Armed with a Pen & Journal, Alexis Lagan Stays On Target in Pursuit to Paris
Boulder City Olympian Values the Consistency and Performance of Fisher Pen for meticulous journaling efforts as athlete, coach, wife, and proud Nevadan
Blend together a scientific mind, a tactician’s commitment, and a dreamer’s vision. Add in a little insecurity, competitiveness, and unwillingness to back away from challenge. Mix all that together with a whole lot of pride for sport, faith, family, and community and you start to put the puzzle pieces together of who Alexis Lagan truly is.
A member of the USA Shooting Team, Lagan is set to compete in the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in air pistol on July 27. This will be her second Olympic Games after competing in three events for the 2020 Olympic Games, finishing 16th (Mixed Team Air Pistol), 18th (Sport Pistol) and 38th (Air Pistol).
We recently announced our proud collaboration with the Olympic pistol athlete. As part of this exciting partnership, Lagan will serve as a valued PENfluencer, promoting our brand’s innovative space pens and rich legacy.
It’s a collaboration written long before this day given the geographic connection, with us being headquartered in Boulder City, Nevada since 1976 and Lagan having grown up in this historic little community 26 miles southwest of Las Vegas.
“We’re thrilled to welcome Lexi to the Fisher Pen family,” says Matt Fisher, Vice President of Fisher Space Pen. “Her dedication and passion resonate with our brand values, and we look forward to an exciting journey together and wish her complete success in Paris as we cheer on our hometown girl as well as every member of Team USA.”
Lagan’s precision, dedication, and reliability on the equipment she uses to hit her targets align perfectly with our commitment to excellence. Lagan’s passion for her sport, and impressive achievements, while combining her handwritten journaling process as a critical component of her training and competitive makeup, make her an ideal ambassador for our brand.
"Having the opportunity to represent Fisher Space Pen is an honor," Lagan said. "They are a company with a proven history of innovation that values excellence and precision in their work. I, too, hope to mirror those attributes as I continue forward through the Paris 2024 Games and beyond.
Carving Out Dreams with Pen & Paper
Lagan writes copious notes and journal entries using our Black Cherry Cerakote® Cap-O-Matic Space Pens and has also recently fallen in love with the Elite Blue Navy Cerakote® Cap-O-Matic Space Pen. She also finds our fine-point pressurized cartridges allow her to write more notes and positive messages to herself in the confined spaces of her Leafy Treetops journals.
Every handwritten entry into the ginormous Leafy Tree journals she carries in her backpack like a sherpa scaling Everest, is a peek into her soul. Who she is, who she wants to be, and where she wants to go all captured in chronological order like a scripted time capsule. Every training session and competition detailed out very much like a science experiment with hypotheses, data, and variables that she decides to restrict or allow based on what goal she’s trying to attain that particular day.
“The way that I learn and retain the best is to hear it, see it, and write it physically,” Lagan says. “Having it written down is something really critical for me. For example, I'll have affirmations during training or competition that I need to remember. You can say those affirmations out loud but having them written down and feeling your body actually make those movements just really solidifies it. I mean, it's not in stone, it's on paper, but it feels like in stone for me when I do it that way.”
“It's completely different when you are telling yourself, I am a talented shooter and seeing it in your own handwriting over and over again in your journal,” Lagan concludes. “Having it written in your handwriting makes a significant difference.”
If the pen, as Horace suggests, is the tongue of the mind, then Lagan is in a good place as the days dwindle toward competition day. These are some of the reminders she wrote in pen in the lead-up to her Olympic departure.
June 3 … Believe In Your Work
June 5 … Felt that overwhelming stress again.
June 25 … You’ve Got This!!
June 28 … Confident in the process
July 13 … Own the work you have done.
Confident, aggressive, deliberate … those are the big words that you'll see often as you're flipping through the pages of her journal she reads aloud when she needs a during long days of training and perfecting her craft. “I need to go back into my data and remind myself, no, it's fine. Everything is fine.”
Even her coaches and teammates laugh at those moments when self-doubt or bad technique creeps in given the copious notes she keeps of her daily process. They are quick to remind her to always refer to her journal first, reminding her that she needs to discuss with herself because usually, the answer lies written on one of the pages in the past.
Lagan is quick to brag about the Fisher Pen she uses to keep her notes and uses to keep her structured life in balance. Her teammates, like many before they put a Fisher Pen in their hand, just don’t seem to get the attachment.
“Just the other day with one of my teammates I was talking about my pen and how much I love it and how he should try it out” she claims. “He's like, ‘it's a pen. Yeah, right. I like hotel pens.’ Fisher Space Pens write so smooth and consistent. It literally is the consistency of these pens that is exactly what I’m looking for in every piece of equipment I have. There are so many little minute details that you absolutely need when you're shooting. And I get that met with these pens.”
Bonjour Paris
Lagan’s arc of triumph, if you will, has been the resolve, the fight and the attention to detail needed to become a returning Olympian in a sport where perfection is the quest and obtaining it becomes an obsession.
She’ll walk to the firing line next Saturday as the savvy veteran now with a different mindset and physical condition than three years ago at the Games in Korea that was pushed back one year -- from 2020 -- due to Covid-19. That delay, she admits, only helped her level of preparedness. That is until she slipped and fell just weeks before the start of the Games and had to compete on a broken ankle.
