PYEONGCHANG, South Korea — Race across the snow on skis as fast as you can. Now stop and shoot a target the size of an Oreo about 54 yards away. If you miss, you’ll ski penalty laps before you are allowed to race to the next set of targets.

Most of us will never try the biathlon, a uniquely stressful sport that demands both physical intensity and emotional calm. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from it. Talking to an Olympic biathlete about how she trains for competition can offer a life lesson in managing stress and dialing back intensity and aggression in an instant.

“The physical things are difficult — using all your muscles and pumping your heart as fast as you can,” says Clare Egan, a 30-year-old from Cape Elizabeth, Me. who lives and trains in Lake Placid, N.Y. “But the mental piece is the biggest challenge of biathlon.”

Egan, who competes this week in the team relay event at the Pyeongchang Olympics in South Korea, has had plenty of practice with stress at these Games. She has missed seven of 30 targets over two races, though even the best biathletes have races where the aim just isn’t there. I spoke with Egan as well as a sports psychologist, Sean McCann, who works with biathletes on the United States team, about the mental challenges of biathlon and what the rest of us can learn from the sport. Bottom line, it’s all about preparation, knowing that you are entering a stressful situation and figuring out ahead of time how you are going to deal with it.