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Jim Ploen takes aim. Jim, now 98, took a hobby and explored it and turned it into a career. This story isn’t to convince you to quit your day job. It’s to convince you to be wide open to learning, whatever you do for exercise. Photo courtesy Growing Bolder.
By Ray Glier
Jim Ploen unwrapped everything about archery as if it were a limitless gift. He is in, as he prefers to say, “my 99th year” and you better believe the devotion to a hobby has something to do with his longevity.
The man is what the rest of us call a 98-year old and he is still walking around Bloomington, Minnesota, with a bow and arrows.
“There is a group of us that gets together and we make up our own rules, we go out there and have fun,” Ploen said. “We’ll shoot all the stakes that are out, and we’ll just play games where we’ll find a little hole and say ‘oh, let’s try and get an arrow through there’.
“It’s back and forth with people and fun.”
Jim was a lineman for a power company in Minnesota when he loosed his first arrow in his 20s.
Look at what he did with this sport and hobby over the years:
*Studied kinesiology to understand the intricacies of body movement.
*Practiced Tai Chi to quiet his mind before shooting an arrow. He still practices Tai Chi almost daily for 30 minutes.
*Became adept at woodworking to become an archery artisan making “limbs”, otherwise known as bows.
*Studied physics to understand energy applied to the arrow.
*Mastered the mechanics of the sport to teach coaches throughout Canada and the U.S.
All the gifting to himself was to try and get a perfect string arrow separation moment, which leads to bullseyes and exhilaration.
This hyperawareness about his sport created a robust activity because he refused to be brittle around his hobby, like he didn’t have the skill to take it to the next level. Ploen chipped off piece by piece of his hobby and what he has learned he shares on You Tube and in a forthcoming book The Mechanics of Archery.
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Jim is one of only two men to have ever won twice the famed International Archery Championship at Cobo Hall in Detroit (1965, 1968). He beat 1,700 shooters from around the world.
In a spectacular display of archery at a tournament in Connecticut, Ploen landed 60 arrows out of 60 shots inside the 3.125 inches center ring on the target face.
And then he got serious about the sport.
Jim was the teaching pro at the Archery Club in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area in the early 1970s and one of the students, Dick Phillips, was a professor at the University of Minnesota.
Phillips asked Ploen to be studied shooting arrows with Electromyography (EMG). The professor –and Jim—wanted to see which muscles were being activated when he shot an arrow.
The scapula was key. “When I tightened that muscle up, and I released the arrows, they all piled right into the center of that target, just piled one on top of the other,” Ploen said. “And from then on, I said, ‘Well, I’m going to study more about the muscles of the body and the tensions and all that good stuff’.
“I was hooked on kinesiology and studied it ever since.”
Just that bit of curiosity helped Jim know when he was in precise shooting position. He would draw the arrow back and when he felt a certain tension in his scapula, a floating bone, he was ready to shoot. He had learned about scapulohumeral rhythm.
Go ahead, Geezer Jocks. Collaborate with curiosity.
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How does a 98-year old man keep his hands steady drawing back an arrow?
It starts with properly positioned feet, Ploen said. Steadiness depends on your posture and how to push your hip forward to achieve desired balance with a raised bow. That steadiness conveys to your hands.
“I do hand exercises just about every morning,” Jim said. “I do folding the fingers in. I do circles with all my fingers in two directions. I rub in a forward action to force the blood to the center. I flex my hand back and hold for about 10 seconds. And then I do circles with my hands.
“It keeps your hands limber so to keep the arthritis away.”
The limber hands designed a bow, the 21st Century Longbow, and it helped earn archers in the U.S. many international wins.
“I was pretty darn proud of that because it seemed like I was paying back to the sport for all the joy I had by creating something that the guys had so much success with,” Ploen said.
Jim went to work for “Wing”, one of the largest archery manufacturers in the world. He designed and sold gear. Later, Ploen started his own company.
Jim has a great beginner video done by media group Growing Bolder. You can find it here.
A good bow, Ploen said, can cost you $100. How deep a dive into archery is up to you.
“It’s the challenge,” Jim said about why he continues to shoot and compete. “It’s hand-eye coordination, and so that’s always a challenge. You’re always learning something, and it’s great exercise, you get to walk down to the target, or walk with friends. I walked 27 miles in June.
“And you don’t need a partner. You can do it all by yourself. I still enjoy it every day. I shoot some in the house here, which gives me good exercise.”
You get it now, Geezer Jocks. What you do with your hobby and exercise has nothing to do with chance. It’s choice.
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