A journey is made up of thousands of steps. Every further step one takes towards an established goal has reverberations from the steps taken before. It is on this wavelength that one must understand how training for biathlon affects an athlete's performance in an actual biathlon competition. A shot taken in a race can only be a hit because of the thousands of shots taken before.

For the past five years, I have been training for the sport of biathlon. Over the course of this time period I have shot an arsenal of bullets, skied and run thousands of miles, and thought about one goal: being successful at the international level. Originally a cross-country skier, shooting presented me with a steep learning curve. Previous to this season, I had never shot better than 80 percent in winter competition.

Take a moment to imagine a task or project that you believe is nearly impossible for you to accomplish. Maybe it is breaking the three-hour mark in a marathon, or even removing a hundred rocks from the potato fields in an hour. This is similar to perhaps the subconscious belief about shooting that I have had since I began biathlon.

I had never shot a perfect 100 percent in a race, so my mind limited me to this result every race. Such a belief is also similar to the general atmosphere in American biathlon and cross-country skiing: since America has not been a dominant power in these sports in the past, how can it transcend that barrier today?

For me, the latter feeling was not so entrenched in my belief system. I knew that I, as an American, was just as capable of performing well as any other human being, even if he is from Germany or Norway. Still I felt before last week that I was an outsider, looking in on other athletes from other countries rising to the top of the podium and enjoying their own successes.

Before starting this season I set down a list of goals that I wanted to achieve by the end. First on this list was placing top ten at World Junior Championships. Second was shooting perfectly in every competition and at every training session. These were high goals, considering the best that I had ever placed at World Championships before was in the fifties and that my best shooting race was an 80 percent.

Initially, my coaches seemed to think that I was joking and was not very serious about these goals. Little by little, both they and I came to realize that by setting goals higher than I or anyone else expected me to achieve, in training I would work that much harder to reach them.

In the 10-kilometer sprint competition at World Junior Championships on January 28, I broke down both of these boundaries. Shooting 90 percent, I placed fourteenth, only 1:49.8 behind the French victor. It was the best shooting race I had achieved in my career. On my final three-kilometer lap, my coaches were shouting at me, "You are in sixth place, with a good chance of cracking the top ten!" When such things are shouted at me, somehow my body is able to summon energy that I did not know existed within me.

During this final lap, I pushed with everything that I had, and more. Up and over the final hill, my lungs burned from lack of oxygen at the high-altitude and my legs reached the point of no return. I imagined lactic acid inundating my blood stream, but, of course, I could not imagine because my brain only had enough concentration to focus on moving my limbs towards the finish line.

Upon crossing the finish line, I collapsed. At first, since my mind was still out on the course trying to gain seconds, I was disappointed with my performance. I thought about all of the places that I could have made up time on my competitors, the missed shot that I had taken in prone, and how slow I had been in the shooting range.

In the end, I did not make the top ten. I was 13.4 seconds from achieving that. Nor did I shoot all of my targets down. I missed one. In the beginning of the season if I had really written down goals that I thought I was close to achieving, they probably would have fallen short of what I ended up achieving in the end.

After exiting the finish area, I thought about the thoughts that were coming into my head. I suddenly realized that I had "arrived." No longer was my mentality on shooting "decently" or skiing "well." My concern had succeeded simple questions of performing at my "ability." Now I was concerned about winning and shooting 100 percent!

Perhaps one would think that an athlete should always be thinking about winning. This is far from true. It is important for all athletes to have both performance-based and results-based goals. For me, I was simply satisfied with having performed at my level of ability.

This race showed me that we often limit ourselves - and our performances - to a level below what we are truly capable of achieving. Often these limits are formed internally, but our peers equally as often create them. The truth is that believing in yourself, in addition to setting your goals higher than you believe you are capable of performing, are painless ways of getting more out of sport, and ultimately, life.

Peace,
Brian