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Camo Cowboy's performance analysis journal


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I just shot my first match at Boulder Rifle Club with the C-More mounted back on the gun.  I also put the extended mag release on so the unit is exactly back to before I started this grand experiment. 

 

The first two stages were the famous indoor stages.  I guess it was quite a bit of a shock to be shooting the old C-More and I tanked the first stage with 2 deltas, 2 mikes and a noshoot.  Oh well, onto the classifier. 

I performed the first string without issue, but upon picking my gun up for the 2nd time I hit it with my finger and it slid forward while rotating.  I didn't want to just grab for it.  I just kind of watched in horror as it slid to the far side of the table and stopped at about the 170 degree line.  By the time I started shooting I really was only thinking about how lucky I was to still be in the game.  I racked up another mike-noshoot combo for a spectacularly crappy start. 

 

With the attitude, of "hey, at least the dot is tracking well" I moved onto the remaining stages.  

 

I was able to shake off the crappiness and perform to my expectations the remainder of the match.  I was very successful at keeping the dot working in a consistent pattern, and maintaining a firm grip on the gun.  I could feel my thumb pretty firmly implanted on the C-More mount as I was crushing a couple of plate racks.

 

It feels really good to be able to see the dot track in a predictable manner and keep the run running in full control during shooting.  

 

A couple more matches should really show me whether I fully understand my grip and the effect of the C-More as a part of the assembly.

 

In case anyone cares, here's a link to the stages.  (No, I didn't get the indoor on vid... luckily.) 

 

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Well, with the Colorado winter we've been having this spring there was only one match this weekend.  Weld County had a "shotgun leftovers" match and both the weather and the match turned out great.   By shotgun leftovers, I mean that the stages were all setup for a shotgun match on Saturday and then just converted to USPSA the next day.

 

This means lots of movement, and big props like vehicles, staircases and I think 3 plate racks, a star, and various other steel.  

 

This was my second match since ditching the DPP sights.  Back on the old C-More feels better than ever.  I tanked one stage because I didn't give enough credit to what it takes to hit mini-poppers on the move and ran dry by the end.  I wound up with 2 mikes and an FTE, but this certainly was not the equipment's fault.  I was happy with dot tracking and grip all day long.

 

The rest of the stages went well for me and on a few steel targets (one particular plate rack and then again on a popper through a 12" sonotube) I was reminded just how well I can handle that C-More rig on occasion.  Watching the dot glide into position from the previous recoil and breaking the shot just as it lands on target is a hell of a good feeling after weeks of frustration.  

 

I'm not saying I'm suddenly elevated in any way.  This was evidenced by my extremely mediocre classifier run, that was both slow and contained 2 deltas.   But hey, at least it didn't contain any mikes like everything I had shot while the DPP's were mounted.

 

I've ordered a Cheely mount for the other gun from a buddy in Alaska and will soon be back to C-More's on both guns.  

Experiment over for mission critical gear.  I have enough data and ideas for a new experimental gun down the road.    

 

Back to some goals:

Work on aggressive transitions. (away from "just engaged" targets mostly)

Keep the grip work up.  Now that I'm aware of thumb pressure on the C-More mount learn how it works and work on consistency with it.  (this explains a lot about how I would perform differently with the two guns.... they had different mounts) 

Practice!  Summer is almost here, another couple of months and the snow in Colorado MIGHT stop.  Get to the range when you can!

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  • 2 weeks later...

This weekend had me at 2 matches.  Aurora Gun Club on Sunday and Clear Creek County Sportsman's Club on Sunday.  

Both matches wound up with very nice weather and some decent blasting for me. 

 

On Friday night, I was cleaning my guns and found that the trigger return pressure on #1 was very light.  I checked my trigger pull and it was sitting at 6 oz.  This would explain some issues I've been having with rhythm when shooting very fast lately.  I increased the pressure which also brought the pull weight up to about 1lb-2oz according to my scale.   I figured I better give that a try and see what happens.  #2 was not an option since it had it's old C-More on it, but not sighted in yet.

 

Well, the new weight felt like I was pulling very hard during the match and evidence is shown in this video from Saturday.  While the run was pretty decent, I just didn't seem to be able to pull a fast split due to a perceived delay in when I wanted to break the shot, and when it actually broke.  

 

Our squad finished super early.  Since I'm on the board I took the extra time waiting for everyone else to finish and sighted in the #2 gun.  It had not been sighted in since swapping back to the C-More on it. (they are both green now, so I can't call one the Hulk!)  It only took like, 30 rounds to sight in the #2 (C-More's eh?), and I verified that the #1 gun had only drifted 1" low since last zeroed.  So now I have 2 working guns again!

 

Since I was all bent out of shape about the trigger situation I headed on down to Rick's so he could get the triggers setup the way I needed.  A few minutes later I left with 2 triggers at 1lb 6oz (according to his scale) and a decent amount of return pressure.  I went home and put them on my scale, only to find they measured 1lb 1oz.  

This confirms that my scale is way off... but now that I know that I can adjust accordingly.  I'm not too worried about what the actual weight is... I just need to know if it's gone out of whack or not.  I can't trust myself to just feel it and as this has happened before I find that when I lose fast shooting rhythm I want to blame myself, but often find it's a trigger issue.  Now I'm a bit more educated about how to identify and confirm the issue.

 

So the next day I had a  chance to check things out at the Clear Creek match.  I was relieved to find that all day, I didn't have a single rhythm issue.  All my splits were nice and crisp and I shot a very solid match.

 

I only had one fubar moment when I dropped my mag on the last target of the last stage.   The match was way more rounds than usual and the only spare ammo I had was 9 rounds in one spare magazine on my belt.  While I consciously knew that would finish things up, my unconscious mind read "NO MORE AMMO, YOU NEED THE ONE ON THE GROUND!"  So I picked it up, very quickly determined it had not picked up enough dirt to cause a problem, loaded and completed the stage. 

However, my foot had not gotten the memo and had stepped out of the shooting area to retrieve the mag.   So, no misses, but a considerable amount of time and penalty points were my final moments.  Oh, and all the people on my squad laughing their asses off... there's always that!

 

So, why I dropped the mag is something I'm going to write off. The last position was an awkward, upgrange run with a crazy spin into position.  In all that twisting and changing grip I just didn't rebuild a solid grip on the gun.  With extended releases like we run, we sometimes pay the price for poor grip.  That was one of those moments. 

 

Anyways, I'm getting ready for the Rocky Mountain 300 this weekend and look forward to my first major match of the year.  I really feel like I'm missing out this year with such a light schedule.  But after the move, and some additional "time in grade" I think next year is really going to be a bang up year for me!

 

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It was an awesome weekend shooting the Rocky Mountain 300.  Always a fun match, this year I was lucky enough to be on a super squad with JJ Racaza, Bob Krogh, Paul Clark Jr, and Spencer Stein.  I was a sponge this year watching JJ do his thing along with all the other top shooters on my squad.  We learned from each other, and had a good time strategizing and giving each other crap.  I hope that the other shooters on my squad got as much out of shooting with this group as I did. 

Reviewing my performance (Here's the Vid) I see PLENTY of areas for improvement.  Then again, I wound up placing 3rd overall so it wasn't all bad.

 

In Lanny Basham style, let's look at some of the good stuff.

First on stage 1 (and the entire day) I never lost rhythm in my splits.  Any slow splits were necessary because I was waiting for the proper sight picture.  Especially on the stage 1 hosing. I was able to keep things moving along nicely when it came to the shooting and aiming necessary to make it through... for the most part anyways.  

