled all over
1:22:04 the place, all over the country in the US, certainly. And I would check my targets. And often it’s just a
1:22:08 big cube of foam. And they’d be like, sir, what’s in the box? And I’m like, there’s nothing in the box.
1:22:13 And they’d be like, sir, need you to be serious right now. What’s in the cube? I’m like, it’s solid
1:22:17 foam. And they’re like, yeah, but what’s inside it? I’m like, foam. And this would go on and on and on.
1:22:26 And, you know, going to Hawaii, going to Canada, going to the UK, where I ended up going on this
1:22:34 pilgrimage trail, Cotswalt’s Way. And at every tiny inn, I would have to negotiate, try to pitch
1:22:42 my little heart out to shoot in the backyard or anywhere. I ended up shooting from inside a hotel
1:22:46 to outside the hotel. I ended up shooting from outside a hotel, through the living room, through
1:22:49 the kitchen, into a laundry room where I hit a target.
1:22:50 Pickleball courts.
1:22:50 Pickleball courts.
1:22:51 Tennis courts.
1:22:52 Tennis courts.
1:22:53 Batting cages.
1:23:00 Batting cages, right, where you have like kids whacking balls with aluminum bats and screeching and
1:23:01 hooting and hollering.
1:23:02 Eight feet from you.
1:23:02 Eight feet from you.
1:23:05 So if you want distraction training, that’s a great way to do it.
1:23:12 So we had some things to work around, but the forcing function was for me, and this is always
1:23:19 the case, the magic of a deadline. And having a competition on the books, which I wasn’t 100%
1:23:23 committed to, but I was like, let me behave as if, let me train as if I’m going to compete.
1:23:29 It’s like, I don’t want to embarrass myself. I don’t want to embarrass you. Let’s see how it goes.
1:23:33 But I remember probably a few months out, like paying the registration fee and I’m like, okay,
1:23:39 now my name is online for everybody to see. That probably means I should go.
1:23:43 And then the question is, all right, what do you do if you have six months to train?
1:23:50 And a few things come to mind immediately. Number one is you’re always going to have things to work
1:23:55 around. So it could be logistics, could be in my case, my left shoulder, which was reconstructed
1:24:04 in 2004 and it was a real limiter, had many different physiological limiters. Right now I have a
1:24:08 probably going to require surgery, my right elbow, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. It’s like, okay,
1:24:15 well, we will have to just work around it. And lo and behold, you can work around. You might have to
1:24:22 make some compromises. Okay, fine. But it’s like, if, for instance, as we experienced, if shooting with
1:24:28 a particular stance causes my back to seize up and it’s producing a lot of incredible pain, okay,
1:24:35 we’ll make a few compromises on that in order to minimize that. And then that’s going to trigger a
1:24:43 whole chain of other adaptations that we need to make. And like you, I guess, as a kid, I very quickly
1:24:50 found it meditative. Archery was almost like taking a break from my monkey mind. And particularly when you
1:24:56 start to focus on, and this is something we focused on pretty early. I want to give Joel Turner again,
1:25:01 credit shot IQ in terms of like the boot up sequence and blueprinting your best shots,
1:25:08 really having a script for your checklist, like your pre-flight checklist as you’re going through
1:25:16 your entire shooting motion and having, for instance, positive affirmation. Where do you put that? You want
1:25:25 to put it in the same place every single time. And then I would say also recognizing that given some of
1:25:30 the physical limitations is like, okay, I can’t do 500 hours a day. Forget it.
1:25:36 We started at 60 something arrows a limited day, I think. Oh, max. Yeah. Yeah. That was the absolute
1:25:41 max. Yep. And a lot of that had to do with, you know, very typical Tim Ferriss fashion, as I know
1:25:49 now to overdo everything to 11 out of four. Yeah. I was basically doing like a Mr. Olympia pose down
1:25:55 every time I was trying to shoot the arrow. So there was a lot more tension in the system than was
1:26:02 necessary. Yeah. Which is, I just, in fairness, in my own defense, really common. Go to a range and watch,
1:26:07 especially guys who have a little bit of muscle shooting these things. And it’s like, whoa, okay,
1:26:10 this guy’s like trying to hulk his own shirt off.
1:26:16 But for you, the challenge was you had actual injuries, actual limitations. So how much were those
1:26:23 affecting the system versus the excessive tension? And it was this back and forth juggling to figure out
1:26:28 what was what? What was the cause? Yeah. So there’s a lot of detective work. And for instance, in the left
1:26:34 shoulder, you have two titanium screws, had the whole arm ripped out doing some combat sports stuff
1:26:39 a million years ago. And my arm ended up sticking out of my chest, basically. And I won’t get into all the
1:26:45 gory details, but suffice to say, when you tack down the shoulder with these screws, you create some
1:26:51 limitations. And as a consequence of that, I had a lot of tendinosis in rotator cuff muscles,
1:26:57 super spinatus. They’re a mess, really, really tangled up. So what that means is like, okay,
1:27:02 how do we work around this rather than do I need to stop? I mean, look, there are times when you need
1:27:06 to stop. Like right now with this elbow that requires surgery, I’m probably going to have to take a break
1:27:11 from the hard stuff for a little while, two to three months. But outside of that, it’s like, okay,
1:27:17 how do we work around this? And that took a bunch of different forms, including like rather than trying
1:27:21 whack out. I mean, we ultimately got to the point when we were training in person, at least that we
1:27:28 were doing what, 200 plus arrows on some days. And there were many aspects to that. And then we can
1:27:34 talk about some of the technical stuff, but just from the physical workaround perspective, when I
1:27:40 started practicing, there were a few things that I would do. And all of this we talked about, and I was
1:27:45 building off of your advice. So rather than doing one session, break it into two sessions
1:27:52 and also start and end your sessions with blank bill practice. Do you want to explain what blank bill
1:28:00 is? Because this avoids the target panic that you mentioned earlier. And I think is an incredible tool
1:28:03 that I found very, very helpful. What is blank bill practice?
1:28:09 The blank bail is, so the bail, the target bail is blank. There’s no target face on it, nothing to
1:28:17 aim at, not even a spot, a shadow, a hole or whatever. You can do small amounts of aiming per
1:28:23 se, but it is not for the sake of precision. It’s not trying to hit the 10 ring or anything like that.
1:28:29 What it does is it removes the aiming requirement or the aiming distraction from the process.
1:28:36 And when you were at the high level using blank bill practice, how far away from the target do
1:28:36 you stand?
1:28:43 Generally speaking for blank bail, I would be eight feet or so from the target. So you’re
1:28:48 never going to miss. And so you’re just simply going through repetition. It’s like a palate cleanser
1:28:52 almost. So you go through your motions, you go through your shot process, but you’re not aiming at
1:28:58 anything. So you can confidently move through the movements without being careful or over analytical
1:29:03 or get yourself in a bind that can happen when you’re aiming at a target. So it allows you to
1:29:09 ingrain your technique to a level that really trains the subconscious brain to try to take over
1:29:16 when you’re in pressure situations. And it also allows you to put in a lot more repetition without
1:29:22 so much time spent walking the distance to go down to the target. So for me, going down to 70 meters
1:29:26 takes a bit of time to walk that distance. So instead I can just walk eight feet, pull my arrows and
1:29:30 pick up my bow and immediately start shooting again. So that’s what it meant to me. And the
1:29:35 amount of training at blank bail really depends on what you’re working on at that time. But generally
1:29:42 speaking, more is better because it really allows you to focus on the process and ingrain your steps.
1:29:47 You know, you talked about the level of detail with just the hook alone to be able to ingrain that,
1:29:50 to be automated to where you grab the string and you don’t even have to think about it.
1:29:55 You have to put in the reps. And so if you’re putting in the reps and you’re distracted by aiming,
1:30:00 it can take away your focus on that grip on that hook or whatever it may be.
1:30:05 Exactly. So I could use it for warming up in the beginning of a session, let’s say the beginning
1:30:11 of the first session. And then towards the end, I’d be like, okay, look, I got as anyone competitive is
1:30:20 likely to do. Overly fixated on the scoring and the aiming, the performance. Let me end on a good rep.
1:30:29 And so ending the training practices with blank bail just allowed me to settle the snow globe a bit,
1:30:34 focus on the biomechanics, particularly something, I mean, at least I took this approach in the training
1:30:41 session if I noticed, oh, you know what? I am collapsing a little bit, meaning losing back tension
1:30:48 in the following way. A, B, or C is happening. Or maybe I’m not pulling my bowhand pinky back enough
1:30:55 and therefore I’m landing right or whatever. I’m just going to focus on that for my blank bail.
1:31:00 That’s going to be my most important cue, particularly in the beginning, because if you try to incorporate
1:31:06 too much too quickly, you’re going to get the Mac ball of death beach ball, right? You’re not going
1:31:15 to be able to divide your attention and maintain any type of performance in the beginning. So a lot of
1:31:20 what I found so valuable with your coaching was the layering. When do you choose to introduce certain
1:31:28 things? And I also really liked the focus on biomechanics. So the blank bail you could think of in
1:31:32 a way as if, let’s just say you’re, I don’t even know if they do this, but I’m making it up. Let’s just say
1:31:38 you’re a major league pitcher and it’s like, all right, you’re trying to focus on some aspect of your
1:31:47 throw without the distraction of trying to put it right into the sweet spot of a catcher’s mitt. Then let’s
1:31:53 just say you had a very, very large net hanging. It’s like 20 feet just hanging down and you were just throwing
1:31:56 the ball into this net and working on the biomechanics.
1:31:59 It would be similar to like dry fire training with a pistol.
1:32:04 Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Very similar. Yeah. Similar to dry firing, which you should never do
1:32:12 with a bow. We talk about that in our video. Unless you want your bow to explode, literally don’t do
1:32:20 that. And I’m trying to think in the early stages, what, because it was a detective process. And you know,
1:32:25 my mind is a little unusual at times and I process things a little differently. So do you recall like
1:32:30 what some of the early most important things were that we focused on in training?
1:32:38 A lot of them were conceptual things, not necessarily technical, physical, but thought process. How does the
1:32:45 shot go? What should you be trying to achieve kind of things? So a lot of those are really setting up
1:32:50 kind of the process of how to shoot a bow, not necessarily how to shoot tens with a bow.
1:32:50 Yeah.
1:32:54 So how to shoot tens with a bow comes later, I think. I’m not sure about that, but.
1:32:59 Yeah. And tens for just if people are getting distracted, just think about shooting both sides.
