Esther

Tyler - Thanks for reminding me that I'll feel less gobbly (I already do, except on days when I have long drives and/or lots of makeup clients) once I establish a new California homeostasis. I know you can empathize with how it feels to have your work and education experience all over the map - I'm glad that we can see how each other's stories turn out in real time. Alma - Thanks for that. I'm thankful to have you as a friend too! Very true. I remember Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail) saying that's how he ended up at Google and met his wife, and that being present and open to serendipity was the fun way to live. Bradley - Very interesting way to look at it. Come to think of it, yes, "letting go" is something that pushes me out of my comfort zone, in life and in shooting. Which means I need to do more of it. Move is done, new revenue streams are found; time to resume shooting! One of my strengths as a shooter is, I think, identifying people who are not only good at shooting but also good at getting good, and not being shy about being a nuisance. On Tuesday I practiced movement with Andre at Richmond. He noticed that when moving forward at the start, I was placing my weight on my front leg, which meant that I was shifting weight back to spring-load before I started moving forward. Placing my weight on my back leg (while still leaning forward) saved almost a second on a moving start to a close array! Yesterday I practiced transitions with David in Oakdale. We started with three targets spread widely apart and close (to us) and gradually moved back as the sun went down and the shaded part of the bay lengthened. Rob - you are right that at this point, I benefit most from being able to try different things in practice and "fail" without consequence.

Nice. Alma, I hear you about not getting to practice nearly enough at an outdoor range! Ken, I like what you said about being fast on the sights and focused on the trigger. Too often in dry-fire I swing my gun to a spot and then press the "dead" trigger twice without worrying about the quality of my press at all. I'm going to try dissociating being fast on the sights (between targets) and fast on the trigger (on a white wall) in dry-fire and then put them together in live-fire. I miss shooting with you guys!

Alma - Thanks so much for the feedback! You, Ken, and Chris have helped me so much in refining my technique and stage breakdown. I am going to miss shooting with you guys! I got to shoot one last Peacemaker match before heading back to California (on our road trip and in Wyoming now). Here is video from one of the stages: I think it was C.S. Lewis who said that the devil liked to send errors into the world in pairs. I definitely feel that way in my struggle to overcome gobbling. On the one hand, gobbling sugar constantly, feeling sick and drugged and sluggish and gross, is not a good way to be. On the other hand, constantly watching what I eat and how many steps I take and trying to balance on the razor edge of my lowest healthiest weight and body fat percentage is miserable and frankly idolatrous. The road trip so far has been challenging in terms of gobbling. I always feel unsettled around transitions, and I hate feeling cooped up, so some degree of gobbling isn't unexpected. But what feels like a huge relapse has made me realize what I had perhaps suspected (and feared) on some level - that my "progress" while in Virginia was based on a financial, emotional, and time commitment that was unsustainable. I've written elsewhere about how the self-monitoring that many women do around eating, body-image, weight, and appearance is a constant headwind that detracts from achievement in things that really matter - shooting, for example. I want to be not addicted but also to have a relaxed attitude about eating - to have a few truffles or French fries without feeling guilty, to not mind if I am a few pounds heavier than I could ideally be for this sport (because not being lean enough is hardly what is keeping me from GM). I've often admired people who subordinate everything to the pursuit of one thing that really matters. Monks and nuns who strive to simply be in the presence of God, artists who shape themselves into instruments worthy of conveying the vision they see, athletes who sacrifice comfort and leisure to perform to their potential... In my life, I've wanted to: 1) be a sign of the living God, 2) convey beauty and feeling as an artist, and, more recently, 3) to shoot really fast and accurately. 2) and 3) are not incompatible and are to some extent subsumed in 1). I want to seek first the kingdom of God and let everything - shooting, eating, writing, Max - fall into place, but (perhaps like most humans?) I constantly find myself stuck on a local maximum. Being thin and fit and healthy, for example, but forgetting to love others as myself. I'm not sure if this is what Bruce Lee meant by "all goals apart from the means are an illusion," but the way I understand the quote, it's that any goal, no matter how worthy in itself - excellence in shooting, art, even in loving another person or raising a family - is nothing if not undertaken in the right spirit. That is what makes overcoming gobbling AND making GM so incredibly hard. But it is also what makes both of those goals, any (non-stupid or evil) goal, a potential particular path to something much, much more.

Both, please! You too, Alma.

+1

You are awesome, thank you! Now I just need to live- and dry-fire until I can consistently nail that 1 sec draw into the A zone at 7 yds.