On stage 3 I really liked my hit quality and despite making a huge strategic error the shooting went well.  Especially on the steel array.  I hammered it with authority and probably beat JJ for that single engagement.  (OK, maybe not.  It's still going in the + column)

Stage 5, despite a slow start I picked things up on the 2nd star and finished with quite a decent time on that stage. (40 seconds, to JJ's 34 seconds ain't too shabby) 

 

Now, to look at the negative column.  It's been a bit since I recorded an entire match.  It's also been a while since I reviewed the entire video with the mindset of actually searching for what I'm not doing so well.  I've also NEVER had the opportunity to watch as a world class champion performs the exact same stages showing me exactly what I missed.  JJ is super cool as a squad mate and we talked a lot about strategy and why we made some of the decisions we made.  

 

First, something that has fairly recently really crept into my performance.  Verbal outbursts.  The problem with verbal outbursts is two-fold.  One, is that it's a family sport and I enjoy posting my vids to Facebook and other places.  They don't need to include me swearing or otherwise making "in the moment" colorful comments.  Secondly, I believe this drags out the error into the next moments.  To say something takes a hell of a lot longer than to think it.  The mistake I made on the memory stage was minor.  I had lost count in the port and leaned way over in the following port before I realized I was not seeing the views I had programmed for this stage.  I yelled "shit!" and by the time I did that, I was reloading into the next port.  While still dwelling on my previous mistake from verbalizing it I went into the next port and screwed that up worse.   I wound up taking 2 mikes (due to an undetectable FTE) on that stage.  The slowdown cost me additional points and I literally handed over the 2nd place position to my competition with that move.   

 

Secondly, I need to dry fire a LOT more and a LOT more seriously.  The thing that's missing from my movements is that decisive, robotic like movement that comes from extreme confidence in motion.  How do you get extreme confidence in motion?  By repeating that motion a crazy number of times.  Also, you get that confidence by never doing that motion differently.  I noticed that when JJ pulls a magazine out of his mag pouch it's the same every time.  The same way he does it in a match.  There's never a lazy, slow grab and there's never a time when the magazine is in his hand with a different grip than the proper grip.  EVERY draw of the magazine or gun, is a practice draw for the match.  EVERY TIME.  If it's to clean, or check it the proper grip is followed by this other action. But if you just zoomed in on his hand grabbing the magazine you would never know whether it was during a match, or to reload that mag.  Also, the reverse of that motion is exactly the reverse of that motion.  Putting a magazine in the pouch is not done with some different action.  If you play a video of JJ putting a magazine in his pouch, in reverse, you would think it was a regular video of him pulling it out.  

While this is somewhat anecdotal I'll bet he would agree that this will help to build and maintain that "muscle memory" that makes the top GM's not have to do something fast, to be faster than everyone else at it.  This is not just goal, this is a shift in my thinking and overall style that I'll work to integrate with urgency.  It will take dry fire, and it will take discipline.

 

Reviewing my video there are several instances of this lack of "muscle memory." First is the obvious jacked reload on stage one.  That cost me a full second and while the reload fumble may have been caused by my looking back at a target I thought I missed, it was REALLY caused because that was only my 10,000th time reloading.  It was probably JJ's 100,000th reload.  There are many others, but most notably are the draws, and pushing off from a given position.  Some are pretty decent, but again.  Only having pushed off as hard as I possibly can say, 5000 times I often forget to make that ONE TIME the hardest I can push and to apply the proper "foot plant and spring out" technique to get my ass moving.  I need to do it say, another 5000 times before it sinks in.  

 

Wow, this is getting long.  Need to wrap it up by summarizing how I'll execute this moving forward.  

 

1. Prioritize dry fire.  With no gun (such as when traveling for work), practice movement.  With a gun practice all the other stuff.  Every night if possible.  My awesome wife has vowed to help with this by prefacing anything she asks me to do after work with "After you dry-fire.... "  (she's freaking bad ass.)  This is also made better by the fact that tomorrow the basement get's carpeting.  I can move better and mags won't get the shit kicked out of 'em by hitting concrete.  The new house WILL have a space that's made for dry-fire.  I never prioritized a space and made sure it was setup properly.  It doesn't have to be dedicated, but does have to be properly setup and easily convertible. 

 

2. Control my "retard valve."  When that valve opens up, SHUT IT DOWN before it reaches my mouth.  This is a good one for professional life also.  Without realizing, I've been working on the same thing at work.  When I want to say something like "you're late" to a contract tech, I just need to shut it down.  It doesn't help anything.  They know they are late and bitching only drives a wedge between them and me.  They are ultimately my teammate and teams don't need that stress.   This is the same with screwing up at a match.  Move on, (silently) and continue operations as programmed. 

 

The next major match I'll get to try this at is the Mile High Showdown in 2 weeks.  I'm excited for another major, and well run match!

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Controlling negative self talk during a stage run is huge. Yelling out in frustration in the middle of a run does nothing but add more distraction to an already frustrating situation.

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With the cancellation of one of the matches this weekend I only made the match at Pueblo West Sportsman's Club this weekend. I had managed to dry fire every night since being back home last week.  Not a lot, but at least performed some reload drills where I reloaded 10-12 times out of #1, then the same out of #2 and #3.  Then did some reloads out of all three consecutively  This coupled with some draws seems like a good drill to keep the basic skills on the upslope. 

 

For the match, there was not a single reload issue.  Most of the shooting was fine and with my Gopro down (dead battery) I'm not able to really analyze movement.  However, I did concentrate on getting super aggressive in movement and posted some good times on most of the stages. 

All but one stage was successful on shot calling. Several instances I called marginal shots and when we went downrange I verified those calls.  

Until the last stage I had one no-shoot.  It was basically an AD, where I was settling into a position after running hard on a reload.  When I was coming into position a came up on an open target between two no-shoots.  I just saw brown and allowed the prepped trigger to let one loose while the dot was still on the white, heading over to the intended target.   The good news out of that is that by the time I did get my dot on-target and called the next two shots I had forgotten all about it.  The cadence just sounded like an instant make-up shot and I avoided internal (or external) self talk and just moved on with the work I had to do for that stage.  I had actually successfully forgotten all about it until scoring.  

 

Once again, I let my composure fall completely apart on the last stage of the day.  We had several new shooters on the squad and after I ran my plan had a few discussions with them about their plans.  Then, I was almost last in the order.  I just lost focus and didn't stay mentally in the game by the time my turn came around.  I failed to call several shots and racked up 2 mikes and 5 detlas on the stage.  As a bonus, I also did it very slowly. 

 

This is the third or so match where I feel like I didn't stay in the game and have given up copious amounts of points on the last stage.  For sure something I need to work on and avoid things that remove my attention from the match until I've scored my last points.  

 

 

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This weekend I shot the 2017 Mile High Showdown at the Ben Lomond Gun Club. I also volunteered to setup and RO. It was a pretty brutal schedule and the guys that actually do ALL the work have my utmost respect. Thanks a whole bunch to Cha-Lee, Jerry Westcott and the other heavy hitters that make matches like this possible.

 

I've known Cha-Lee for quite a few years now and I understand a bit about where he comes from when dreaming up his shooting challenges. If you can master the skills required to make it through one of his matches clean you are truly ready for some serious shooting success down the road. Other matches will throw in boats, rubber chickens and feats of math or engineering before the shooting starts, but the Mile High Showdown is about making the SHOOTING fun and hopefully that tradition will continue with whoever takes up the baton for next year.