1:33:03 Yeah, exactly. So not how to put it in the middle, how to shoot a good shot. Right.
1:33:09 And so there are some really key factors that are super important to actually shooting a good shot.
1:33:16 One of those is follow through. It’s a very simple thing to explain. If you think of somebody,
1:33:21 say, throwing a ball or kicking a ball, the moment of contact of the foot hitting the ball,
1:33:26 when you kick the ball is when you let go of the string for shooting archery, or when you let go of
1:33:29 the baseball, when you’re throwing it, that’s the moment you let go of the string and shooting
1:33:35 archery. And so follow through is what happens after that motion. No one ever in any other sport,
1:33:42 including baseball and soccer, stop their motion of their foot or their arm the moment they let go of
1:33:46 the object or make contact with it. Just doesn’t happen. Same thing with golf, right? So stuff happens
1:33:52 afterwards. That’s a follow through motion. That is a maintaining of your, in archery, we call it
1:33:57 tension and direction. You maintain that through follow through. So tension and direction being
1:34:03 pull back the bow, it’s wanting to collapse you. So you have to build tension against the bow, the system
1:34:09 and whatever direction that is going back with the string hand and forward with the bow hand,
1:34:16 that tension and direction has to maintain exactly how it is when you’re at full draw through the release
1:34:22 until the follow through finishes. So that would be the principle of like tension and direction and just
1:34:27 follow through in general. It’s a very simple concept to imagine, but it’s quite difficult to kind of
1:34:34 implement. So we worked a lot on the technical aspects of how to apply that physically throughout
1:34:41 the months or years. We’ve been working together for a couple of years now, but really that last six
1:34:47 months leading up to Lancaster, trying to hone that in to be fluid, one motion, not fake, not two points.
1:34:52 So not letting go of the string, losing all that tension of the string hand, and then faking a follow
1:34:58 through motion. So it’s like, for those that are watching the motion would look something similar as,
1:35:03 so the hand touching the face at anchor, the fingers opening the arm, not moving and then moving back in
1:35:09 a second motion. So a good follow through would be the same fluid backward motion of the elbow, the same
1:35:14 exact time that the fingers are pushed out of the way of the string. And then that tension just continues
1:35:17 until you run out of range of motion with the shoulder.
1:35:24 Yeah. I mean, imagine just for a visual for folks, if you had like a theraband or a giant rubber band
1:35:31 and you got into an archery position and you’re holding that rubber band at max tension, the way that
1:35:37 it would simulate holding the string of a bow. And then you closed your eyes and somebody walked up
1:35:38 and just cut the rubber band.
1:35:40 Correct. What would happen?
1:35:46 And the arms kept going, obviously you didn’t expect it. And that would be what you then have
1:35:50 to do consciously on some level. It should take care of itself. If you’re using
1:35:56 the proper thought process, proper thought process and proper tension in the back and not in the arm.
1:36:01 But even if the tension is improper in the back or the arm, the follow through will happen if you
1:36:05 have that concept of maintaining whatever tension it is right or wrong when you’re at full draw,
1:36:07 but you continue through through release.
1:36:11 Well, and this also relates to the inner monologue.
1:36:12 Exactly.
1:36:17 Right. So when you’re at anchor, okay, so you’ve got your strings fully pulled back again for people
1:36:21 listening or not familiar with archery, your hand is glued to your face or under the jaw in the
1:36:26 case of Olympic archery. Okay. Now at this point, what are you saying to yourself?
1:36:28 Or what do you sometimes say to yourself?
1:36:28 For me?
1:36:28 Yeah.
1:36:32 There’s a lot of different options, but basically just continued motion.
1:36:37 Yeah. Continue the back shoulder moving around and behind me and the bow moving forward.
1:36:38 Yeah. Or like finish the shot.
1:36:39 Correct. Or finish the shot.
1:36:44 So one of the things that I talked to Coach Lee about somewhat recently when I had dinner with
1:36:50 him about a year and a half ago or so was, so anything new to share? And well, he chuckled first.
1:36:55 And then his response was, you’re not going to like this or others won’t like this actually.
1:37:01 And he said, release is not a step anymore. We do not release the string. And I said,
1:37:05 tell me more. He said, well, if you follow through and your main primary focus when you are
1:37:10 at full draw before you let go of the string is to follow through correctly, the release will take
1:37:16 care of itself. If you maintain and execute a good proper follow through your release is good. But if
1:37:21 you’re focused on the release, you cannot then switch your brain fast enough to the follow through
1:37:26 motion because the follow through is it’s frankly a reaction, not an action. So it tells you everything
1:37:30 about the tension that you’ve built up in the system when you’re at full draw. So it’s my job to
1:37:35 watch you and see the motion that the elbow moves and the hand moves and the bow hand moves and all sorts of
1:37:40 different spots of the body, even your head movement. The moment the string comes off your
1:37:45 fingers, what direction does a particular body part move? And that the motion of that body part
1:37:49 tells me the tension that you have at full draw because I’ve shot enough arrows and I’ve watched
1:37:57 enough people with enough intention and attention to look at their form, analyze it, and just overall,
1:38:03 just watch. I can see where the tension is built. And then a lot of the stuff that we did working
1:38:10 together was when you’re at full draw, I’m behind you and I’m like, I’m making motions and doing things
1:38:16 to feel what you’re feeling. So I can assume that if the hands coming out, there’s a change of tension
1:38:21 going outward of the release hand coming away from your face when you let go, instead of maintaining that
1:38:26 line along your neck as it comes back off your face. So if I mimic what you’re doing, I get a
1:38:31 bit of an insight as to what you’re feeling. And then I can communicate with you nearly at the same
1:38:37 language, hopefully, maybe not using the same words, but at least trying to meet you where you’re at.
1:38:42 Tap the muscle I should be feeling as a primary mover when I’m supposed to feel it.
1:38:47 Correct. Yes. And I only get that based on looking at what you’re doing and just overall trying to
1:38:52 really just tear down the shot and see what’s happening on the inside.
1:38:55 Yeah. So flashing back then thinking about
1:39:01 say the six months leading up to Lancaster, a couple of things. So one is
1:39:06 I, for a very long time, people are going to find this pretty funny.
1:39:10 number one, I didn’t care about hitting the bullseye. I did care about grouping.
1:39:17 Right. So I wanted arrows to land very close to one another. Right. But if they were bottom left,
1:39:22 top right, my assumption was, and I’m sure this is based off of conversations we had,
1:39:30 if you’re shooting consistently, if you’re getting good groups consistently, it’s not just a one-off kind
1:39:39 of lucky bunch of arrows. Then moving that on the target face is not going to say necessarily simple,
1:39:44 but it ended up being pretty straightforward as we got further down. Yeah.
1:39:49 But doing the blank bail, got to the point with the blank bail where, granted, it’s like for me,
1:39:54 10 feet away, 12 feet away, whatever, that these arrows were just getting clumped, like right on top
1:39:59 of one another. Even if I shot, I know this is maybe not your favorite thing, but I did this too. Like
1:40:06 like sometimes releasing with my eyes closed. Sure. And then how long before Lancaster did I start
1:40:10 aiming with the crest of the arrow to? Yeah. So about two weeks.
1:40:18 So, so what Tim was doing was, was, uh, having blind faith that the arrow would land in the middle
1:40:24 by using instinctive aiming per se. Well, I was also doing a few things that you recommended because
1:40:34 in fairness, we tried to have me aim earlier and I had for the first time target panic with the
1:40:39 understanding that the tip is always going to move. But I had, I started to develop this anxiety around
1:40:43 shooting because you didn’t want to let it go when the point wasn’t right on the middle.
1:40:50 Exactly. It wasn’t right on the bullseye, so to speak. And I also didn’t have the biomechanical control
1:40:57 and the conditioning, which had to compensate for all sorts of things to do it effectively. Right.
1:41:03 So, and we also hadn’t adjusted your bow either because we did make compromises within your equipment
1:41:08 to help work with the shoulder. We did a bunch of stuff with that. We won’t necessarily get into
1:41:12 because it gets really technical, but a lot of things that would confuse even
1:41:18 certain experienced folks, like the upper and lower limbs, right? Where you would attach the string,
1:41:26 switching those and making all sorts of tweaks to the equipment to compensate or to allow this
1:41:31 compromised shoulder to function, to work with you. Yeah. Not against you. Yeah, exactly. I mean,
1:41:36 because for instance, like the more weight, there’s a point of diminishing returns, but since you can’t
1:41:42 put stabilizers on a bare bow, people add weight. They just have to keep the weight very close to the
1:41:46 bow because this ring has to be able to pass over the whole thing for you to use it in competition.
1:41:54 But people had quite a bit of weight and it helps to stabilize things, but I could not tried,
1:42:01 but I couldn’t do it. My shoulder would develop all sorts of pain and tendon issues and just couldn’t do it.
1:42:06 And ultimately you could only shoot 60 arrows in a session. You couldn’t put in the amount of
1:42:11 arrows that was actually required to be proficient. Yeah, exactly. So I was like, okay, we’re going to
1:42:16 make yet another trade-off, which is I’m going to sacrifice some of the stability
1:42:28 in order to be able to add more volume. But the point was to allow you to work with the system.
1:42:35 And because when we first started aiming, you started aiming early on that distraction because
1:42:39 you weren’t yet there physically pulled you out of the process.
1:42:44 if we were to lay out step-by-step every single checkpoint that I go through or you go through,
1:42:46 I mean, I’d be here for three hours.
1:42:49 Yeah, we’d be here for three hours. It’s like 25 steps. I mean, I’m exaggerating a little bit,
1:42:49 but yeah.
1:42:52 25 steps for my hook.
1:42:57 Yeah. I mean, actually, you’re right. If I were to go through like every single checkpoint,
1:42:59 it’s like hundreds of hundreds.
1:43:06 Yeah, like a hundred checklist points for every shot. And until you have a critical mass of those
1:43:16 steps on autopilot, you cannot add more steps. And therefore, given the compressed timeline we were
1:43:21 dealing with, it was also like waiting for my nervous system to adapt. And for that reason,
1:43:25 like sometimes if you’re trying to grease the groove with a particular motor pattern, it’s like,
1:43:34 okay, lighter limbs are fine. Dial it down. And then, so in terms of my instinctive approach,
1:43:40 found a compromise was, all right, you’re not going to try to put the arrow tip or the crest of the arrow
1:43:46 on the bullseye. Again, for simplicity, just saying that. However, there are a few things you are going
1:43:52 to do. You’re going to burn a hole into the very center of the target with your eyes. And you’re going
1:43:59 to people think of shooting an arrow if they haven’t had a lot of experiences, like pulling back and
1:44:06 letting go. But you have this equal and opposite action in pushing forward with the bow hand. And
1:44:14 there’s a lot of technical detail that goes into how you do that. But basically pushing a portion of your
1:44:22 your palm, kind of the right next to your lifeline in the meaty pad of the thumb, let’s just say, roughly.
