In 1972, Lanny Bassham competed in his first Olympics. As a boy, Lanny was the type of child who was always picked last in sports. So, he found an Olympic sport where all he had to do was be still. Prior to the day of his event, he had become one of the top smallbore rifle shooters in the world. He was at his physical peak. Lanny ran three to five miles a day to force his resting heart rate to under 60 beats per minute so that he could shoot between heartbeats. But on that day, the pressure of competition got to him, and he fell to his teammate, John Writer, taking home a silver medal.
Rather than rollicking in a once-in-a-lifetime experience, Lanny decided to completely change his approach to mental preparation. Lanny had to start by deconstructing and reconstructing what he was thinking about and how he was thinking when he shot. What he did after that day resulted in a gold medal in Montreal at the 1976 Olympics. In his book, “With Winning in Mind,” Lanny writes: “If you can define a thing, you can duplicate it. If you can duplicate it, you can achieve mental consistency. If you have mental consistency, you can win.”
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