 

I was only able to get 3 stages on video as there didn't seem to be any people on my squad to “trade work” with. Paul Clark Jr, grabbed the GoPro for what we got on video but I didn't want to make him video all of them so when he was distracted, it didn't happen.

 

3 Stages is enough to see what I need to see. I see a lot of areas for improvement to be sure. In the spirit of how I like to analyze my performance we'll start with what went well first.

I was able to hang onto 3 stage wins with some spicy runs that went very well for me.

The first one is Stage 2 (my first stage and the first stage on the Vid). There are two areas that I performed well on this stage. The first was not getting too hung up on the start position. To me, doing a “one foot in, one foot out” scenario only added complexity and to get all that steel way downrange I wanted to have a comfortable, stable shooting platform. That required a foot position for both feet that didn't line up near the X's so no advantage was gained by destabilizing the start position.  Although I still missed said "stable" position for a fairly mediocre one, I slaughtered that steel and gained a significant time advantage over my competition. It was a good thing too because my movement into that final position was slow, and non-aggressive. But the shooting was accurate so my points, and time gained on the steel was a solid run that held up against everyone else.

 

The remainder of the shooting, mostly on steel was good and I was happy throughout the day with my shot calling.  I was also not deterred by some of the more significant challenges. On the single shot stage it was challenging not to rush that shooting. The “1 per” targets were spread out and the stage was super wide causing a sluggish feeling to the shooting that could easily cause serious rushing by the end. With far targets to finish up on, there was probably a lot of misses on those last targets. I made it through without issue and was proud to have performed well on that stage as well. 

 

So, without stretching this out too long, suffice it to say I mostly kept my shit together despite several costly mistakes. I mostly performed some good shooting and moving.

 

Now, looking at the vids I can also see a laundry list of things that didn't go so well. Mostly they are movement issues that I'm still working on.  I see that I'm beginning target engagements way too early and stretching them out beyond necessity.  Looking at people like Chris Tilley, the dude has a clear handle on how long he takes for a setup and unless he's in that setup window he's hauling ass.  I frequently miss that and spend too much time setting up... or not enough time sacrificing aiming quality.  Although on average that works out reasonably well, the true GM can get that window correctly set and executed on each engagement. 

 

The other issue I see is that I'm still making strategical errors.  (I.e., bad stage planning... or more accurately, engagement planning within a stage plan.)  There are several engagements where I chose to (or accidentally) took risky targets on the move and hammered a no-shoot as a result or paid the penalty in time for stretching the engagement out.

 

Also , I STILL lost my shit on the last stage of the day. I missed SEVERAL calls and wound up giving up 2 mikes, 3 deltas, and countless charlies on the last stage. (actually it was 12) This cost me the first place win. In reality, eliminating any ONE of my mistakes that day would have netted me the first place spot for open. 

 

Clearly, there's still a lot to learn!

 

 

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I only shot one match this weekend.  It was at the Aurora Gun Club and the weather was nice and warm all day.  

 

The shooting went well, but unfortunately I had a major death jam on one stage and this cost me big time.  I was told it was a 5 second repair, and I followed that up with some pretty careless shooting that netted me a 3 detla stage.  My only 3 deltas of an otherwise clean match meant that the rest of the day I was super happy with. 

 

I did NOT poop out at the end and had a strong finish.  I also managed to score a 97% on the classifier.  A fun day, and an encouraging day that with a bit more work and dedication I'll soon make some measurable progress on my goals. 

Movement was decisive and I feel like, for the most part I executed with my utmost aggression.  I did get pretty unstable dipping into a port to engage 2 poppers, but got things stable after 2 misses and managed to make the next two rounds hit steel.  I followed that up with a 90 degree turn to some far, partial no-shoot hits that were very stable with fast splits that drew an encouraging reaction from people watching. 

 

With regard to "staying in the game" the entire match I did feel myself slipping away as I was waiting on the final stage.  I consciously got up, walked around and talked and made sure to keep working on reset duties.  This helped a lot and I didn't feel at all tired when it was my turn to go. 

 

So while I didn't feel like a whole new person, I'm happy to have acknowledged some progress on my goals this weekend. 

 

The only problem now is that the move is heating up.  This was one of many matches I'll be missing over the coming weeks for our final push to Florida.  I crated my V-Nailer and otherwise transformed my wood shop into a garage for the next guy all day Sunday.  The house goes on the market THIS FRIDAY, and with the current real estate market in Denver we'll honestly be surprised if we don't have an offer by Saturday.  

 

So, between crazy work travel and crazy personal travel I fear that my shooting will take another slump (like the DPP era) and I'll have considerable work to do this winter... that's right... I'll be shooting this winter! hehehehehehehe.

 

 

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I shot a match today at Aurora Gun Club.  Wow, it was down right hot out and didn't start clouding up until the last stage.  Jeez I can't wait to move to Florida so I don't have to deal with this heat!  (yeah... I'm kidding)

So I was generally happy with most of the shooting but am paying the price for not dry firing, and not continuing my grip strength training.  I've been to California, Mexico, sitting in the airport now heading to California, then I head to Florida and Chicago back to back.  This work schedule won't lighten up any time soon, and while I would normally not mind much my personal travel and move will make it a tad stressful.  I bring it up, because the bottom line is... if I'm not training between matches to do anything to get better then I can't expect better results at future matches.  

So I'm a bit on coast for a while and I'm OK with that.  This match was no different.  I had a malfunction on the classifier and it was because I got my gun back from Rick and it was dry as a bone.  I knew it and blew it off... and paid the price.   With plenty of oil the gun ran tip-top the remainder of the day.  

 

I ran some decent stages, but did fall apart on a very tight stage shooting between obstructions.  I'm not sure if it's a left eye dominance issue or  the fact that my dominance is mot very pronounced.  But I've always had a hard time shooting very tight spaces like that.  The doubling effect I get causes me to blast through objects readily.  On this stage I tried to consciously close my right eye, but I suspect I left it open.  OR, the unnatural shooting (with one eye closed) led to some poor shot calling.  Either way, I plugged a barrel 4 times before I was able to call my 2 hits, and by then I was rushing the rest of shooting causing a no-shoot hit.   So, penalties AND a slow time led to a discouraging score to say the least. 

 

There was another stage where my plan was backwards from everyone else.  I was a bit worried as normally when this happens it means you are missing something.  I was confident that the more smooth aspect of the "left to right" scenario up front on this stage would lead to better hits and the "awkward" portion would be a break even from doing it the other way.  I feel like my gamble paid off and I was able to maintain the overall best HF on that stage.  This is a triumph for my goal of better stage planning and I feel like I'm picking out optimizations these days that I was missing only a few weeks ago.   My plan was based on optimizing each position and determining that the non-shooting time was a wash either way you did it.  While not a huge difference, smooth engagements kept the gun running and made my shot quality higher that any other plan I was able to come up with.  

 

And for my final goal progress I was very happy with my level of energy and did not even think about pooping out at the end of the day.   

 

So, all in all it was a good day shooting with the usual moments of decent shooting being pulled down a tad by reminders that there are plenty of areas to improve.  More work, and more fun to come.   I still have a ton of fun shooting this sport and this is made better by seeing some of my "competition" increasing their skills and really giving me a run for my money.  The top of the local shooting crowd is more crowded than ever and we all having a hell of a good time.

 

I was the RO for a run where Lauren Cannon just executed the run absolutely flawlessly.  I didn't see her hits, but her movement, gun handling, and aggressiveness told me she had an awesome run and I was giggling by the time I was trying to give the ULSC command.  Her hits were sweet.  She beat me legitimately on one of my best runs of the day and was about 3% behind Charlie Perez.  Fun stuff and I have no doubt that she'll make GM one day. 