1:44:24 Kind of where your wrist meets your palm.
1:44:30 Yeah, exactly. And pushing that also, so you’re burning a hole into the target in a very dead center,
1:44:37 and you’re pushing that point on your palm also towards the exact center of the target.
1:44:42 despite whatever you’re seeing as far as your sight and your sight picture.
1:44:48 Right. So where you don’t worry about where the tip of the arrow is. And maybe I said it,
1:44:52 maybe you said, I can’t remember. I ended up calling this the Jesus takes the wheel approach,
1:44:59 you know, Jesus take the wheel. And it was shocking to see what happened because more often than not,
1:45:04 I would shoot better with that type of approach.
1:45:08 Yeah. And it worked surprisingly well.
1:45:09 It worked surprisingly well.
1:45:09 Until.
1:45:15 Yeah, it worked surprisingly well until. I guess we just decided, I mean, there were just,
1:45:20 it wasn’t reliable. I mean, to give you an idea, and this will mean more to people who have shot some
1:45:26 arrows, but when I was hitting, I had some pretty good scores. I mean, in practice, like, I don’t know.
1:45:28 Into the 270s, I believe.
1:45:30 Yeah, 270. So like 540.
1:45:37 270 out of 330. So decent. And the goal for where you were wanting to be was 252 plus.
1:45:38 Yeah.
1:45:41 So you were in excess of your score goal for Lancaster.
1:45:47 Yeah. I wanted to qualify for the top 64 shooters at Lancaster. We trained using my
1:45:53 Jesus take the wheel approach for up until a few weeks before Lancaster, because I was a little gun
1:45:58 shy after having so much trouble with trying to hold the point in one place.
1:46:02 And Jesus taking the wheel was working so well.
1:46:08 It was working really well until we started having really variable lighting conditions,
1:46:13 and we started dialing in the technique and the biomechanics for more precision.
1:46:20 And when we went to some test events, essentially. Not a test event per se, but like a local club
1:46:21 shoot to see how things are going.
1:46:27 Exactly. Yeah, that’s a great point. So, I mean, I don’t recommend this, guys. So if you can do a ton of
1:46:32 warm-up tournaments before the big tournament, I highly recommend doing that. Just didn’t really
1:46:38 work out that way. But we went to a number of league nights and it won two small events at
1:46:42 the Easton range in Salt Lake City, which is awesome.
1:46:47 I think you shot like Utah state shoots or something.
1:46:52 Yeah, I went in and basically just like audited the thing, right, to try to get competition
1:46:59 condition experience. And there are a few things that we noticed. So one is in that environment,
1:47:08 the bale, the canvas upon which you put the target, right, the backstop is black. And all of a sudden,
1:47:13 my eyes started doing funny things. And I couldn’t see the arrow tip as well. Now, the reason that’s
1:47:18 relevant is that I wasn’t trying to place the tip of the arrow in the center of the target, but I would
1:47:24 try to see it so that I could tell if I was roughly in the center of the target, right? So I would pay
1:47:25 attention to the left, right.
1:47:30 And just really quick for those that don’t know, with bare bow, you use the tip of your arrow as
1:47:36 your aiming reference. Part of the game is there is no sight. So you’re using the tip of the arrow
1:47:40 as your aiming reference. And then you’re placing that in a particular place every single time to
1:47:46 shoot a group in the middle. Exactly. So all of a sudden, and thank God we did these test events,
1:47:50 which I always have done in any other sport. Also, you just do not know what’s going to happen
1:47:55 and how you’re going to respond in competition conditions until you do it.
1:47:59 So there are a few things I think we did right. There are a lot of things we did right,
1:48:05 but doing those warmup tournaments, thank God, those were there. And with the black
1:48:07 bale, the black background that ended up…
1:48:12 It wasn’t just a black bale. It was also a black stand and the wall behind it was also black. It was
1:48:14 just all out, just dark.
1:48:21 It was dark. And so I could not reliably track because my arrow tip, people who have
1:48:26 done bare bow are going to find this funny. It was like three feet below the center of the target. I
1:48:27 mean, it was really, really low.
1:48:32 But you could still see it. I could still see it. Yeah. But it was hard to discern with that
1:48:39 particular black bale and everything around it. So what ended up happening in competition is I was
1:48:43 all over the place. Yeah. It wasn’t even just the black background that was different. It was also
1:48:48 the lighting condition too, because the light was very different compared to other places you shot in.
1:48:54 So the way you actually perceived objects in space was slightly different and you could not adjust.
1:48:56 It was all over the place, as you said. Yeah.
1:49:01 But the main thing was your first few shots were so low. Yep.
1:49:05 And with bare bow, we do what’s called string walking for those that don’t know.
1:49:09 String walking is essentially, you’re not pulling the string back right next to the arrow. You’re
1:49:15 actually going down the string, walking down the string, and that affects the trajectory of the
1:49:20 arrow. So you can essentially use the arrow point as your site. So you site in by walking up and down
1:49:26 the string. So to put it another way, if you had a site on your bow or on your gun or whatever,
1:49:29 you take some shots, assuming your technique is decent. And then based on where it, okay,
1:49:35 it landed bottom left. And then you adjust the site to move that point of impact. Correct.
1:49:39 Can’t do that in bare bow. Yeah. There’s no actual aiming reference.
1:49:44 Yeah. You’re not allowed to use a site. So what do you do? Well, the first thing is for left,
1:49:49 right, you do have something called the plunger and think of it just as kind of a screw that it’s much
1:49:55 more than that, but it pushes the arrow left or allows it to be more flush, right? So you can use
1:50:00 that to adjust your left, right. But how do you adjust your up down? Got a problem. Okay. Well,
1:50:07 the way you do that, and there are a lot of different approaches to this, but you’re crawling. So that means
1:50:13 means you’re using your thumb to basically move your fingers down from the back of the arrow
1:50:19 to, let’s just say, the further down you go, the further down on the target, it’s going to land and
1:50:26 so on. And it needs to be very precise. This is part of what makes bare bows so frustrating and so
1:50:32 difficult. Like if you’re, I mean, one millimeter, right? Like above or below a line.
1:50:37 So you have laser etched marks on your finger tab, the thing that protects your fingers from the
1:50:43 string, and it’s a flat piece of metal. And you were trying to be as precise enough to crawl to
1:50:47 the top of the laser etched line versus the bottom of the laser etched line. And it’s less than a
1:50:55 millimeter wide. Yeah. And that makes a difference in terms of point of impact. Yeah. Okay. So keeping all
1:51:02 this in mind, when I got into those lighting conditions with everything at play in competition,
1:51:06 it was a disaster. I mean, it was all over the place.
1:51:09 It was the worst score you had shot by a long shot.
1:51:14 Yeah. And I was like, oh, fuck me. This is three weeks, two weeks before Lancaster.
1:51:20 Yes. Maybe three, maybe three weeks out. Yeah. And I was like, well, keep this up. I’m definitely
1:51:25 not going to Lancaster because I will just, it’ll just be a complete clown car disaster.
1:51:28 Heather and I were looking at, my wife and I, we were looking at each other after that day
1:51:31 and we’re like, I really hope Tim still wants to go to Lancaster.
1:51:37 Yeah. That was the most frustrated. I think you guys have ever seen me. It was probably after that.
1:51:43 There was a lot of, uh, statements you were making in regards to never being on such an emotionally,
1:51:48 an emotional roller coaster from day to day. Yeah.
1:51:51 Because that timeframe was, was really challenging for you.
1:51:56 Oh, it was wild because I would go from one setting and we ended up shooting at a CrossFit gym from
1:52:03 seven 30 to like 10 30 at night. That was the only time and the only location that we could find.
1:52:09 And thank you to those guys. What a lifesaver. Chris Spieler. I think it was park city fit.
1:52:14 Amazing gym. The cleanest gym I’ve ever seen. It was like, yeah, you could eat off.
1:52:18 You could eat off the floor. It was incredible. So thank you to those guys. So we were training late
1:52:23 at night, very different lighting conditions, but I would have a day where I’m like, man,
1:52:30 I can’t miss. I can’t miss. I am so far above. I have so many more points than necessary that I need
1:52:37 to qualify for the top 64. Like it was your goal. Yeah. Even if I’m 10% off of this, I’m good. And then
1:52:43 went to this tournament or mock tournament on the, in the case of the league nights and it was unmitigated
1:52:48 disaster. Like a hundred points under what you wanted. Yeah. Yeah. And I was just like, what the hell is
1:52:53 going on? So the reason that I sometimes compare it to golf, even though I’ve only played golf a few
1:52:57 times, it’s like, you’re looking at this, you’re like, okay, there are a hundred different checkpoints.
1:53:03 Which one is it? If it’s even one of those hundred. Yeah. And that’s the detective work.
1:53:08 And so I’m looking at you and everything going down the list, try this, try this, try this, try this,
1:53:13 try this, try this. And then it’s like, maybe you should start aiming, I think. Yeah.
1:53:16 Because that’s really the only thing that we haven’t done up until this point.
1:53:20 Yeah, exactly. So we went through the list. It was like, nope, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail. All right.
1:53:24 So two weeks out and we start aiming and it started working.
1:53:30 Because you had developed your technique enough that you didn’t have that aiming distracting you
1:53:36 from the process, from what you needed to do. And a lot of that work that we did beforehand,
1:53:41 when you were instinctive aiming, I don’t think we really quite covered that, but instinctive aiming
1:53:44 is, you know, the tension and direction of the bow arm and just staring and burning a hole with
1:53:50 your eyes, but your subconscious brain like takes over and just makes the arrow land in the middle.
1:53:54 It’s like throwing a ball. You don’t have a sight to aim with when you throw something or throw an
1:53:59 object at something through repeated motion. You, you make adjustments and you don’t even do that
1:54:03 consciously. Same thing with archery when you’re shooting instinctive per se.
