are right-handed in archery, you’ll aim slightly to the
left to hit the bull’s-eye. This skill means focusing
on your mark, the likely shape of an arrow’s arched
flight, and the many variables that can knock it
off all at once. The most precise archers call this
process of dual focus split vision.
It also requires constant reinvention—seeing
yourself as the person who can hit a ten when you
just hit a nine, as an archer who just hit a seven, but
can also hit an eight. Archery is one of the sports
that gives instantaneous, precise feedback. It puts
athletes into rank order of how they measure up
against their seconds-younger selves. Archers
constantly deal with the “near win”: not quite hitting
the mark, but seconds later, proving that they can.
If an archer’s aim is off by less than half a degree,
she won’t hit her target. “Just moving your hand by
one millimeter changes everything, especially when
you’re at the further distances,” said Sarah Chai, a
recent Columbia graduate and former co-captain
of the varsity archery team.
From the standard seventy-five-yard distance from
the target, the ten-ring, the bull’s-eye, looks as
small as a matchstick tip held out at arm’s length.
Hitting the eight-ring means piercing a circle the
size of the hole in a bagel from 225 feet away. And
that’s while holding fifty pounds of draw weight for
each shot.
It’s a taxing pursuit. Well into a three-hour practice,
two of the women were lying down, their backs
on the turf behind the shooting line, staring up at
the sky. Three hours per day of meditative focus,
trying to find what T. S. Eliot would call “the still
point of the turning world,” requires a unique,
sustained intensity.
Living on a landscape where an infinitesimal
difference in degree leads to a massive difference
in outcome is what makes an archer an archer. It
means learning to have the kind of precision that
we find in the natural world—like that of a bee’s
honeycomb or the perfect hexagonal shape of
the rock formations on Ireland’s Giant’s Causeway.
When archers start getting good, with scores
consistently above 1350 (out of 1440), they taper
down, shoot less, and attend to their concentration,
breathing techniques, meditation, and visualization.
One teammate, overwhelmed with exams, still
made it up to Baker’s fields because the focus
she gets from archery calms her about everything.
“When I was studying abroad, I was going crazy
without having it,” she said. Without the regimen,
she felt irritated all the time.
I stayed at the archery practice for three hours.
Someone watching me might have wondered
why. For all the thrill of discovering a new sport,
it was, admittedly, interminable. I hadn’t brought
binoculars, and it is hard to concentrate for three
hours on what is right in front of you but not easily
seen. It was also a cold day, but I stayed to witness
what I was starting to feel I might never glimpse:
“gold fever,” or “target panic,” as it’s called—what
happens when an archer gets good, even too good,
compared to her expectations, and starts wanting
the gold without thinking about process. In extreme
cases, it means that one day she is hitting the
bull’s-eye, the next day her arrows could end up in
the parking lot. No one is clear about whether it’s
choking, a kind of performance anxiety, or some
form of dystonia.
But what we do know is that the only way to recover
fully from it is to start anew, to relearn the motions
and to focus on the essentials—breathing, stance,
position, release, and posture. None of the archers
I saw seemed to have target panic. Few are willing
to admit it even if they do.
Yet something else about archery gripped me enough
to keep me there. The reason occurred to me as I left
practice, walking down Broadway. I stumbled upon
a national historic landmark, a restored eighteenth-
century Dutch colonial farmhouse owned by the
Dyckman family. It once stood on acreage that
spanned the width of Manhattan from the Hudson
to the East River, but is currently nestled on the
busy avenue behind shrubs and foliage, raised and
hidden nearly out of sight. The incongruity of the
farmhouse on Broadway intrigued me and I went in
for a tour. It was, in fact, my second such visit of
the day. Watching an archery team in this modern
age had been like seeing a similarly ancient relic, a
vestige of a past way of work that we rarely spot in
action—not a contest, where there is a victor, but the
pursuit of mastery.
The mastery I witnessed on the archery field was
not glamorous. There was nobility in it all, but no
promise of adulation. There is little that is vocational
about American culture anymore, so it is rare to
see what doggedness looks like with this level of
exactitude, what it takes to align your body for three
hours to accurately account for wind speeds and
hit a target—to pursue excellence in obscurity. It
was an unending day in and day out attempt to hit
the gold that few will ever behold. Perhaps I noticed
it more than I would with the practice required for
a more familiar, popular sport such as basketball
or football, one with more chance of glory or fame.
To spend so many hours with a bow and arrow is a
kind of marginality combined with a seriousness of
purpose rarely seen.
There was another reason. As each arrow left for its
target, the archers were caught between success
(hitting the ten) and mastery (knowing it means
nothing if you can’t do it again and again). If I had
to hazard a guess, I would say that this tension
between the two, the momentary nature of success
and the unending process required for mastery, is
part of what creates target panic or gold fever in
the first place.
Mastery requires endurance. Mastery, a word we
don’t use often, is not the equivalent of what we
might consider its cognate—perfectionism—an
inhuman aim motivated by a concern with how
others view us. Mastery is also not the same as
success—an event based victory based on a peak
point, a punctuated moment in time. Mastery is not
merely a commitment to a goal, but to a curved line,
constant pursuit.
HR
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and discover what really drives iconic,
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more about Sarah Lewis, see page 10.
From THE RISE by Sarah Lewis. Copyright © 2014 by Sarah
Lewis. Excerpted with permission by Simon & Schuster, a
Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
> “MASTERY REQUIRES
ENDURANCE. MASTERY, A
WORD WE DON’T USE OFTEN,
IS NOT THE EQUIVALENT
OF WHAT WE MIGHT
CONSIDER ITS COGNATE—
PERFECTIONISM—AN
INHUMAN AIM MOTIVATED
BY A CONCERN WITH HOW
OTHERS VIEW US.”
17