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Ho....ly.....crap.  We did it.   Our house is under contract in Colorado and we are negotiating a contract on a new house in North Port FL.  I'm freaking out.  What an adventure this will be.  

As a result our lives are a bit on hold.  I had to cancel my Area 3 match as that's the weekend before we move and missing out on practice, plus stress will only lead to a less than adequate performance so I decided to suspend all shooting while I pack.  I have a shit load of ammo loaded up so I can take about two months to get my press running again after I move and hit the shooting as soon as I get moved.  I'll be attempting to join the Hansen Range in North Fort Myers once I arrive.   With no response back from email I hope I can just show up and get joined fairly easily.


Of course, there is still a contract to secure...and to work through to fruition so it will be a delicate road indeed.  If all works out my actual move date is tentatively scheduled for Aug 15th - 21st.  

 

 

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  • 1 month later...

Well, it's been a long few weeks but I think I can start writing my journal again.  After such a life change I almost feel like I'm starting from scratch again.

I had a few weeks off for the big move to Florida.  With all the heavy lifting I really hurt my shoulder and left elbow.  I've started acupuncture and after 2 treatments the shoulder is back to how it was before the move.  I can feel it popping and hurting a bit, but at least it's not constant pain.  The elbow too is about 30% reduced.  Hopefully a few more treatments will get me back to a manageable level.  

 

I went to two local mates this past weekend.  One was a steel match at Universal Shooting Academy (my only option for Saturday).  It was an eye opener as this was the 3rd steel match I've ever shot.  The first two were in my first year of shooting competitively so it was almost like my first time.  A completely different mindset and strategy led to a pretty dismal finish and I will definitely remain open to making more of these matches in the future.   I was surprised how wide the cone of fire was on most of the stages.  I mostly just kept a wide stance that would allow the entire stage to run without moving my feet, but speculated that moving a foot might be the best way make it from side to side and keep my shooting platform rock solid. 

At any rate, it was very good practice and I had fun meeting some new people.  I look forward to seeing them again.  

 

The following day I went to Ruskin FL, for a match at the Gun Craft range.  These guys have a very relaxed attitude that I wasn't really used to.  I had a very good time laughing and listening to these guys jab each other.  There was a good mix of stages and one in particular led to a lot of discussion about staying back vs moving forward.  It was one of those "3 second run" vs "3 seconds of aiming" stages that make either option look pretty juicy depending on the strengths of the shooter you're talking to. 

In the end I decided that my old standby of "it's almost always better to move forward" would prevail.  I wound up winning the stage by a large margin and not knowing what the other shooters did on other squads I can only assume that going forward was the right choice. 

Other than that one stage, I was surprised how my grip, or otherwise dot watching ability has lost it's edge.  I found the track less consistent than before and shot a large number of deltas and took 2 mikes.

I also made a critical strategic mistake.  Knowing damn well, I was first on a stage with moving targets I NEVER watched the previous squad shoot it.  There was like, 10 shooters left on it and not once did my dumb-ass get up and watch the moving targets.  

This led to a poor engagement order and I plugged a no-shoot on it.  I mean wow, what a rookie mistake that was.  

 

This weekend I'm not likely to shoot and will just concentrate on trying to get my arm back to normal.  Unless of course I wind up swimming for my life.  My wife and I are pretty freaked out about hurricane Irma.  I thought I was mentally prepared to deal with this type of thing, but what I wasn't prepared for was the worst hurricane in history.  Irma is just that, and in the 1-2 days we took to get freaked out ALL air travel is off the table.  We are already stuck with the decision to drive out, or ride it out in our house.  We have a bunch of supplies and this is a block house with steel hurricane panels, but I'm still nervous as hell about it.  

I'm in Chicago now, and will get back into town tomorrow night.  At that time there will hopefully be enough information about Irma's path and strength to make a solid decision and go with it.  We are most likely going to bug out and stay with friends in Alabama.  

 

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Well, since we were headed back to Colorado anyways, we bugged out of Florida and hurricane Irma wound up passing right over our house.  She was so weak by then we literally saw more wind in Kansas on our way to Colorado than they saw in our neighborhood.  There was plenty of damage in other areas, but North Port faired pretty darn well.

 

Anyways, back in Colorado this weekend I shot the Colorado State Match at Colorado Rifle Club.  The weather held out pretty well except for a cold 
morning on Saturday.  I was glad I had grabbed a hoodie on my way out the door when I bugged out from Irma. 

 

Although I haven't been gone for long it was a welcoming reunion with my Colorado homies.  I had a really good time, but my performance was a bit rough around the edges and I paid the price for such low practice over the past 6 weeks or so. 

 

In an effort to keep this from just being a negative entry I'll lay this out Lanny Bassham style.

 

What I did well and what I learned?
One thing that I did well from an equipment perspective was to ensure I had time to get a quick practice run in and inspect my gear.  On Thursday I ran up to Clear Creek for a couple hour practice session with a buddy.  I sighted both guns in and did some short drills where we took a plate rack, then moved and took two paper targets.  We did this about 25 yards and I used both guns.  The #2 blaster had a major malfunction.  It was a hammer follow and explains why I boned the "can you count" classifier at the last local match.  I thought it was trigger freeze, but due to this practice run I found that it was a broken gun.  Switching to my #1 gun proved a successful practice session and it didn't malfunction a single time the entire match.  

 

Something else that I've been working on is ensuring that my draw remains smooth throughout a match.  Although it's not a super important issue I have a tendancy to create a pause in my draw in matches that isn't there in practice.  I only got three videos but I see a nice smooth draw.  Especially in the only vid with a basically standing draw.  There's a bit of a sticky draw on the turn-and-draw stage, but with all that rotation and movement I think that's to be expected.  

 

The last thing I see is pretty decent movement without a lot of extra motions.  I can easily spot a few times when I move and shouldn't have, but for the most part I'm shooting with a stable platform and getting out of positions nicely.  This is due in part to my cleats.  Those cleats, I now believe is one of the best equipment choices I've ever made.  No slippage leaving a position and they remain comfortable all day.  I can honestly say I don't like the old trail running shoes I was using before. 

 

What I could improve on?
Well, I can certainly see a heck of a decline in my overall ability from a lack of practice.  Also, since I injured my elbow I have a very marked decrease in weak hand grip strength.  This has created a notable wobble, and sometimes sideways track in the dot.  This is a real drag as I've worked for years to obtain a firm grip that's key in making that dot track consistently vertical. Something made way obvious to me during the "Deltapoint experiment." This is just a physical issue of more acupunture and a shit load of strength training when the pain is gone.  


Also, the dot in my #1 blaster is either dimmer than ever, or I think it's dimmer due to the tracking problem I'm having. It's always noticeably dimmer than #2 but now it just looks dim even when not comparing it to anything.  I lost it more times than I can count and I'm done with that sight.  I'm buying a new one when I get home and sending it back to C-More to see if they can brighten it up.  I've tried swapping modules and batteries so I think it's the rheostat.  I don't want to argue with C-More, or be down a gun while it's getting fixed so I'll buy new and get a spare out of the deal.

 

This leads me to my next improvement note.  I need to work on making shot decisions and then moving on.  There were several occasions where I was still thinking about a marginal shot and it affected my ability to perform on the next array. This also caused extra setups on two occasions where I went back to a target for the makeup.  Probably boiling down to actually making sure I see an acceptable sight picture in the first place, I need to let that marginal shot go OR stay there until the makeups are done and I've got the hits I want. Going back and forth is complete bullshit. Watching the video you can see it TWICE in the 2nd stage, and once in the 3rd stage. 