1:54:10 And there’s some amazing instinctive shooters. They don’t tend to go to competition for reasons we can
1:54:16 get into. But for instance, I don’t want to name him. I don’t want to dox him, but this amazing guy from
1:54:24 Albania at one range I went to, and this guy all day long with his hunting bow, like a trad hunting bow made
1:54:31 out of wood, just drilling the center of this target for two hours straight, every time I saw,
1:54:36 and he would kind of pull back. And then as soon as he got his finger to the corner of his mouth,
1:54:42 he would release. And that was it. And the guy’s just a beast. I mean, incredibly good.
1:54:47 So we finally started aiming and I want to mention a couple of other things that I think were key to
1:54:53 ultimately being very happy with performance at Lancaster, even though, of course, I always wanted to do
1:55:04 better. But the first I would say is standardizing a handful of things. So obviously the shot sequence
1:55:14 and anchor and aiming system and all of that. The second was experimenting in mock tournament conditions,
1:55:20 because we also discovered, for instance, that when we went from, we upgraded from a very, very narrow
1:55:26 arrow. So the shaft of the arrow, and therefore the head of the arrow as well, in this particular case,
1:55:32 because they’re not broadheads or anything, going from a very, very thin arrow to a maximum allowable
1:55:37 javelin sized arrow. And what’s the reason for that?
1:55:43 So basically in archery, when you touch the higher scoring ring where your arrow lands, you get the
1:55:48 higher value. So all you have to do is touch that ring. You don’t have to break the line. You don’t
1:55:52 even have to be inside out. You just have to touch it. And that’s enough to get you the higher score.
1:55:59 And statistically speaking, somebody did a study and analysis of scores across the board at indoor
1:56:04 archery tournaments. And if you’re in that range of score, where you were actually targeting to be,
1:56:10 to be at Lancaster, there’s a very statistically significant impact on your score going up by a
1:56:16 tremendous amount. I think it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of eight plus points every 30 shots,
1:56:24 which is a massive jump at that 280, 270 range. Somewhere in there, the bigger arrows make statistically
1:56:28 speaking a huge difference at the highest level. The guys that win the tournaments when they’re
1:56:35 shooting say one or two points down from perfect, they do not make any difference at all. Like
1:56:41 statistically it’s, it’s a zero sum. There’s no, no additional benefit to shooting the fat arrows,
1:56:44 but for me, but for you statistically it made sense.
1:56:48 Yeah. It made a lot of sense. What that meant though, is we had to adjust a bunch of the gear.
1:56:58 When you put the arrow on your bow, I’ll just keep it simple. You have an arrow rest. And we had an
1:57:05 arrow rest that had been working great. Fantastic. It had been working so well with the little tiny darts
1:57:13 that I had been using once we put the much heavier arrows on. And I mean, I guess, uh,
1:57:17 what is the model of those arrows? So the arrows you were using was the Easton RX seven. And before
1:57:24 that you were using a Easton advance, I don’t know how to say it. Basically you went from an arrow that
1:57:32 was smaller than the diameter of your average pen or pencil to a something that was three pens combined,
1:57:36 almost. Oh yeah. As far as the diameter is concerned. So big, big difference there.
1:57:39 Yeah. And, uh, and much heavier. Yes. Right. Not just a heavier arrow,
1:57:46 but also a heavier point because there’s a lot of technical stuff here, but as an archer, you want
1:57:51 your arrow to fly perfect and you can adjust parameters of the arrow, the stiffness of the arrow,
1:57:57 how resistant it is to bending the point weight, the knock weight, the fletching size, the arrow length,
1:58:02 all sorts of things to make the arrow work with the bow. So they fly perfectly straight because
1:58:07 ultimately you don’t want it to have a tendency to go one direction. You want it to have like a
1:58:10 forgiveness. So if you make a mistake, it’s not going to deviate far from the middle.
1:58:17 And what we discovered when I did my, I guess it was probably the first time I did the tournament
1:58:23 conditions, a few things. Number one, my instinctive shooting was not going to work. Right. It was all
1:58:27 over the place. On top of that, with the much thicker arrows, which are much heavier,
1:58:34 the arrow rest, which in this case is a fall away, it was a fall away rest. What was the model on this?
1:58:41 So for those bare bow listeners out there, it is the sniper arrow rest, Z-N-I-P-E-R. So it is a
1:58:48 magnetically controlled drop away arrow rest. So for those that don’t know archery, a drop away arrow
1:58:54 rest is a rest that holds the arrow and supports it when you’re at full draw. But the moment you let go,
1:58:59 it snaps down out of the way to give the arrow, the maximum amount of clearance as it’s going by the
1:59:05 bow for bare bow. You use it because of the awful flight of the arrow that happens due to string
1:59:09 walking. When you go down the string and you don’t pull it straight back. So what was happening was,
1:59:15 and this is not a design flaw of that rest. It’s just, we literally hit the absolute limitations of
1:59:20 the system because you have to make it stiff enough, hard enough to drop, to hold the arrow up. So you
1:59:26 don’t accidentally bump it when you’re moving around, but you want it to be soft enough. So it drops when
1:59:31 you let go of the string. And because the arrow was heavy and more importantly, the point weight was
1:59:38 so heavy, it was not dropping. Yeah. So also bare bow shooters that are listening, we were using the 2315
1:59:45 size RX seven. So the stiff 420 versions, the 420 spine versions, and we had to run heavy point weights
1:59:52 to break the spine down. Ideally we should have run the 21 size arrows. I believe that I forget the exact
1:59:57 spine. I think it’s 570 or somewhere in there, much weaker. And we should have shot those light
2:00:03 point weights, but I don’t know if they are even available yet. They are or were on back order at
2:00:07 the time. So I couldn’t get you the arrow for the lighter point weight. So we literally just hit a
2:00:13 roadblock of the arrow rest, not working with that arrow setup. And how much can it change your impact
2:00:19 the 20 yards if the arrow rest does not fall? Six inches. Yeah. So if, if not more. Yeah. Game
2:00:23 over. Yeah. That’s it. You’re done. Yeah. You’re 10 ring again. So that’s part of the reason. Yeah.
2:00:31 In addition to my instinctive aiming, completely shitting the bed and not working given all the factors
2:00:38 we’ve already talked about, I’d say one out of every four shots maybe was, was not falling.
2:00:43 And so mentally you’re struggling with the aiming. Yeah. Then all of a sudden the equipment’s not
2:00:50 working. So it’s just adding insult to injury and it’s just making this mental struggle so much worse.
2:00:57 Yeah. So I should highlight that it, there are so many reasons in any sport to mimic or rehearse
2:01:02 competition conditions. But in the case of archery, one is you want to get used to being crowded,
2:01:07 right? If you’re training by yourself, it’s not the way it works at any of these larger tournaments.
2:01:11 Like you’re going to be on a line and literally could have somebody, I don’t know how far away
2:01:17 were folks for with me? Uh, less than a foot, less than a foot probably in front of me and behind me.
2:01:21 Correct. And I mean, you just want to hope if you’re right-handed, you don’t have a left-handed
2:01:26 person right next to you on your right side. Cause you’re going to basically be eye gazing them the
2:01:31 whole time. It’s really distracting. Although I encouraged you during your training at Gotham,
2:01:35 find a left-handed guy and stand right in front of them. Yeah. Yeah, totally. So I did that.
2:01:42 Yeah. So I had the practice. That is one reason. Another is to see what happens to your mental state
2:01:46 if and when, I guess it’s not really if, I mean, at my level, when you make mistakes.
2:01:52 At my level too. Yeah. It’s like, what happens? Yeah. Right. And those play poker. Like,
2:01:59 do you go tilt, monkey tilt? Like how bad does it get? And can you recover if and when that happens?
2:02:07 And I was just like, the wheels came off. Yeah. Yeah, it did. The wheels came off. I was like,
2:02:12 aren’t you stupid? Fuck this game. I didn’t say that, but I think you did inside, inside. I was
2:02:20 definitely, I was not happy. And then it was really, I think a combination of, I mentioned a few things.
2:02:27 We talked about the tournament conditions and with each mock tournament or league night that I did,
2:02:32 the scores went up. So everything was trending in the right direction. And I was trying to, I mean, I
2:02:39 used AI and all these tools to find every possible shop within an hour and a half driving distance.
2:02:44 And what kind of targets are they using? Can I bring my own target? Which we ended up doing,
2:02:49 right? Yeah. You went and shot a blue and white face league night, an NFA league night and shot a
2:02:53 colored face. So instead of shooting the five arrows that everyone else shot, you were shooting three
2:02:59 arrows. I was running a timer manually behind you, keeping tabs on, you know, your actual pacing,
2:03:04 because within tournaments, like a simple little added change is just a time limitation. And even though
2:03:08 you may never even remotely come close to running out of time, just knowing that there’s a time
2:03:12 limitation is enough to make you panic. Well, that’s another thing that happened to me,
2:03:18 right? Yeah. So given, let’s just say, you know, six months of serious practice. Now it’s like two
2:03:26 weeks out starting to aim. And I still have a lot that is manual. It’s not yet automatic. So I am a
2:03:31 pretty slow shooter. Well, because you have to think through everything. Yeah. Yeah. And so how much time
2:03:35 do you have for how many shots? You have two minutes to shoot three arrows. Yeah. Which sounds like a lot.
2:03:40 There was often times you were had three to five seconds left, which is not a good feeling to see
2:03:46 the timer. And it’s like, what happens when it goes from green to yellow? Yeah. And so 30 seconds
2:03:51 less a yellow light comes on. That’s way brighter than the green light. Green is meaning you’re just
2:03:55 standard time left. And what happens to a lot of people, what happened to me initially is I would
2:04:00 rush through that shot and let it rip. And I would still have 15 seconds left, but I rushed it and it
2:04:05 would not be a good shot. It was a change to your process. Yeah. All right. So other things,
2:04:11 mentioned standardizing as much as possible. So one was, and look, guys, I’m not proud of this,
2:04:19 but I’ll admit it. Figuring out expedient fuel that you can get or bring with you everywhere,
2:04:23 right? Especially with the amount of travel I was doing, that was actually very good practice. And it’s
2:04:30 like, okay, let me know how much caffeine I can tolerate. What am I going to use? Does it help at
2:04:35 all? Because oodles and oodles of liquid anxiety does not help you shoot better, which is why also
2:04:40 I beta blockers are not allowed in competition unless you get deliberately fat enough that you have a
2:04:44 prescription for them. That’s a whole separate story. There are actually people who do that,
2:04:49 just like the sprinters in the Olympics who, oh my God, happened to all be narcoleptics so they can take
2:04:55 modafinil. What a coincidence. All right. Putting all that aside. So what does that mean? That means that I
2:05:01 wanted to be able to fuel myself from things I could get at any convenience store, almost any gas
2:05:09 station. So it would be some form of basic protein. Don’t judge me, but maybe it’s like muscle milk or
2:05:17 whatever. And then having almonds. I had tolerated Maui Nui venison sticks really well. We knew that I
2:05:23 could digest that reasonably quickly. So always traveling with that. Then figured out a couple of other
2:05:27 things. So I’ll give a couple of shout outs because these products end up being really, really helpful.