Tim - Getting the right fuel mix for your body is a good way to think about it. Garyg19 - Well, I think that fat and happy is not a bad way to be, especially since I consistently get beat by some of those fat, happy, beer-drinking shooters. (I do think that being female generally adds (an) additional layer(s) to eating and body issues, though.) Shot a fun match at Peacemaker on Saturday. Met Alma for the first time and got some good tips on stage planning (figure out which positions you can move through and, if possible, take farther/harder targets from places you have to make a hard stop at anyway). Video from one of the stages:

Chris Rhines is an awesome practice buddy. Re: eating, from a PM: I think sometimes it's hard because Max is the most disciplined (guy) eater I've ever met. He weighs his food, eats high protein, lots of chicken breasts, vegetables, very few starchy carbs. (Whereas, when I hang out with my range buddies, I feel like a pretty healthy eater even when I'm having dessert!*) I think that part of my development is/will be developing a way of eating that suits my temperament and body's needs. I guess it's like what Brian says about technique - you need to discover the way of shooting that works for *you* and *your* body and *your* personality and *your* gun. I don't like eating the same things all the time, I like carbs more than Max does, I probably have a faster metabolism, and I want to be balanced and happy as much as or more than I want to be fit and live as long as I possibly can if I ate perfectly all the time (Max wants to live forever -- but then, he's also an atheist so he doesn't think there's anything after this life). * Some of my shooting buddies seem to treat beer as the base of the food pyramid.

Rob - That means a lot. Rick88 - I'm reading The Inner Game of Tennis. It took me a long time to get around to it even though everyone seems to recommend it on the forums. I had read With Winning in Mind a while back and thought it was OK. Like a lot of popular psychology and business books that have one major somewhat counter-intuitive idea that they spend 200 pages illustrating with examples (e.g., Malcolm Gladwell). So I figured IGoT would be more of the same. But I'm really liking it so far. To me, IGoT is about how to learn a motor skill. Tim Gallwey sounds a lot like Brian (and Bo) do sometimes. Have your mind give your body the intention - the image or the feeling - of what it wants the body to do, and letting the body figure out its way of doing it. I think that learning - and teaching - motor skills is very different from learning and teaching representational knowledge.* My main experience has been with academic/symbolic subjects, where the instruction and learning process is much more conscious. I don't think the best way to teach, say, algebra to most students is to have them visualize the right answer and have their body intuit their way to it. (Kids following what "feels right" is how they end up canceling the "2" in top and bottom of an expression like (2x + 1)/2.) I've never really had to learn how to learn a motor skill before.** In some ways, learning motor skills seems more similar to learning to draw and paint than it is to learning higher math. You (or at least I, when I draw) have an image in my mind that I'm constantly refining, and as I'm refining it, I keep comparing my in-progress drawing to the mental image and conforming it. Though, now that I think of it, writing poetry has a similar intuitive, "Self 2" feel to it. And I'm guessing that my friends who are really good chemists and theoretical physicists have a similar creative, not-entirely-dictated-by-the-conscious way of working. So maybe when you get deep enough into anything, ways of learning and exploring are more alike than not. Or maybe not. I'm just thinking aloud here. I also really like how Gallwey talks about observing "errors" without judging: When we plant a rose seed in the earth, we notice that it is small, but we do not criticize it as "rootless and stemless." We treat it as a seed, giving it the water and nourishment required of a seed. When it first shoots up out of the earth, we don't condemn it as immature or underdeveloped; nor do we criticize the buds for not being open when they appear. We stand in wonder at the process taking place and give the plant the care it needs at each stage of its development. The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential. [...] Similarly, the errors we make can be seen as an important part of the developing process. * I struggled to find the right word here. I mean skills like math, physics, logic... in which the student is learning to manipulate symbols and think analytically. ** as a non-child. Obviously, I learned to walk - and later, ride a bike and swim. But I was very young, and I never strove for the same kind of excellence in those skills as I do in shooting.

Rob - Thanks for clarifying. I'm re-allocating my ammo between practice and matches. Will report on my assignment. I'm understanding, I think, what you meant by, "Grip gun MUCH tighter" and "Do not start aiming when you see [the gun] stop, shoot." I've been working on gripping hard not just with the fingers of my left hand, but with the palm as well (not letting my palm lose pressure as I transition between shots). And in my last match, there were times when I saw my sights linger on a target before I released a shot. I made it to day 14 without mega gobbling. That is a new record for me by 5 days. And then I noticed that I was on day 14, and getting a little thin (my body hasn't quite figured out how much energy it needs when I'm not dousing it with tens of thousands of sugar calories every few days), and I've been feeling unsettled and a little anxious about our upcoming move back to California, and... I mega gobbled. Oh well. Onward, I guess. I'm not one of those people who naturally goes with the flow and can move, or travel, or have a kid, without it upsetting them too much. I like to be in control, to know where I'm going to live long-term (hard when you're married to an academic), to have reliable Internet and access to healthy foods, time to exercise and write and sleep 9 hours a night. I've been reading about the Jews of Warsaw from 1939 (the start of the Nazi occupation) to 1943 (the Jewish uprising and final razing of the ghetto). I like reading about people who lived in extraordinary circumstances because it reminds me that people can get uprooted from their homes, lose their jobs, be forced to live 7 to a room in unsanitary conditions and on meager rations, and do it. Maybe - certainly - with life, as with shooting, the changes I need to make are not what I want to work on. Having faith and living in the moment - accepting the things that are given to me right here, right now (like Rob Leatham posting in my range diary), being open to how I can give of myself right here, right now - are weaknesses, not strengths. But maybe, with practice, they will become strengths.