 

At this point I don't really want to pile on, and will wrap up with what I suppose is the new goal set for when I can finally get back to a regular shooting schedule.

 

Get a dry fire practice schedule back.
More videos.  I've been slacking on this and they are still valuable.
Rehab the arm and strength train my grip.
Replace the C-More on #1 
Work on visual patience and not committing to movement until the shooting is done. 
 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I'm finally back in Florida and was able to make some serious progress on a bunch of things throughout the week.

I had an entire 5 days without traveling somewhere for work.  It was freakin' awesome.  However, Monday and Tuesday were spent driving back from Colorado hauling the Prius behind the Tacoma.  It was a surprisingly easy pull, but sure put a hurt on fuel mileage.  I was scared to check it, but no way I could have made that drive alone so worth every penny to not drive separate cars for 3 long days.  

So we pulled into North Port, and pretty much went straight to the gun shop to get Heather's C.O. gun.  We picked her up a M&P CORE 9mm with a DPP sight.  (yes... the same damn thing I sold not so long ago.)  We ordered a bunch of stuff to go with it including a DAA holster so she'll be practicing for her first match in about 5 years by next weekend!

 

I went ahead and made good on my promise to ditch that 80 year old C-More and purchased a brand new one.  The dot is brighter than ever and when I send the old one back to C-More I'm hoping to have a spare.  Due to the age of the #2 blasters sight I think it's wise to keep a spare these days. 

 

So I went down to the Hansen range on Saturday to help the MD setup a stage and get some badly needed practice in.  I found my arm pain was just as bad as before and while I did OK at freestyle and SHO, my WHO is still extremely painful and sloppy beyond belief.  I'm surprised how slowly the acupuncture is progressing and decided to get serious about rehab and my physical fitness.  Heather has always belonged to a gym and we both found a gym close by and signed up for a membership.  I also signed up for some training sessions because I really want some help in the best recovery plan to get these elbows in shape before worrying about other body areas.   I know that every person on the planet has "promised" to make good on the gym thing, but at the same time EVERY gym rat that's all buff has started at some point.  If I'm serious enough about my shooting to move my dumb ass to Florida, I can make myself hit the gym a few days a week.  This is made easier by the fact that my work schedule needs to remain 8:00 to 5:00 Denver time.  I find that starting at 7:00 AM Eastern time means that I can't interface with anyone from the office until 10:00 AM. Then, they continue to call and email (expecting a response) until 7:00PM Easter time.  I'll hit the gym at 7:30 Eastern, be back by 8:30 or so and still have time leftover before starting work at 10:00.   In Hotels I'm usually up around 5:00AM watching TV and waiting until 8:00AM to go to the customer's site.  I think I can sneak in a workout in the fitness center, and get ready in 3 hours. 

 

So then I shot the local match and was pretty happy with a couple of things at the match.  There were 2 stage planning moments where I saw the best plan and hardly anyone else did.  The first was on a stage I designed, but I still had a hard time deciding on the best plan when I saw how so many other shooters interpreted it.  They were all basically staying on one side of it and I was planning on running the entire distance across.  After watching a couple and running a few walkthroughs I realized that it was the same decision as the old "stay back and aim" or "run forward and hose."  The difference is that this was sideways.  When I realized this I decided to run the entire width and make up the extra time with some spicy splits on close targets.  I was right and wound up beating the next fastest shooter by over 2 seconds.   The other one was a bit more cut and dried and I was going to run it a different way but when discussing it with a buddy I found myself applying the same logic and agreeing with him.  Running forward to a port I was going to do from pretty far back also meant I could do a reload moving forward instead of backward.  It was a win-win.  Another wise choice for a win-win-win!  

 

Then, of course I found areas for improvement. I missed a stage plan on 2 others.  The errors didn't cost me a lot of points, but clearly after watching another shooter go the correct way I could see what I missed.  In both cases I thought I was speeding up an engagement by aggressively engaging it while move forward.  But in fact rushing the port despite what looked like extra movements yielded a faster time AND better points.  (see my first point on the first stage description)  I totally missed both opportunities for this.  Oops. 

 

At the end of the day I was very happy with my shooting and thanks to IBuprofen and KT Tape my arm didn't bother me for a second and I was able to maintain good shot calling, a consistent grip, and a good dot path.  The match was chock full of partials, and very long shots that (with all but one mike) I was able to wrangle in for a 99% clean match and pretty high alpha count. 

 

All during and after the match I was met with good old USPSA hospitality and can honestly say I found a bunch of people that I can't wait to hang around next weekend!  

 

Goal progress?

Get a dry fire practice schedule back.  (got a session in this week... more to come)
More videos.  I've been slacking on this and they are still valuable. (well, dead batteries, next weekend for sure!)
Rehab the arm and strength train my grip. (joined the gym... will include the rest of my aging parts)
Work on visual patience and not committing to movement until the shooting is done.  (close.  with all but one shot)

 

 

 

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It's been quite a week since last post.  I've hit the gym almost daily, except for Thursday morning when I was heading to the airport from Chicago at 5:00AM.  I made it up by heading there Saturday morning though.  So far the gym experience has been positive and I'm excited to continue going and get over these damn joint issues.  Speaking of which I've been training my arms pretty constantly with flex-bands from Iron Mind and the left elbow pain will hopefully be completely gone with just a few more Acupuncture treatments.  The shoulder is basically healed (no pain, but still feels a bit wobbly sometimes) so I'm just about ready to start hitting some heavier weight training.

 

I also practiced a bit on Saturday and mostly it was a sight-in for the green gun with the new green sight.  But we did get some long shots in and a few movement/transition drills.  That coupled with a couple of dry fire sessions during the week meant I was ready for a match on Sunday.

 

The match was another one at Hansen Range and this one is known as "the easy match" and I found out why.  I think I saw a total of 3 no-shoots for the entire match and not a single hard cover target.  All wide open stages with very few obstacles and a lot of running.  

 

Here's the vid.

 

So, for sure a good practice session for "on the move" and testing the limits of your split accuracy.   That and some movement drills between every position.  

Looking at the video, I'm pretty happy with what I see movement wise.  No real hesitation on exits, some pretty smooth entries and no extra footwork going on.  I'm generally happy and on many occasions I let out an audible grunt as I was pushing hard out of a given position.  This is always a good sign because it reminds you that you are giving it your all. 

 

Continuing on the footwork, I'm super glad I've switched to cleats and not a single step was lost during my movement.  One move in particular that's a good highlight is at 00:15.  I made that the thumbnail as it demonstrates how hard I was pushing off.  Oddly enough, only a couple seconds later at 00:18 I think I lead into that position way too slow. 

 

Looking at my draw I'm happy with most draws and this is shown best at 00:44 where I get a nice smooth draw and start shooting with what looks like no aiming time.   Contrasted with a notable pause at both 1:29 and 2:02.  Although at 2:02 my hand had to be touching a barrel so was coming from the side rather than below the gun.  At any rate, I'm happy with progress in removing the pause that can creep in, but it's still there with some draws from differing positions. 

 

The shooting, well although the match lacked hard shots I managed to keep a low delta count (4) and not an embarrassing amount of charlies.  Although I certainly should have been hitting more.  I need to start really looking at the percentage of alphas I'm shooting and start increasing that by a lot.  While there's certainly other areas to work on, I think the points I'm giving up by not concentrating on bringing that alpha count up are what I need to deal with next. 