2:05:34 So Peak Tea, P-I-Q-U-E, which are basically, if you think about matcha as whole leaf, these are
2:05:39 pu-erh, oolong, they’re all whole leaf. They’re powdered, so you can mix them instantly.
2:05:40 Even in cold water.
2:05:41 Even in cold water.
2:05:41 Yeah.
2:05:48 Even if you’re combining it with other things. So I figured out the timing for using that, using
2:05:55 glutamine, which is incredibly cheap. And I use momentous glutamine, also the next one I’ll talk
2:06:03 about. And for muscle recovery and soreness, it is incredibly effective. I wrote about this in The
2:06:07 4-Hour Body. I know you were pretty skeptical at first of the glutamine.
2:06:10 I mean, the amount you were taking was insane.
2:06:10 Yeah, it was a lot.
2:06:16 After doing a little bit of research on my own with the help of Heather, we saw that it was good
2:06:21 for people with leaky gut syndrome at very high doses. So if it’s okay for that, then it’s got to
2:06:26 be all right for the overall GI system, right? So it’s like, let’s give it a try. And we started trying
2:06:32 it as well after seeing you pretty much take an entire bottle of it in a day. Well, it actually
2:06:34 makes a massive difference for muscle soreness.
2:06:35 And it’s amazing.
2:06:41 Yeah, it’s wild. So I would say when we were doing hard training and look, talk to your medical
2:06:46 professional, I’m not giving medical advice here, but I was using a scoop, which is say five grams of
2:06:55 creatine three or four times over the course of a full training session, I would say. And then what
2:07:01 we figured out reasonably late, this was a lucky discovery, ended up playing around because I had used
2:07:08 this actually on very, very long hikes, which is something called fuel also by Momentus. And that is
2:07:20 a combination of electrolytes and let’s just call them more slowly digested carbohydrate and a handful of
2:07:28 other things. But it’s basically like Bugatti Kool-Aid for mental and physical performance. And it was visibly
2:07:35 noticeable when I was on this cocktail and when I was not. I’d start getting shaky. And then if I had,
2:07:40 and I timed this, I had everything on a schedule and I knew how long it took me to digest. Because
2:07:44 the last thing you want to do is have like three protein bars and then get up to shoot and you have
2:07:45 all this blood in your stomach.
2:07:52 Or even worse, a crash. And then you’re like, oh, emergency fuel. How long does it take to come back
2:07:58 Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So figuring all that out was key. And I would just travel. Like I would have the
2:08:03 fuel, the glutamine, the peak. I would have bottles of water so I could mix all of that on my own with
2:08:13 a shaker bottle. And these ended up being, I think, really key to also reducing the decision fatigue and
2:08:16 possibility for logistics challenges. For sure.
2:08:24 And that’s why with Lancaster, like most high-level competitors, how early, like how far
2:08:28 before their first shooting do they arrive at Lancaster?
2:08:30 Most pro shooters?
2:08:30 Yeah.
2:08:34 45 minutes, half hour, an hour.
2:08:37 Right, but when would their plane land?
2:08:39 Oh, sorry. A few days.
2:08:40 Yeah.
2:08:44 You know, well, it depends. Depends on the season. Because if the season’s really crammed in,
2:08:49 you may land the night before the competition starts because one just ended somewhere across the world.
2:08:50 Yep.
2:08:54 But ideally, you’d try to get there a couple days early. So that way you shake off the jet lag,
2:08:58 you get used to the bed, you just get used to where everything’s laid out. And you know,
2:09:01 you kind of just see how things are going.
2:09:02 But if you’ve been to the event before.
2:09:03 How early did we get there?
2:09:06 10 days, 12 days early, I think. Something like that.
2:09:12 Yeah. And so again, this is just, if it’s helpful for folks, I do this whenever I’m
2:09:16 competing in anything new, right? So figure out where you are, figure out your food options,
2:09:22 figure out your bed. For instance, I slept really poorly on the hotel mattress. So ordered a pillow
2:09:26 topper, got that all figured out. Where are we going to practice?
2:09:29 How long does it take to drive from your hotel to the venue?
2:09:31 Right. How does that differ with different times of day?
2:09:34 Yep. And what does it look like, the venue?
2:09:39 So we did a lot of different things too. We went to the venue early and checked it out after hours
2:09:43 when no one was there. We’re the only ones walking around except for the Zamboni cleaning the floor.
2:09:44 Yeah.
2:09:48 Right. And so we’re checking it out. And so you get an idea of what the field looks like,
2:09:49 what the lighting looks like, where the bathroom’s located.
2:09:51 Figuring out where the bathrooms are.
2:09:56 This is not a small thing, right? Because when you’re shooting at this particular tournament,
2:10:02 on each bail, you have four targets, A, B, C, D. So you’re shooting with three other people,
2:10:09 you all score one another, and I’m simplifying things a little bit, but basically you’re switching back
2:10:13 and forth. Two people shoot, and then the next two people shoot, and then the next people shoot,
2:10:19 you alternate back and forth. So you may not have a whole lot of time to get to the bathroom. How
2:10:24 crowded is the bathroom, right? Where is the least crowded bathroom? Where’s the secret bathroom?
2:10:25 Yep.
2:10:29 I’m figuring all this out ahead of time, because I recognize, look, I don’t have a lot of time under
2:10:34 my belt. I’ve trained my ass off to the extent that my body would handle it. I pushed my body,
2:10:42 and I do need to give a huge thank you to Heather, who is a top-tier manual therapist,
2:10:48 magician with soft tissue, and no way that I could have made it to Lancaster without her help.
2:10:50 Yeah, you were on the ragged edge.
2:10:57 I was run pretty ragged. Yeah. I mean, I had kinesiology tape all over me. A couple of other
2:11:01 recovery tools that were really helpful. One, I really didn’t anticipate because I had no exposure
2:11:07 to it, but this is, I guess, full-spectrum cannabis oil. Was it Rick Simpson?
2:11:13 Yeah, R-S-O. Rick Simpson oil, I believe, is the name of the guy that came up with this.
2:11:19 And what was fascinating for me, you do not feel any psychoactive effects whatsoever. Topical,
2:11:21 to be clear. Topical, yes. It does not cross the blood-brain barrier.
2:11:23 Not suppositories. Yeah, no.
2:11:25 Don’t fall for the marketing campaigns for the archery.
2:11:26 No.
2:11:30 THC suppositories. And you don’t feel any psychoactive effect. Obviously,
2:11:36 do not break the law where you live, so pay attention. But in terms of reducing or eliminating
2:11:43 muscle spasms, incredible, incredibly effective. And also, if you’re going to get, let’s just say,
2:11:49 massage therapy, do not get, necessarily, Heather would be able to speak more intelligently to this,
2:11:54 but incredibly deep, hardcore work right before you’re going to train. I mean, there are different
2:11:56 types of massage for flushing.
2:11:56 Sure.
2:12:01 Yeah. You don’t want to overly lengthen the muscle, because then you can lead that
2:12:07 joint that it’s supporting or around to become potentially unstable, which results in a potential,
2:12:10 serious potential for an injury to the joint, like an actual injury.
2:12:13 Yeah. You can also get really sore, as I was saying.
2:12:15 Increase your inflammation.
2:12:21 Which does not help with anything, right? My main issue was, like, my shoulder or my wrist or
2:12:27 my forearms would just be on fire. They’d be all swollen like a puffer fish.
2:12:27 Sure.
2:12:28 And it’s like, okay, sure.
2:12:29 This is our first day of four days of training.
2:12:30 Sure.
2:12:31 We need to fix this.
2:12:32 How do we fix this?
2:12:40 From an outsider’s perspective, it was fascinating to see with unlimited ability to just make things
2:12:47 happen, what you can do to maximize your potential to perform. So what can you control? Can you get
2:12:54 that bed topper? Can you get there 10 days early? Can you see the venue? Can you have the Bugatti of
2:13:00 electrolytes? Can you get the things that actually make a difference and have you experimented enough
2:13:06 leading up to the event to know how you respond? And if you take enough detailed notes, you know
2:13:10 exactly how you’re going to respond. What is the lag time? What is the delay? How many days
2:13:15 days after I shoot this 300-arrow day, am I going to be sore and unable to shoot properly?
2:13:15 Exactly.
2:13:17 So many different things.
2:13:24 And actually, this is as good a point as any to mention the glue that holds us all together,
2:13:28 which is note-taking and training logs.
2:13:29 Yes, entirely.
2:13:29 Right?
2:13:36 This is such a pivotal thing to consistently performing under pressure. You might get hot once
2:13:40 and shoot great and win a tournament, but if you didn’t know what you did that led up to that,
2:13:46 how are you going to repeat it? And so you have to blueprint, as Joel says in his system,
2:13:53 the shot IQ, how do you blueprint an ideal shot or an ideal tournament? And leading up to that,
2:13:57 a training session, whatever it may be, what can you do to replicate that every time?
2:14:02 Yep. And a few things that were surprising to me, for instance, if I felt like I’d just been put
2:14:09 through a meat grinder, I would maybe, left to my own devices, look back one training session,
2:14:16 maybe two training sessions, but often it’s five days ago, five training sessions ago. You have to
2:14:20 look back further than I would have expected. That is going to be beyond your memory.
2:14:25 For sure. How many arrows did you shoot? Yeah. What did you do that day? Did you strength train
2:14:30 as well? How about massage therapy? What did you eat? Whatever it is, you’ve got to know. If you
2:14:35 don’t know, you’re guessing. Yeah, exactly. And also, we’re mentioning a lot of these different things.
2:14:39 Most of these are not expensive in the grand scheme of things. Correct.
2:14:45 I mean, the only one that might be out of range that I used quite a bit is the low intensity continuous
2:14:52 ultrasound. Sure. There are these devices that basically put a very light ultrasound stimulus
2:14:57 through these electrodes. And there’s a SAM device. There are a number of other ones that is
2:15:03 Lycus, L-I-C-U-S, low intensity continuous ultrasound. People can look it up. That one’s a
2:15:09 little pricey, but there’s a whole lot you can do that is not expensive. Almost everything I’ve mentioned
2:15:14 is well within reach. I mean, you’re doing it right now. You got a pen and a paper.