Her path back hasn’t been void of obstacles this time either having battled back from two bouts of Covid, and overcoming a broken wrist on her shooting hand in early 2023 that nearly cost her her shooting career.
Eliminate the worldwide pandemic, physical setbacks, sickness and equipment failures, Lagan admits that the biggest force weighing against her success is still between her ears.
“I know I have the talent. My biggest enemy is myself,” she admits. “So, to be successful, to come out of it being happy with what I put on the target, is more about being comfortable with the effort that I put into it, and not being disappointed with that. Eliminate the feeling like I didn't do enough because I know that I've done enough.”
“My favorite quote in the whole world is from Theodore Roosevelt,” adds Lagan. “Do the best that you can, with what you have, where you are. And that is something I live by every day. I am always doing the best that I can in whatever I'm doing. And if it's not the best that I can do, it's the best that I can in that particular circumstance and with the things that I have around me so that's something that I really live by.”
Lagan will lean on experience, preparation and normalcy as she prepares to compete this time around.
“The last time I knew I was inexperienced in an Olympic Games, and I went into it, giving myself a buffer that if something went wrong, it's just because I'm inexperienced,” Lagan states. “This time, I have that experience. So, I feel like I'm going into it with more expectations. If I'm successful at this match, I will be able to balance that expectation and those experiences and come out of it not just with a solid score but with reality that I’ve given it my all this time around.
“Having those thoughts and those experiences written out in those trials that I've tried with my guns and with whatever I was doing in my training, has kept me narrowed on my focus and kept me on a straighter and narrower path,” admits Lagan. “Rather than this zigzag of back and forth that I felt like I had in Tokyo. Leading into Tokyo, there were a ton of times when I had a lot of self-doubt and questioned so much of my process. It literally felt like when you have bumpers up while bowling, and I just kept bouncing off each side, but never really fully landed in the gutter. I just bounced a lot and nicked some of the bowling pins at the end. This time, I feel much more solid. It's smooth and steady right down the middle. I do have a little weeble wobble. That's where my journaling process comes in. It makes it feel like my bumpers have narrowed a little bit. We've already tried all this extra gap space. Let's put the space here instead.”
Still, self-doubt is always present and why the positive affirmations strung about on her daily journal entries, help reinforce where she wants her focus to be.
“There are so many moments where I’ve completely thrown away the idea that I’m an Olympian but that’s really not that big of deal because I know tons of Olympians,” the 31-year-old admits. “But it’s also, I’m at the Olympic Training Center surrounded by Olympians. It’s such a reality check when I realize that Olympians are few and far between, so having that hit me every once in a while like ‘you are an Olympian.’ That is such a small percentage of people that have done what I’m doing and especially to double-down on it. That’s something I have to slap myself with when I get down in the dumps about something. No, I’m an Olympian. I’ve proven that I can do the things I need to do.”
Battle Born
The phrase “Battle Born,” appears on the state flag and is one of Nevada’s nicknames and a moniker well-suited for Lagan’s strive for greatness and pride for all things Nevada.
Her mom, Jill, is the CEO for the Chamber of Commerce in Boulder City. Her dad, Barry, is still actively involved at the Boulder Rifle & Pistol Club where she fell in love with the shooting sports. Her grandad helped start the whitewater rafting opportunities that now exist along the Colorado River. Her great grandaddy, Joe Kine, was a high scaler during the building of the Hoover Dam. Sitting in a bosun’s chair, hundreds of feet in the air, his job was to set charges and clear the loose rock from the face of the canyon walls. A monument featuring Kine that sits just off Purple Heart highway upon entrance to the Hoover Dam pays tribute to all of the men who labored to build the Hoover Dam, 98 of whom lost their lives during various phases of the project.
“I love my small town. It's somewhere where there's four generations of us that have been born and raised in Boulder City and gone to the high school and been a part of that community,” Lagan declares. “I am constantly looking forward to the next time I'm going to be there, not just because I get to be around the things that I'm familiar with, but to see all the people again. My community is so tight knit, in the best way, and we all want to make sure everyone is taken care of. So, that’s something that I really treasure. It's cool to have the amount of history that we have there, to have grown up in a historic town and having these incredible people that helped build this community is amazing and to be able to reflect back on the fact that that’s my heritage.“
“Being able to represent my community as Boulder City, Southern Nevada, the state of Nevada, and my country on an international stage at the Olympics is incredibly important to me,” boasts Lagan. “How can I not be so proud of the accomplishments that not only myself but all of the people that have come before me, that have helped get me to the place I am now? It's not just a me accomplishment. It's all of us. And that's what I represent, not just myself but the whole team and community behind me. I know, they're my biggest cheerleaders, that support what I'm doing.”
Lagan exemplifies dedication, resilience, and the pursuit of excellence. As she gets set to compete in Paris 2024, we eagerly anticipate witnessing her shoot for the stars once again, Competitive with a Boulder City grit, self-doubting while at the same time determined to advance her journey. A true representative of God and Country, reassured by self-reflective notes on paper, and unfailing Fisher Pens helping her write the chapters of her life with pride and precision.
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