 

So, I had a good time.  Feel like I'm getting back in the groove.  Certainly ready to make some improvements and earn that GM classification. 

 

Goals:

 

Work on visual patience to increase alpha hits.  
Continue the active dry fire schedule
Keep getting videos.
Rehab the arm and strength train my grip.

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It was a full weekend of shooting.  I went and practiced with my wife on Saturday and shot a local match on Sunday at Hansen Range.  

 

For a while now, I've known I need to work on getting way more aggressive on transitions and evening out the cadence in most arrays, but have just kind of ignored it.  I'm going to really put some work into this and add it to my goal list.  This was made especially obvious while watching the hoser match that I shot last weekend.  While I didn't really pay the price on that easy match, I had a terrible alpha count and since there were so many stages of the same type I became aware of just how badly I need to work on this.

 

And, my arm pain is gone.  6 acupuncture treatments, and some light therapy has removed the pain and this week I started to weight train it much more aggressively.  I'll do a couple more acupuncture treatments to ensure that the healing is complete, but with the included weight training should be able to get my arm back to it's original strength.  Then start working on increasing beyond that.  

 

I posted the first and almost last (forgot to vid the last couple) runs at some transition practice.  I just setup a simple drill with 5 paper and a plate rack.  The spacing was varied between all of the targets with just a smidge of varying shooting challenges.  The idea being to reach a point where transitions between different spaced targets were almost the same as the splits.  I didn't get too technical with the timer and just chose to work on it from a "sounds and feels like" perspective.  I wanted to ensure I was concentrating on what it looked like, and felt like to aggressively move off of, and then on to the targets without worrying about milliseconds.  I was also after all alphas and steel one for one.  

After about 3-4 attempts I was able to really bring that "double-tap" sound down to a much more even cadence and you were hard pressed to tell which target I was on.  I kept my alpha count way up and only got a single delta for the drill and very few charlies.  Only 1 or 2 on any given string.  Very good training and I'll do similar drills moving forward. 

 

Then, I hit the match on Sunday.  It was a good time meeting some more new people and although another hot Florida day it wasn't too bad.

 

What I like in the video is some aggressive movement and most shooting positions optimized well.  I also maintained the small movements nicely on the two short ones.  One of them being the classifier Tick-Tock where I managed to get a 95% even with a delta hit.  

Almost all the steel was nice and quick, and I was particularly please with stage 2's steel engagement.  

I was focused on the dot and the tracking was good.  This was the first match in a while without KT Tape and an obvious pain in my arm.  It was nice to just shoot.  The only time I pulled an uncalled shot was through that awkward port I had to hold open and shoot strong hand only.  On that I really blew the rehearsed position and it was awkward and very difficult to keep looking through the glass.  The entire array was really just point shot.  It sucks to give up a bunch of points on an array like that.

 

I also suffered 2 malfunctions.  I'm not sure what happened on the one I had to rack.  It just didn't go into battery and that was on my backup gun so I just oiled it and hoped for the best.  It ran like a top the remainder of the match.  The primary gun doubled on stage 2 (the first stage of the day) and I was able to make the hammer drop while racking it in the safety area afterwards.  It went to the gunsmith. 

 

Areas for improvement?  Well, I certainly blew a couple of shooting positions.  The one on the one-armed port is pretty poor, but that was a jacked up position anyways.  Where I really missed the mark was on Stage 1 (first stage in the vid, but last of the day).  I forgot to move my cone of fire into the center array at the start of that engagement.  This led to a seriously unstable platform when I got to that last steel.  Like a dumbass, after missing the first time I chose to continue unloading rounds at it while I THEN adjusted my stance.  And a poor job at that indeed.  This caused me to run dry.  D'oh!  

 

While the movement was mostly on my "good list" there were some that certainly remind me there's still plenty of work to be done.  

 

The other, more obvious is transitions.  While I can see some improvement I can tell that only 1 day of practice will certainly not be enough to start making a difference.  

 

So the goal list now looks like:

 

Aggressive transitions. (do more drills) 

Work on visual patience to increase alpha hits.  
Continue the active dry fire schedule

 

 

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This weekend Heather and I shot, for the first time at the Wyoming Antelope Club in Clearwater.  The match as a very well setup, fun and challenging match.   

 

It's in the middle of Clearwater on the peninsula just east of Tampa.  They have massive railroad tie sidewalls, very high berms and a concrete roof.  It's basically like an indoor match, but outside.  They are limited to back berm impacts and make up for it well.  

 

I have a Youtube vid of 2 of the stages.  The other vids really didn't provide much useful information as they just showed me going into obstructed views.  

 

I shot about as sloppy as I could manage and still somehow only wind up with 1 mike.  7 deltas and 40% alpha's shows just how poorly I made any progress on my "visual patience" goal.  I certainly need quite a bit of work and honestly I'm not positive that all of it was my own fault.  I sent my gun to a local smith to take a look at my trigger from the malfunction last week thinking it would only need adjustment.  He pointed out that barrel is pretty loose.  I know it sighted in fine last time but this may be a case of hitting an "over the top" tolerance and maybe the thing has lost it's accuracy.  I'll be checking it next Saturday when I practice in preparation for the Monster Match next Sunday.  I decided to shoot this gun despite it's questionable accuracy so that it could provide a working backup for the #2 blaster that will be my primary for the Monster Match. 

 

Although, there's a chance I had an equipment issue, it's what I saw through the sight that counts.  What I saw was some moments of questionable calls that were left alone in haste.   I need to work on that for sure. 

 

I also found that my arm pain made a slight return.  After the 2nd stage I felt a dull ache and put KT Tape on it.  It didn't get any worse but I feel a bit of tenderness in it now.  I'll make sure to pop some IB and perform my weight training on it all week.  I'm really bummed because it was feeling great all last week.  I believe this put me back in a loose weak hand grip mode and contributed to some hasty shot calling because of the looser dot track. 

 

I also saw a few things I like.  There were some engagements that I definitely dropped my transition time on and feel like I made some progress on this goal.  It could explain the moments of poor visual patience.  I think we all do this, and basically "step left, then right" when it comes to working on skills.  What I mean is, I allowed my shot calling/splits to suffer a bit in the name of concentrating on transitions.  When we do this, we at least perceive that we do worse on the skill we aren't working on.  Usually this leads to upping our entire game when we swing back to the original skill.   Hopefully this will be the case.

 

I like most of the draws and movements.  Nothing really got screwed up with the exception of one stage where I, for some reason took some targets out of order so there was some stutter steps that bogged me down a bit.  I also hit all but 1 steel on the first shot and one in particular in the 1st stage of the vid I swung a pretty big transition very fast and nailed the steel the instant my dot landed on it. 

 

Goal list:

Aggressive transitions. (do more drills) 

Work on visual patience to increase alpha hits.  (no, seriously)
Continue the active dry fire schedule

 

  

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

This weekend I shot the 2017 Monster Match at the Universal Shooting Academy in Frostproof.  It was a costume themed outlaw match with a minimum round count of 48 per stage. Most were around 55 rounds.  Sort of Florida's version of the famous Rocky Mountain 300.  


I decided to dress as the Hulk since I've called my green gun the Hulk for a long time... now-a-days I can't do that since both guns are green.  At any rate, we got 25 match points and a bonus on the steel stage for dressing in costume.  No way, no how, no gamer is going to miss out on that one.