2:15:19 Yeah. That’s like the weapon right there. You know, that is so important. I’ve encouraged so
2:15:25 many people I work with that come to me for coaching to take detailed notes. And I can’t
2:15:30 tell you how few do. And you’re the only one that I’ve ever seen take a sufficient level of detail of
2:15:36 notes on how the training session went, what you did, and how you ultimately felt. And then just being
2:15:40 able to look back and see. I can’t tell you how many times you pulled it out and said, “Let me look back to
2:15:45 San Diego when I went and visited Coach Lee and he told me to go away after 45 minutes. Oh yeah,
2:15:48 this is what we worked on. Interesting. Okay. Let’s make sure I’m doing that today.”
2:15:49 Yeah, totally.
2:15:50 That’s a few months later or more than that.
2:15:57 Yeah. Yeah. That ended up being such an important key to everything. And I would log the workout,
2:16:01 give you just a couple of tips. I mean, this is going to seem really rudimentary and it’s like,
2:16:06 yeah, duh, but very few people do it. When did you work out? When did you do your training?
2:16:11 Time of day. Yeah. When was your last meal prior to that? Write this stuff down. You are not going
2:16:18 to remember. And then going through training, it’s like, well, if you had a period of shooting really
2:16:24 poorly and then you tested a number of things to fix it, what happened? So for instance, that pulling back
2:16:32 on the pinky of the bowhand ended up being something. When I got fatigued, I would start to lose that
2:16:37 tension and it would have a whole cascade of negative effects. And I was like, okay, interesting.
2:16:44 For whatever reason, that cue seems to fix a lot. And there were a handful of things that you’re only
2:16:50 going to discover if you are taking those types of notes. And I think this applies to way more than
2:16:57 archery. If you’re not really paying attention to what you’re doing and maximizing your chances for
2:17:02 success and ultimately maintaining what you’re doing and training or leading up to an event,
2:17:07 whatever it may be, if you change everything at the event, because I’m at the event, I should
2:17:12 probably clean up my diet. Why would you do that? It’s too late. It’s too late. If you’re eating Cheetos
2:17:16 at home, as much as you shouldn’t be eating Cheetos at home, you should probably just do it at the
2:17:21 tournament. If you drink seven up or you have a beer the night before or whatever it is, you should
2:17:25 probably continue to do that. You don’t want to all of a sudden sober up at the event and deal with
2:17:29 withdrawal syndromes from not having enough sugar because you used to have cap and crunch for
2:17:35 breakfast. I don’t know, whatever it may be, you might want to just maintain the same thing. And so
2:17:41 this applies to so many things, not just archery. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And also if it’s helpful to
2:17:46 people, when I would take notes, I mean, you can even kind of, I won’t show off all this because
2:17:53 some of these are top secret in this one, but I also basically draw a little square. You’ve seen
2:17:57 these in the bottom right of each page in this training log. And my training log is actually
2:18:02 like this big, it’s larger paper. It’s like bigger than an eight and a half by 11. Yeah.
2:18:10 It’s, it’s a large notebook. And in that bottom right corner, I, so I’m not only taking notes,
2:18:17 I’m also reviewing all of those notes after the session. And in the bottom right, I am putting my
2:18:25 next actions or key takeaways to focus on for the next workout. And so when I land at the gym,
2:18:31 or in this case, the range, the next day or two days later, I know exactly where I’m picking up.
2:18:35 I do not have to spend any time on that. All right. So we’re doing all this stuff,
2:18:42 chugging muscle milks and fuel and glutamine and peak tea and learning to aim.
2:18:42 Yes.
2:18:43 Like a big boy.
2:18:44 Yes.
2:18:51 Then what happens at Lancaster? What’s the goal? Were the expectations, hopes, like from your
2:18:52 perspective, I’d be curious to hear.
2:18:57 I would say my number one hope was just that you’d be happy with how it went, no matter what,
2:19:02 because ultimately there’s no way to know how it’s going to go. Would it be great if you made the cut?
2:19:09 Would it be great if you won the event? Sure. That’d be cool. But how is it going to go? No one knows.
2:19:14 Competition is very interesting. It really is. It’s just unknown until you do it.
2:19:20 Just a quick side note. So I remember, I don’t want to mention his name, but I was training somewhere
2:19:28 and I saw my first barebow shooter who was, in my eyes, really good. And in practice, just incredible.
2:19:31 And do you remember what you said to me after that?
2:19:32 I can tell you.
2:19:34 Go for it.
2:19:35 Practice scores don’t matter.
2:19:35 Oh, yeah.
2:19:44 Now, on some level, consistent practice scores are one indicator, but competition is just a different…
2:19:44 It’s a totally different animal.
2:19:45 Different animal.
2:19:52 And so you can expect to falter. You hope to do well. But ultimately, it’s looking at where you were,
2:19:56 you really hit rock bottom three weeks before the event, right?
2:20:02 So from there, there was an upward trajectory and you were heading in the right direction.
2:20:06 So that’s a lot of stuff that I remember I was reminding you about. You’re headed in the right
2:20:10 direction. You just have to maintain your focus on these things. Do not get distracted by anything
2:20:15 else. Each arrow is its own. You give it the care that it deserves. The arrow that you just shot does
2:20:20 not affect the next. And the arrow that you’re about to shoot doesn’t affect anything. It’s just its own
2:20:26 individual thing. Treat it with care. It’s a 60 arrow round, not a one arrow round. So it’s really
2:20:30 unimportant what happens on each individual arrow. Ultimately, it’s how you control the whole event,
2:20:37 how you maintain focus, whatever it may be. Just composure ultimately is what’s required to succeed.
2:20:41 It’s not about being perfect. It’s just about maintaining what you do in practice better than
2:20:46 the next guy. That’s who wins. And so that was just the main focus that I was trying to hammer home
2:20:50 to really say, this is what you need to lean into and avoid any of this other distracting
2:20:55 thoughts. It’s not Lancaster. It’s nothing. It’s just another venue. You’re just shooting arrows.
2:21:00 Nobody’s interfering with you. It’s you and the bow and no one else. So ultimately nobody’s going to
2:21:06 prevent you from succeeding or failing except for yourself. So you just got to get out of your own
2:21:10 way and let it happen. You’ve already put in the time you put in the effort. Just go have fun.
2:21:12 Just shoot some arrows and maintain composure.
2:21:21 Of course I was nervous, but I also came into it feeling like I cannot imagine with the limitations
2:21:28 that I have having taken this more seriously. Like I’ve done the prep I was humanly capable of doing.
2:21:35 So ultimately it was just, there was no expectations. I don’t like to have expectations when it comes to
2:21:40 competition because it’s just, it adds a level of pressure, distraction.
2:21:47 Yeah. Well, I can also say for myself, I hadn’t done a proper large competition in a super long time, right?
2:21:48 You said 20 years.
2:21:58 20 years, 20 plus years. And for me, I was so curious. I’m like, is that gear going to click?
2:22:02 Is there going to be another gear? And ultimately there was, and I was very happy to see it because
2:22:04 I had not seen it in the mock tournaments.
2:22:07 No, me neither for the record.
2:22:15 Yeah. And part of that though, for me was, okay, now this is a real competition, right? This is what
2:22:21 we’ve been training for. Adding extra pressure to myself now, much like changing your diet last minute
2:22:28 is not going to help. The training has been done. And so coming into it, I don’t even know if I’ve told
2:22:35 you guys this, maybe I did, but I basically just told myself, this is just treat this like training
2:22:40 with distraction. That’s it. This is just another training session with a lot of distractions.
2:22:40 It’s healthy.
2:22:48 And I have had my best competition performances, whether it was, you know, going to the worlds
2:22:56 in tango or the national championships in Sancho Chinese kickboxing when I’ve done that and having
2:23:06 high hopes certainly, but the mental prep that I did for that was my pass fail here is not the score.
2:23:11 It’s how well I can recover and keep my calm.
2:23:11 Exactly.
2:23:16 That was it. And I was like, okay, I have a lot of room for improvement because I remember
2:23:22 throwing a tantrum of epic proportions when everything went sideways at Easton.
2:23:22 Yeah.
2:23:23 In fairness, that was pretty rough.
2:23:24 It was rough.
2:23:25 That was rough.
2:23:25 Yeah.
2:23:27 Yeah. I felt bad too.
2:23:28 Yeah. It was bad.
2:23:29 Yeah.
2:23:34 It was really bad. And I was like, okay, so this is it. This is like a meditation practice.
2:23:44 And success is viewing it as training with distraction and just keeping calm. And if I
2:23:46 get excited, that’s okay. Just like reeling it back in.
2:23:47 Everyone’s going to get it.
2:23:53 So Heather was sitting there with a mutual friend and what Heather was saying is she was looking
2:23:57 at me and she’s like, wow, Tim is overstimulated. And it’s very easy to be overstimulated there.
2:23:58 I mean, it’s-
2:23:59 So loud.
2:24:03 It’s so loud. It is a cavernous space. There are how many shooters?
2:24:07 I mean, there was close to 600 shooters on the line at one time.
2:24:12 Yeah. And what Heather was saying is that when I crossed the line to straddle the line to
2:24:16 shoot, there was just this like calm that washed over me. And she was saying that-
2:24:19 I mean, you were just high-eyed walking around.
2:24:20 Yeah. My eyes were-
2:24:21 Beforehand.
2:24:22 Saucers beforehand.
2:24:26 And the moment, yeah, the moment you crossed, it was just like, this is what I do.
2:24:26 Yeah.
2:24:27 This is how it’s going to go.
2:24:33 And it was just, it was the first time, genuinely the first time where it was just like you held
2:24:34 your shit together.
2:24:36 Yeah. So that was an experience.
2:24:36 Yeah.
2:24:41 And I was like, oh, oh yeah, I’ve done this before. Because I guess, and we’ll get to
2:24:47 this, but it’s like historically, like I know I don’t have a technical advantage over everyone
2:24:48 there. Some of these guys have been shooting forever.
2:24:49 Yeah.