Excellent performance on Sunday.

spanky - I like that. And, since you have over 1,000 posts, you obviously use correct range commands, yes? Rob - Very interesting what you said about "calling every shot [being] waaaay over emphasized." I tried to implement your advice in yesterday's match (appropriately, a "hose fest"), and, perhaps not surprisingly though still to my chagrin, had my worst performance of the year so far. I miked a wide open target at 4 yds, tensed up "trying" to go fast, and focused so much on going fast that I didn't realize until after the second stage that I didn't remember looking at or through my sights at all. I might as well have been shooting as fast as I could into the berm. I 100% agree with you about live-fire being essential to my progress at this point. I need to shoot faster AND see the whole time AND commit to move ASAP. Re: gobbling, the hardest thing to do is to forgive myself, over and over and over again after I screw up. This morning, I mega gobbled. After forgiving myself and moving on, I mega gobbled again at 3pm. It's hard for me to express, sometimes, when I'm not in that state, how much anger and frustration and tendency to self-loathing I feel in those moments. How pointless all of the effort and previous attempts to forgive myself feel. How I want to - and sometimes do - recruit all of my skills of imagination and words to tell myself in lurid detail exactly how horrible and undisciplined and undeserving of good things to happen I am. Mastering myself is 1000% harder than anything else I've ever done or can imagine doing. My best friend told me that the only answer to feeling discouraged and frustrated is hard work - to keep going, push harder, persevere. It's more frustrating when the obstacles are inside instead of outside you (or maybe I only think so because almost all of mine are). On the other hand, the ones inside are the ones you can more readily something about. Habits (which I think addictions are, in the Aristotelian sense) are things we become and can un-become. Along those lines, from Dunnington's excellent Addiction and Virtue: We might mean one of two things by calling something more or less voluntary. On the one hand, we might think of the ultimate in voluntarity as being that which is most expressive of an agent's character. Or, on the other hand, we might think of the ultimate in voluntarity as being that which is most susceptible to an agent's immediate control, in other words, as being that which an agent is most arbitrarily free to do or leave undone. If we take voluntarity in the first sense, habitual actions are indeed the most voluntary of our actions because they spring, not just from some fleeting deliberative process, but rather from the source of who we are, our character. I suppose there is nothing to do but to press on until to eat healthily and when I am hungry, to write beautifully, to shoot fast, accurately, and move at the earliest possible moment - all spring from who I am.

Alma - Thanks for the offer! I may take you up on it. Before, I was shooting an XDm. Rob - Thanks!! Can you elaborate on what you mean by being faster and more aggressive in every element of my movement? (I know you don't just mean drawing and reloading, which I know I need to do faster.) I definitely need to stop looking at targets once I've called a hit! I don't try to be smooth; I think that way of moving feels natural to me. It's the violent, sharp, explosive movements that feel funny - and that I need to master. Re: training partners - David Starr, you need to come to Virginia and kick my ass in practice again!! Re: the system - what do you mean by "commit to make a change and follow through with it regardless of consequences?" I forget who said that "if you think you are humble, you probably are not." Every time I think I've gotten my ego out of the way (getting over my dislike of seeing pictures of myself and posting video online, for example), I get someone like Rob Leatham telling me I am not nearly aggressive enough and look like I am dry-firing when shooting! (Andy's pretty good at spotting everything I do wrong, too. ) Awesome. Thanks so much for the critique - I appreciate it a LOT!

Alma - Thanks, I agree that video is a great tool! From today's match: Takeaways from today's match: 1) Mag changes are getting smoother. Other than the first stage, they were all pretty smooth and subconscious. 2) Hosing is getting faster. 2a) I need to remember that not all targets are hoser targets. Need to practice long-range splits and transitions. 3) When shifting slightly to hit another target or array, cross-step instead of shuffle/hop (which is what I typically do - you can see it in second 21!) 4) Remember to load all my mags with 10 rounds! OMG, I half-filled a mag last week and then again this week!

Silas - Thanks! One thing that I think really helped was barely letting off the dead trigger in dry-fire and bouncing it back into the frame as fast as I can. Dry-firing transitions feels really different now (I'd gotten into the bad habit of doing a DA press on every single dry-fire "shot") - much more aggressive, as if I'm racing my trigger finger to get my sights on the next A zone. Alma - Thanks for the feedback and the video! Yeah... my draws and reloads can definitely be much better, which is embarrassing considering how 95% of my practice happens in dry-fire! I know I pause too long between when my hand hits the gun and when it comes out of the holster. I think it's time getting a good grip not excessive tension in the holster. When I try to snatch the gun out of the holster without pausing, I often end up with a less than ideal grip, which of course screws with my sight tracking until I do my first reload and fix it. Suggestions? By two-stage looking draw, do you mean stage 1 = getting hand on gun, 2 = clearing holster to target, or 1 = gun moving up (too high) from holster, and 2 = gun going towards target? Thanks for the video and for telling me about the 25% speed setting on YouTube!