I wanted to shoot the all green gun, but after finding out that the barrel is super loose it needed to be demoted to backup status.  I went to the range Saturday morning to do a bit of practice and check the accuracy on that gun.  Sure enough, some "flyers" that I previously thought were just me were definitely the gun and it sure explains a lot of deltas and mikes that I've been blaming on myself.  How I let the gun get that far out of whack is a shameful deed to be sure.  And there's more later on the primary gun, but the bottom line is with all the distractions of moving lately I have not been cleaning my equipment or maintaining it like I used to.  I'll need to put "proper maintenance" back in my priorities. 

 

So, anyways onto the match I went with full intention of doing some serious Hulk smashing!

 

Nothing could be farther from the truth. Here's a vid, and it's full of some of the worst shooting I've done in a long time.  At one point I really let it get to me and with 3 stages left I was... well, green with anger.  Heather is always my spirit guide and tamed the beast with what she said, and didn't say.  She let me get all bent out of shape for a bit, and then said "I have a colossal mistake with every stage I run, so watch what you say."  Then she let that sink in without another word.  It's all relative, and the size of mistake that us "GM's" make may not be as large as a D class shooter but just like EVERY shooter we will make them, and can't let that get us down.  And I don't think we should verbalize how bad we "suck" because it's not nice to do to our fellow shooters.  Not only because of the relative performance difference, (i.e, condescending) but also because it brings down the mood of the entire squad.  A bad mood is contagious and WILL affect everyone's shooting performance and more importantly their experience.
  
Now, don't get me wrong.  It's not like I threw some temper tantrum and bitched to my entire squad.  It was really only a brief trip down the rabbit hole after the 7th consecutive screw up, but it was about to become an issue.  Heather stopped me cold in my tracks and after I thought about all this, I came back and made a 180 on my attitude.  I fist bumped the guys who did well and didn't say another word about the remaining 3 screw ups on the remaining 3 stages.  (no, my game didn't improve in the slightest... but my attitude did!)

So the list of what went wrong is certainly lengthy but before I get specific I do need to bring up what went well.

 

There were some engagements that I was very happy with.  One in particular was some good transitions on the steel when I jumped into the boat.  There were 3 mini poppers at about 20 yards that were a good 5' apart, and 2 paper targets beyond them.  Listening to the shots it sounds great.  
Also, for the most part my movement is quick, decisive and accurate.  Not really any missed positions or unstable platforms caused by such.  Especially on the teeter-totter stage.  I was one of maybe 3-4 people to make the hits on the disappearing bottom target and as far as I know, the only one to make those shots without falling.  And this, after punching a freaking no-shoot after the malfunction.


My alpha count was pretty sweet too.  I don't know what it was, but on almost every stage (especially the all steel! HAHAHA!) I was very happy with the alphas I had gotten and only wound up with 1 mike and a small handful of deltas at the end.  The scores show 2 mikes because I failed to verify my score and signed off on a npm counted as an actual mike.  That was on the first disappearing target on the teeter-totter stage.  Also, I'll put under the good section my 180 degree attitude change.  The mental aspect of this game a huge portion of it and I'll let overcoming my low point to finish laughing with my squad be a positive achievement. Albeit with Heather's help.  

 

Now, what can I work on?
Well, I can attribute at least 2 of the screw-ups to not owning my plan.  I had let the chatter of other shooters talk me into stage plans that, while I decided were a better plan it was too late in the game to really own it and I would up confused and unaggressive because of it.  It's the one where I ran past the targets and had to go back.  Which by the way, you could see from the ENTIRE REAR portion so I could have picked them up at any point besides where I went back to.  The other is the steel stage.  I was going to sweep across, but was told the "top shooters" did it in sections.  Well, all the steel was in the way and even adding transitions between all of them would have led to my executing the plan with much more accuracy and precision.  Even if I still knocked down the same number it would not have left me disappointed in my poor planning and had a better affect on my attitude.  OWN YOUR OWN PLAN JOHN.  You aren't that bad at stage planning.  

 

D-d-d-d-did someone say st-st-st-stutter?  While some engagements are good, there are way too many instances of trigger freeze.  I think this is a by-product of trying to get more alphas.  I'm not able to consistently point-shoot the close targets.  I'm so wrapped up in making sure not to lose points on those close targets that I'm costing myself a huge amount of time.  While my alpha count is pretty sweet on targets closer than 10' in most cases I'm better off letting some charlies fly so I can get the hell out of there.  The answer, of course is not to let the shooting get sloppy. It's to buckle down and practice some fast shooting so I can point shoot with speed and not have to park on a carefully placed, aimed alpha at 10'.  I know I'm capable of hammering alphas on 10' target arrays. I just need to work on allowing myself to do it consistently.

 

Maintenance? I've allowed several matches to go awry because I have not been keeping track of the accuracy of my guns, not looking at key wear points, and not checking them thoroughly.  In some cases I've gone a couple of matches without even cleaning them.  This not my usual M.O. The malfunction on that teeter-totter stage?  A broken extractor.  I had a spare, but it was probably broken before the match.  How would I know? I didn't check it! The best stage of the day cost me a mistaken mike due to my not checking my score over and a no-shoot due to my poor gun maintenance.   

 

Those are the two things that led to a pretty poor match performance and a heck of a book for this weeks' journal entry.  

 

Goal list:
Aggressive transitions. (do more drills) 
Work on visual patience to increase alpha hits / work on not defining patience as careful. 
Continue the active dry fire schedule
Decisive, confident stage planning. (don't get talked out of a decent plan.)

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Although I was not able to get any practice in on Saturday I shot a local match at Hansen Range this past Sunday.  It was a really good match with some fun stages although one was clearly illegal.  

 

Anyways, my Gopro was once again on the fritz so no videos.  I made some pretty drastic errors that landed me a total of 3 no-shoots.  Luckily I made them up as needed so no mikes for the match.

 

I feel like I made progress on most of my goals.  I was pretty happy with most transitions and don't feel like I lost a lot of time on any of them.  My stage planning was rock solid.  Despite some discussion I was confident I had made the right decisions on them, stuck to the plans and executed all of my plans without error. Reloads were non-eventful, meaning smooth and successful.   

My grip strength was solid. I felt like I was really gripping tight and that will lead to an area for improvement later, but my grip has certainly increased since the elbow pain has left the arm. 

And finally, the shot calling was generally good with the exception of 3 obvious cases.

 

The first was on a target array that had some pretty significant movement before and after it.  I just had to make sure to slow down enough to get the high-risk, no shoot partial.  Well, I completely failed to do that and "stepped a low shot" into the no shoot.  I made it up with haste and finished the stage with a decent time and the remaining alpha count was pretty decent. 

 

The second was the illegal stage.  It was a "stay back vs move forward" scenario and the obvious choice was to haul ass forward and decrease the risk on a 16 shot engagement with alpha zones sandwiched between no shoots for all targets.   (the illegal part was the fact that you could shoot the entire 16 round stage from one position/view) I was very happy with an aggressive run and landed smooth as silk into the box so my shooting on the first target was super spicy.  During the 2nd array I just barely nicked 2 no shoots.  No makeups needed, but that cost me significantly.  It was pretty decent if I had just given up about .5 of a second and been more careful throughout the entire engagement I would have done great. 

 

And onto other errors. 

 

There was a stage where I just let things go off the rails from a speed perspective.  I landed all my hits, but found I had allowed myself to shoot brown in several engagements.  The alpha/charlie ratio was definitely lower than I should allow.  I nailed at least 3 deltas on that run as well.  It's not important to concentrate on just how bad, or lucky some of the hits were.  What I find needs acknowledgement is the fact that I knew I was getting out of control and sacrificing hit quality for speed but did it anyways.  The fact that I got lucky and had all my hits is beside the fact that it was sloppy. 