2:24:55 Right. And I was like, okay, well, how can I try to stack the deck? And we already talked
2:25:03 about a lot, right? Nutrition, sleep, taking away handicaps that I can easily remove. Then
2:25:09 I was like, okay, well, being consistent for 60 arrows, which means trying to contain the
2:25:17 fluctuations in energy and also contain the fluctuations in emotional reaction. And I remember
2:25:22 taking the first few shots and I’m standing on the line and there’s a person 12 inches
2:25:27 in front of me and sweet, sweet people, but her arrows are sticking out and literally jabbing
2:25:34 me in the stomach like the, you know, the knocks, the back of the arrow. And I’m like, well, that’s
2:25:39 distracting. And then there’s a guy right behind me who has a huge longbow. He’s in the longbow
2:25:44 division and he’s holding it sideways right in front of me. So I can’t even lift my bow.
2:25:51 Meanwhile, the timer’s going, right? And I’m like, oh man. Okay. But then I was able to,
2:25:58 I think in part from visiting the venue, in part from doing the Easton comp prep and having the
2:26:06 black bales, which they also had at Lancaster, walking in that late night when the Zamboni was
2:26:11 there because it’s indoor lighting to see what the lighting is like, let my eyes kind of adjust and
2:26:18 feel it out. Not worrying about the bathroom, not worrying about nutrition. And it took a little bit
2:26:26 of shooting to, to get comfortable with the process and the turnaround speed from one pair to the next
2:26:33 pair shooting on the same bail. But ultimately ended up with a, I think it was exactly 500 points,
2:26:38 right? I think so. Yeah. I think it was exactly, look, somebody could find it online. It’s easy
2:26:44 enough to find, but ended up with 500 points. That’s not anywhere close to my practice high
2:26:49 scores, but that’s fine. But it was my best tournament scoring. And you’re most importantly,
2:26:54 in my opinion, the best performance you’ve had. It’s not about the outcome. It’s about the performance.
2:27:00 Yeah. If I shoot beautifully in my opinion and someone else out shoot me, I have to be happy
2:27:04 with that. I did the best I can. What does that mean? I think I’d have to go back and look. I don’t
2:27:10 know what number. I think you were 80th something. 80 something. 80s in there. Yeah. So you’re, you know,
2:27:16 not quite at 64 where you wanted to be, but. It was really fun. And just the fact that I didn’t
2:27:24 lose it, right? Irrecoverably was a huge highlight. And also we ended up, because I’m a glutton for
2:27:29 punishment, you know, doing, I guess it was the next day, maybe, maybe it was a day later, but doing a
2:27:34 bunch of practice. Yeah. And figuring some stuff out where it’s like, oh, okay. Yep. I feel like
2:27:41 automatically some of these tweaks. Yep. Would lead to a higher score. Sure. And if I can basically just
2:27:46 get my practice scores closer to my competition scores, or maybe you frame it the other way,
2:27:53 then if I’m able to maintain my composure, it’s like, okay. Like I think certainly like a 540 or
2:27:59 something like that is, should be enough to get into the top 64 for sure. You would think so. You would
2:28:03 think so. Yeah. So great experience. Thanks so much for the amazing coaching. Heather, thank you for
2:28:10 keeping my body in one piece. And I’m just trying to think of what else we could mention just in terms of
2:28:19 approach or anything else that’s worth adding. I think, you know, one approach maybe, and this
2:28:25 particularly given some of my orthopedic issues and just like tendinosis limitations and so on,
2:28:30 this isn’t totally right. And I’ll explain the modification, but this actually comes from a very
2:28:38 famous track coach with many, many world records to his athletes credit. Hank Kreigenhoff or something
2:28:42 like that. I believe he’s Dutch. I’m sure I’m messing up that, but it’s in the four-hour body if people are
2:28:49 looking for the actual name. And he said, effectively, my goal is to do the least necessary, not the most
2:28:59 possible. And the way that ties into the training is I found if I really, really overdid it, then I might
2:29:04 need four or five days off. If my shoulder’s really inflamed and problematic. So it’s like, okay,
2:29:10 how can we use smaller doses with higher frequency to make this work?
2:29:16 Ultimately, that’s super beneficial in archery. So if I were to wave a magic wand and try to make
2:29:22 things better the next time, it would be doing archery more often. So it’s not about how many
2:29:28 arrows you do in one session. It’s how many sessions in a week can you do and how many days in between each
2:29:34 session are there? Anything more than one is too many, in my opinion. So if you could standardize
2:29:41 your schedule better, better for the sake of archery performance, that of course requires sacrifice
2:29:47 elsewhere. Time hanging out, time working, whatever it may be. It’s a challenge.
2:29:52 I mean, for the competition, I mean, that was a commitment, right? Because it was like, unless my
2:30:00 body failed for a period of time, which happened with alarming regularity, but I mean, certainly when
2:30:07 we’re looking at the training in Utah and a lot of other places, I mean, certainly in person, I mean,
2:30:10 it was kind of like two and a half to three hour sessions.
2:30:15 It was intense sessions. And in Tim’s famous last words, one more end.
2:30:20 One more end. Yeah. One more end. It’s like, well, one more bunch of arrows. And I’d be like,
2:30:20 one more end.
2:30:20 Okay.
2:30:21 Three hours later.
2:30:25 All right. One more end. Three hours later. Okay. One more end. Yeah. One more end. Which by
2:30:30 the way, that ended up for solo training being important to me because you gave me the advice
2:30:36 of, and this might sound a little counterintuitive, but not setting a minimum number of arrows you need
2:30:40 to shoot, but a maximum number of arrows. And it’s like, when you hit that, you’re done.
2:30:45 Yes. No matter what, no matter if it’s your best day ever and you cannot miss, and you’re just
2:30:49 enjoying archery more than you’ve ever enjoyed in your entire life, you have to stop.
2:30:55 But also if you’re struggling, you’ve got to push towards that upper end of that limit
2:30:57 because of you need to put in the reps.
2:31:03 Where I got into trouble was, let’s just say I wanted to shoot a hundred arrows as a minimum.
2:31:10 And I would go, if I were shooting poorly and I got to a hundred, I’d be like, I’m not ending
2:31:16 on that. It’s terrible. Yeah, exactly. Whip my back. I’m not ending on that terrible shitty
2:31:19 end. There’s no way I want to end on a good rep.
2:31:23 And so I’d push and push and push. And more often than not, it would just continue to deteriorate.
2:31:29 Yeah. And then I would end up with some type of inflamed shoulder, inflamed X, Y, or Z that now
2:31:30 keeps me out of training for three or four days.
2:31:34 Or potentially hit you real hard five days later as you started.
2:31:37 Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So not worth it.
2:31:37 Yeah.
2:31:43 But that takes a lot. And to beat a dead horse, it comes back to also the journal, the notes,
2:31:45 the training logs.
2:31:49 But something that was interesting that you kind of discovered watching people on the practice range
2:31:55 the day after you competed or whenever that was, and you learned some things. You were watching a
2:31:59 couple of different shooters out there. There was a, I think the number one ranked barebow shooter that
2:32:05 won the ranking round that year and set the new Lancaster record for the ranking round. You were watching him
2:32:09 shoot. You first pointed him out to me and said, Hey, keep an eye on him. See if there’s anything
2:32:15 that he’s doing that maybe I should start to work on as, you know, just maybe there’s something I’m
2:32:20 missing. And, you know, I watched him for two arrows and I think I just walked right over to him. I said,
2:32:26 Hey, how’s it going? What’s your name? How long you been shooting? Oh, I was successful recurve
2:32:33 archer. Cause his form looked recurve. Like there’s a very distinct look to that. And he shot as a junior
2:32:39 competitively nationally, I believe for Canada, if I remember correctly. And then he shot all through
2:32:46 college shooting recurve competitively. And then he started shooting compound for a while and kind of
2:32:50 set down the bow, came back to it like four or five years later and started shooting barebow.
2:32:56 And so he already had a decade plus of archery experience doing essentially the same thing,
2:33:02 the same kind of form. And then you pointed out some 13, 14 year old Korean kids or something like
2:33:08 that. Korean American kids that were just pounding. Like they’re, they’re just stacking the arrows in at
2:33:13 the center. Yeah. I mean, and when you say stacking, it’s shooting six arrow ends in the size of the okay
2:33:17 symbol that you can make with your fingers basically. Like, and that’s impressive, especially at that age.
2:33:23 And so same kind of thing, you know, you’re like, I pointed them out. Look at these guys,
2:33:29 you know, I bet you they’re shooting X amount of arrows a day for, you know, 300 plus arrow. I’m just
2:33:34 guessing they shoot a lot. I can tell. So I went over to their coach who didn’t really want to respond
2:33:39 to me. So then I went to the kids directly. I was just like, how much you shoot, how long you’ve been
2:33:43 shooting. Which is possible because we have to go pull our arrows at the same time. Yes. Right. So you can
2:33:47 have a conversation. Yeah. And even if not, it’s the practice range. And again, we talked about the
2:33:51 community. They’re very welcoming. People are willing to discuss and communicate because it’s
2:33:56 just, everybody is in the same game. They’re all struggling quote unquote with the same thing that
2:34:00 you’re struggling with. And so they’re just in a different stage. And so you can learn from their
2:34:04 experience if you ask them the right questions and hopefully they’re willing to share. Yeah. The kids
2:34:08 are super friendly, super friendly. And so you’re, Hey, how long you’ve been shooting? Five years.
2:34:13 How many days a week do you shoot? Six days a week. How many arrows a day do you shoot? Two to three
2:34:16 hundred arrows every single day. That’s why they’re good, Tim.
2:34:24 Well now, okay. Now I’m going to get back on the, on the witness stand, defend myself. Not defend
2:34:28 myself. Not that you weren’t good. It’s just, there’s a stage, right? Yeah. I’m good. I mean,
2:34:33 they’re doing a lot of volume. Yeah. But that was despite having technique that was not great.
2:34:37 Sure. I also was like. Now to my untrained eye, I’m like, I can’t tell. Yeah. But I said this,
2:34:41 this, and that. They should do these things. You know, they, despite these issues, they’re still
2:34:46 able to do well because they’ve put in sustained reps for a very long period of time. So they’re able
2:34:52 to just default to what they do. Yeah. And you had six months. Yeah. They had five years. Yeah.
2:34:56 There’s a huge difference. It’s a different thing. Yeah. And it’s just, you get looking,
2:35:03 you look experienced from experience. You don’t just get it. You’ve got to make that groove,
2:35:07 as you said, in the brain and really make that neuromotor connection strong enough to where it
2:35:12 just fluidly happens. That’s why an expert is an expert. They’ve done the same thing thousands
2:35:19 and thousands and thousands of times. I can’t tell you how many, I’m well over a million shots the same
2:35:27 way, same technique, same thought process, same thought at full draw. So it’s yeah. An immense amount
2:35:32 of effort and work over time. Sustained effort is what really makes you good. Yeah.
