Target Panic, and the Arrow I Could Not Let Go

Seventy Metres

If you have never shot a recurve bow, here is the whole sport in one sentence. You stand seventy metres from a target the size of a large pizza, you draw a string weighing as much as a bag of cement, you hold your breath for a second and a half, and you let go.

That last part is the only part that matters, and for two years, I could not do it.

I am forty-four. I have shot since I was fourteen, when a gym teacher in Haifa handed me a beginner's bow and told me I had a steady face. I competed nationally for most of my twenties. These days I coach, mostly teenagers and a few adults, at a club in the hills outside Jerusalem, where the range sits on a terrace between old olive trees and the wind comes up the valley every afternoon at three o'clock like it has an appointment.

What Happened to My Hands

It started small. In practice one spring, I came to full draw, put my sight pin on the gold, and my fingers simply would not open. The string sat against my jaw, my arm started to shake, and I had to let down, lower the bow, and start again.

Every archer has done that occasionally. I laughed it off. But it happened again the next day. And the next. Within a month I could not shoot an arrow with the pin on the gold at all. My hand would freeze the moment the pin settled where it was supposed to be. If I aimed slightly off, at the red, I could release fine. The moment I aimed at the centre, nothing.

There is a name for it in our sport. Target panic. Archers say it in a low voice, the way people talk about the yips in golf or a pianist who suddenly cannot play in public. It has ended careers. Mine was already over, more or less. But I was a coach. I was standing in front of teenagers every week telling them to trust their process, and I could not release an arrow.

The Things I Tried First

I tried everything the books say.

I shot blank bale, standing two metres from a straw boss with my eyes closed, for weeks. I changed my release aid. I shot at a blank sheet of paper with no target. I counted. I breathed. I listened to a podcast about mindfulness so many times that I started hearing it in my sleep.

Some things helped for a few days. Then the freeze came back, sometimes worse. I started making excuses not to shoot in front of my students. I would demonstrate form without an arrow, or demonstrate on the short practice range where there was no gold to freeze on. I am fairly sure the older ones noticed.

My husband, who is a very practical man, said, "Maybe you have just shot enough arrows in your life." He meant it kindly. It was the cruellest thing anyone said to me that year.

A Student's Father

What led me somewhere new was, of all things, a parent at the club.

One of my students is a boy of fifteen called Ariel, gifted, anxious, the kind of kid who shoots beautifully in practice and falls apart at tournaments. His father came to watch one afternoon and stayed to talk while Ariel collected arrows. He mentioned, almost in passing, that Ariel had been doing neurofeedback therapy for a few months for his anxiety, and that the boy found it oddly calming. "He sits in a chair and watches a film," the father said, "and the film gets clearer when his brain does the thing they want."

I had heard the word before. I thought it was something for children with attention problems, or for people recovering from injuries. I did not think it had anything to do with a forty-four-year-old woman whose fingers would not open.

But I went home that night and read about it, and kept reading until two in the morning.

Reading My Own Brain

What I understood, in my non-scientific way, was this. The brain produces electrical patterns that change with your state, focused, relaxed, alert, anxious. With sensors on the scalp, a computer can read some of those patterns and show them back to you as something simple, a sound, an image, a game. Over many sessions, the idea is that the brain learns, without you forcing it, to settle into certain patterns more easily.

What struck me was how close it sounded to what we do in archery. We spend years training a body to do one thing the same way, ten thousand times, until the thinking part of you can step back. Target panic, as far as I could tell, was the thinking part refusing to step back. It stepped forward at exactly the wrong moment, every time.

I wondered whether you could train that the same way you train a bow arm.

The First Session

I was nervous and slightly embarrassed walking in. I half expected to be told it was for children and to go home.

The neurofeedback therapist I met was calm and unhurried and asked a great many questions, not only about archery but about sleep, coffee, my mother, how often I woke at night. When I described the freeze, she did not look surprised, which helped more than anything else that day. She explained what she would be measuring and what she would not, and she was careful not to promise me anything at all. I appreciated that. In my sport, people who promise you results are usually selling something.

Then she put the sensors on, cold paste on my scalp, and sat me in front of a screen with a nature film playing. Sometimes the picture dimmed. Sometimes it brightened. I was not told to do anything, just to watch. I remember thinking, absurdly, that it felt like the opposite of shooting. There was no gold to aim for. There was nothing I could do wrong.

I left that first session feeling like I had slept, though I had not.

The Long Middle

I would love to say I went to the range the next morning and shot a perfect end. I did not.

The sessions went on for months, twice a week at first, then less. Some weeks I felt nothing at all. Some weeks I slept better than I had in years. I kept a little notebook, the same kind I give my students for logging their scores, and I wrote down how each day's shooting felt, honestly, even when the honest answer was "the same."

Somewhere in the third month, the therapist asked whether I would like to try some neurofeedback at home between visits, with equipment and a plan she would oversee. I was sceptical, because I know how easily I talk myself out of things when nobody is watching. But my schedule at the club was brutal, and the drive into the city was eating hours of my week. So we tried it. I did my sessions at the kitchen table in the evenings, with my husband pretending not to stare at the wires on my head.

The Afternoon at Three O'Clock

It came back so quietly I almost missed it.

It was a Tuesday in late autumn. The wind had come up the valley on time, at three o'clock, and I was shooting with a group of my older students, at seventy metres, because they had begged me to show them how to read a crosswind. I came to full draw. I put the pin on the gold, a little left to hold off for the wind. And my fingers opened.

I did not even notice until I heard the arrow hit. It was not in the gold. It was in the red, at nine o'clock, because I had misjudged the wind. But I had released on the gold. My hand had done what it was supposed to do without asking me for permission.

I lowered the bow and stood still for a moment. One of the girls asked if I was all right. I said yes, I just had something in my eye.

What I Tell My Students Now

I still have bad days. Target panic does not leave the way a cold leaves. It sits somewhere in the back and waits for a tournament. But I can shoot again, and I can shoot at the gold, and on most days I can let go.

I do not tell my students that a machine fixed me. I do not believe that. I believe I spent a very long time at war with my own head, and that something gave me a way to stop fighting and start listening.

What I tell them now is something I wish someone had told me at fourteen. The arrow goes where your mind lets it go. Your arm is only the messenger.

Ariel shot his personal best at the national youth championships in the summer. Afterwards, his father found me behind the target butts and shook my hand for a long time without saying anything. I knew exactly what he meant.