2:35:37 Yeah. But that’s true for everything. Yeah. Well, it’s been a hell of a journey. It’s not
2:35:45 over. It’s not over. But we might bounce around, might ask some more questions. But do you want to
2:35:50 talk about the backyard championship? Yeah. So what the hell is the backyard championship?
2:35:56 So everybody loves to be a backyard world champion per se, because everybody, like I said, practice
2:36:01 scores don’t matter, right? Everybody can shoot well in their backyard. Everybody’s happy to tell you
2:36:05 how they’ve shot so well in their backyard and post their pictures of their targets all over social
2:36:11 media or potentially not just their backyard, but the range they shoot at or their club. And that’s
2:36:15 great. Like I’m, I’m all for it. I love that people are proud and passionate about what they’re doing.
2:36:21 And so we’re, we’re forming this thing that we’re calling the backyard championships, which is
2:36:26 essentially a digital tournament. We’re going to have two events this year, an indoor event and an
2:36:32 outdoor event. And essentially you will with a honor code and a buddy system, hopefully submit your scores
2:36:38 after you sign up for the actual event. And after you submit your scores, we’ll have a digital leaderboard
2:36:43 that people can essentially rank themselves amongst other people throughout the world. And it’ll be bracketed male,
2:36:49 female, adult kid, different disciplines, compound recurve, bare bow, you name it, just stick bow,
2:36:56 horse bow. I don’t, whatever it may be. As we identify important disciplines, we will make sure to have
2:37:01 that available so you can compete against other people shooting a similar bow. So this kind of ties
2:37:07 into encouraging others to pick up a bow and shoot archery. And as Joel Turner told me, it’s archery,
2:37:15 try it. Meaning it doesn’t matter what style of bow you shoot. You can shoot horse bow with your thumb.
2:37:20 You could shoot a trad bow. You can shoot a compound with a scope and a level and a release aid and huge
2:37:25 stabilizers. It’s archery and it’s really, really fun. And this is hopefully going to make it more
2:37:31 accessible to more people to show up at their local range, rent a bow, go shoot some arrows, get a score,
2:37:36 get it posted on the internet and just see how it goes. Cause it’s really fun to build a community.
2:37:41 And then within that, we’re going to have a, a discord server that is exclusive for people who
2:37:45 are competing at the event. So we’ll be able to have people discussing back and forth, maybe bragging
2:37:51 rights, things like that. And ultimately it’s nothing really being awarded other than bragging rights of
2:37:52 being a backyard champion.
2:37:58 All right. So I’m excited about this. I want to recommend everybody archery. Try it. I’ll echo
2:38:05 Joel, who by the way, is an amazing, we don’t have time for this, but an amazing thumb shooter. He’s got
2:38:11 a gnarled Franken thumb because he does it so often, but you can check that out. In fact, the oldest way
2:38:17 of shooting probably I would say is a thumb release. So you can check out Joel and his monster thumb and
2:38:23 his, and his system as well shot IQ, but coming back to this, the backyard championship, a few
2:38:27 things I want to say. Number one, this is an opportunity to have an end goal, right? It doesn’t
2:38:34 have to be a Lancaster as it was in my case, which also it’s not where I started out, right? I just
2:38:43 wanted the meditative practice. And quite frankly, this sort of blast from the past of using a tool
2:38:48 granted with some modern materials that humans have used for thousands of years upon thousands
2:38:56 upon thousands. And I think it is really therapeutic for a lot of people who try it and it’s just fun.
2:39:05 It’s really fun. So now you have the chance to have some type of goal related to giving archery a
2:39:10 shot. And if, if you don’t have your backyard championship set up and you don’t have your own
2:39:16 gear, that’s no problem whatsoever. I didn’t buy my own gear for a long time and you can go to a local
2:39:23 range and the folks are almost always incredibly welcoming, ready to help. Try a bunch of different
2:39:29 stuff. Yeah. Try a compound. Yeah. Try a recurve. Yeah. Try a horsebow. Yeah. Try them all out. And
2:39:34 it will give you a regular, at the very least, I mean, this is going to sound like an oversell,
2:39:37 but it will give you a regular meditation practice. Maybe you have trouble sitting on a cushion,
2:39:43 closing your eyes and doing it that way. A lot of people do try this. It for me was such an unlock
2:39:53 for tabling my monkey mind for an hour or two. It’s really remarkable. So I encourage people to try it
2:39:59 out. And this, uh, the backyard championship allows you to shoot multiple different disciplines and
2:40:04 submit multiple different scores. So if you have a compound or recurve, a bear bow, a long bow, a horse
2:40:09 bow, whatever you got, you can submit a score for each discipline for indoor and outdoor.
2:40:15 And once you submit your score, we have these really awesome quiver pins that we’ll send to you
2:40:19 as well. So you can show that you actually participated in the, the backyard championship.
2:40:21 So. All right. Where should people go?
2:40:26 Just head to my website, jakekaminski.com. Everything will be available there. As far as,
2:40:29 uh, the info, the leaderboard, all that info will just be all right there.
2:40:34 All right. Perfect. All right. Everybody check it out. The very least go to range, pick up a bow.
2:40:35 Yeah. Have a good time.
2:40:40 Take some intro classes. They do fun stuff. Some places they’ll blow up balloons or throw on the
2:40:45 black lights. There’s a lot of fun to be had. Yeah. Uh, also if you have kids, this is an awesome
2:40:46 activity to do with your kids.
2:40:52 Absolutely. I mean, and, uh, your YouTube channel, we recorded a video that’ll be coming out soon or
2:40:57 will be already. Yeah. And that, and that will show gear one-on-one from Jake and then also
2:41:03 technique one-on-one. Yeah. So if you’re really not sure and there’s nobody nearby or they’re not sure
2:41:08 how to help you, you’ll at least have a basic understanding of the equipment to be safe and to
2:41:14 also, uh, have a lot of fun too. So it’ll be great. So check that out. jakekaminski.com folks,
2:41:17 YouTube channel. I guess people can find it through the website. Is that the best way to do it?
2:41:22 On the, on the website, you can just search Jake Kaminski as well. It’ll pop up on YouTube direct.
2:41:28 It’ll pop up on any internet search as well. Very prevalent as far as the search engine results.
2:41:33 Easy to find. Jake Kaminski, K-A-M-I-N-S-K-I. Correct.
2:41:39 Kaminski.com. Once again, thanks so much to you and Heather. Yeah. It’s been a hell of a
2:41:45 quite a journey. Awesome adventure and trip and has reinvigorated me on in so many different ways.
2:41:54 And also I will say it’s, it’s given me so much energy in a sense. It’s been such a recharging
2:42:00 activity that it’s, it’s given me a lot that I can then apply to other places. Yeah. Yeah. I cannot
2:42:08 tell you, like I’ve had some, you know, challenging family issues, meaning medical issues over the last,
2:42:15 let’s call it six months in particular year. And having this as a way again, to just take a break
2:42:19 from that for a period of time to have a constant, right? I don’t need to rely on an entire team of
2:42:27 people to gather for a rec soccer game. It’s like, no, I can just book time off in these lanes, meaning
2:42:31 where you would stand and practice at a range. I mean, sometimes it’s like 10 bucks an hour. I mean,
2:42:34 it’s like, it’s not, it’s not going to break the bank. Yeah.
2:42:41 And rentals are generally very, very affordable and I can just take a break. I can go in two hours,
2:42:48 just quiet my mind. And it’s been such an incredible tool. So I want to thank both of you guys again.
2:42:53 Yeah. Anything else you’d like to add? Any closing comments before we wind to a close?
2:42:59 Yeah. Archery is difficult. It’s single-sided, rotational and static. So it’s not exactly good
2:43:04 for you. I mean, it’s great because it clears your mind. It’s activity. You got something to focus on,
2:43:08 but it can be a bit much for the body. So taking care of yourself, super important.
2:43:15 And part of that, I’ll give it another plug, jakecomincy.com. Watch Jake’s videos on technique
2:43:19 because if you are doing the same thing over and over and over again, you know, just imagine you
2:43:24 had a pebble in your shoe and you refuse to take it out and you take 10 steps. Okay. You’re fine.
2:43:29 Maybe you walk to Starbucks and back. You’re fine. You walk a thousand miles with that. You’re going to
2:43:35 have a big problem with your foot. Absolutely. And that is true with really any repetitive motion.
2:43:38 There are a lot of sports with repetitive motions. Yeah. Also applies to archery.
2:43:47 Yeah. And the problems I think are very easy to avoid. Yeah. With a few basic pointers that you
2:43:53 follow religiously. Yeah. And I’ve got an academy of sorts coming out. It’s like a Jake Kaminsky
2:43:59 academy that’ll teach you the technique. It is currently available as far as like form advice
2:44:05 that I give on my YouTube channel. But this academy is an ultra premium, high production quality that
2:44:09 once you buy into the system, you have lifetime access. So as you develop as an archery, you can
2:44:13 come back and check it out as often as you’d like. So that’s something that is in the works and
2:44:19 we’re, we’re getting very close to launching that that’ll also be available on jakekaminski.com as well.
2:44:24 And, uh, you know, as Joel Turner said, either way, it’s archery. You should try it.
2:44:32 Oh, man. Well, thanks again, Jake. So nice to see you and train with you. Heather. A lot of fun.
2:44:39 Thank you again. And folks listening, show notes. We’re going to have links to everything
2:44:45 as per usual, tim.blog slash podcast. I can pretty much guarantee you there will not be another Kaminsky
2:44:51 on the podcast as of yet. So you can check that out or just search Jake. I don’t think there are
2:44:58 many Jakes in the podcast library. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary
2:45:04 to others. Also to yourself. If you’re on the line and shoot a terrible shot, don’t go full monkey
2:45:12 tilt and punch yourself in the groin. Not worth it. Be kind. And I appreciate the other hidden chuckle
2:45:20 from behind the pillar. And until next time, thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one
2:45:26 more thing before you take off. And that is five bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email
2:45:31 for me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend between one and a half and
2:45:36 two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called five bullet Friday,
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2:45:48 coolest things I’ve found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It’s kind of like
2:45:54 my diary of cool things. It often includes articles. I’m reading books. I’m reading albums, perhaps
2:46:00 gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot
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2:46:13 share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it’s very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before
2:46:18 you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you’d like to try it out, just go to
2:46:24 tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you’ll
2:46:27 get the very next one. Thanks for listening.
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