 

The last thing I need to work on is this darn trigger freeze issue.  It's not a solid freeze, more like an inability to consistently hose the close hosing targets.  On 2 occasions I shot very slow at very close targets.  It wasn't an aiming thing. I was literally waiting for the gun to go off while maneuvering my finger as fast as I could muster.  I think the real issue is actually my grip strength.  In both cases I was aware of gripping the gun very tightly.  With my recent upswing in strength (especially with my left hand) I believe that I'm having trouble isolating the trigger movement.  I know in times of very fast hosing I've been aware of loosening my grip and basically bump firing the shots.  That's probably a poor description as I do know that I'm still aiming and it's a controlled rate of fire. It just has to be done with loose grip.  

 

The question now becomes is that a valid technique?  Should I work on a "variable grip" or always concentrate on strong, aggressive grip and work on something in the trigger finger to gain speed?  I think the latter is the correct answer.  This will lead to a consistent technique and not rely on "lucky bump firing" to be called upon in times of need.  

With all that said, I'm going to try a different trigger shoe.  I've always liked short, curved triggers but with a change in physical ability I might be better served to lengthen the trigger.  

 

Maybe I'm thinking too hard about it.  The fact remains that since I've identified this area for improvement I haven't practiced a drill for it.  That's next while considering the trigger feel.  

 

We shall see. 

 

So, goals moving forward:

 

Aggressive transitions. (do more drills) 
Work on visual patience to increase alpha hits / work on not defining patience as careful. 
Continue the active dry fire schedule
Decisive, confident stage planning. (don't get talked out of a decent plan.)

Set up a drill for aggressive close engagements. (consider a trigger change) 

 

 

  

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If you are battling trigger freeze issues with a stronger grip then you may need some more trigger return spring tension (Middle leg forward on the leaf spring). I can't go below 2lbs on my guns or its trigger freeze crazy. I need a little bit of finger push back pressure to assist in resetting the trigger when rage blasting. For whatever reason my magic trigger pull weight is 2lbs 4oz. When its setup to that weight there is just enough trigger push back to reset properly when rage blasting and its also light enough to minimize trigger mashing on precision shots.

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Thanks Cha-Lee for reminding me of an issue I've had before.  Wow, did I miss the boat on this.  I measured my trigger weight and it was down to 1lb 1oz.  I increased the return pressure and now I'm at at 1lb 11oz trigger weight and the return pressure is nice and strong.  Not a super good idea to do something like this just before a major match, but I felt this was a fix rather than a change.  
Sure enough, I shot the Florida Sectional Custom Gun Classic match last Friday and never had a single instance of trigger freeze.  It turned out to be a very technical match with some insanely far shots and large round count stages that had a lot of movement.  I think about half of the targets were partial no shoots giving all the competitors plenty of opportunity for screwing up. 

 

I didn't feel very good about my overall performance and accepted way too many opportunities to screw up.  So what's going on?  Reading back in my journal the general attitude has taken a shift and is mostly negative.  It's gone from "good vs bad" to "breeze by something decent vs laundry list of what went wrong."   I don't like it and I no longer feel it's the same journal nor provides the same value as it once did.  Time for a change up. 

 

From now on I'm going to assume that I've gained the ability to review a match and if some skill has slipped by the wayside I can recognize it and work on some drills to increase performance in that area.  What will I do for the journal then?  I'm going to just see what comes up.  I like concentrating on the positive and will continue to do so and talk about what I liked and how much fun I'm having.  This "slump" I'm in is the result of several things and rather than act like it's something I need to get over I'm just going to shoot, practice, and have fun.  Some things that have caused this slump?  Me!  I think I'm trying to expect more of myself.  I'm just plain thinking I should be better and this is causing me to act as if I was once a better shooter than I am now.   The next thing is the move.  I'm shooting with all new people, at new ranges, and new weather conditions.  It's all different than I've ever experienced before.  My hands are sweaty all day, I'm hot as hell all day, the ground is wet and grassy.  I mean this is like a whole new planet.  Yes I've shot matches in this environment before... but like once a year.  Not every weekend.  It's all new and I'm just going to enjoy it and adapt.  I'm giving myself a break for a while. 

 

So shaking off the negativity, what should I really be thinking about the Custom Gun Classic?

Overall, the match was fun.  It was very challenging and while I made a mistake on almost every stage that gave up points by the bucket load.  Generally I shot like I'm capable of shooting.  My equipment ran flawlessly and was accurate.  There were some pretty spicy transitions and in some cases downright impressive engagements.  I wound up 2nd overall and the top Open shooter certainly worked hard and has been shooting great.  He has smoked me the last two major matches and I'm going to hit the practice range to try to avoid him getting a hat trick over old John.

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I was able to make some practice on Wednesday morning last week, and also made a local match at Hansen Gun Range in Punta Gorda.  

The practice session was a fairly quick one, but Heather and I felt good about it.  We setup two very close, wide open targets and then ran about 5 steps where we stepped into a box and shot 4 targets at 20 yards.  3 were partial noshoots and one was an open sideways target.  So it was a hose - move - aim scenario that we could use to work on several issues.  

I felt great about getting some spicy times on the drill and managing a run or two with all alphas.  I didn't concentrate too much on exact transition times but transitioning has been my primary focus lately.

 

I worked in the garage all day saturday cutting up sheets of some sweet maple plywood that I'll be using to make my chop-saw table.  In the process I really stressed my left arm and basically made a giant leap backwards with it.  I'm still pissed about it and I'm hoping I can make a speedy recovery.  The only hope I have is that the pain isn't quite as deep into the joint as before.  It's really more like a tendon soreness right on top of the outside elbow.  Today It's at about 50% of the pain level from Sunday morning.  I'm hoping that by tomorrow it will be low enough that when ll hit the gym I can do upper body training without aggravating it.   

I had really made some progress since getting it pain free and as recently as Friday was able to completely close the #1 COC Gripper 5 times with my left hand.  That's almost as strong as my right hand which can completely close it 7 times.  Both hands can complete a set of 10-12 reps that close within about 1/4" of touching.  I celebrated by ordering the #1.5 Gripper. (167.5lbs).  I can close the new one once with my right and haven't tried with my left due to the pain.  I'm having a great time at the gym and I'm really starting to feel the effects both in and out of the gym. 

 

So, I went ahead and created a no frills video.  The shooting was fun and challenging and the weather was just plain awesome all day.  I was pretty darn happy with the overall shooting and although there is nothing to get excited about in my performance I had a good time.  I felt like I called all my shots and didn't do anything particularly stupid.  It felt good to just shoot and have a good time.  I'm still going to practice my usual weaknesses and work on getting my transitions down, but for the most part still trying to relax and just enjoy shooting. 

 

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Well, I babysat my left arm all week.  Didn't feel like going back to the acupuncture guy.  I wore my brace, or KT tape when working in the garage and iced it each night along with flexion exercises and the other stuff.  It's feeling really good.  I still feel a dull ache pain, but I think I'm getting over it.  If it still hurts at the end of the week I'll get back to the acupuncture guy.

 

We went and did some live fire practice on Saturday and it was a good session.  We setup 13 round stage and ran it about 12 times.   It was wide V-shape with hard leans on both sides and some steel through a port in the middle.  The targets on either side were a partial no-shoot next to a wide open and a target.  One side had a lone target 20 yards down.  The idea was to work on settling on a partial despite making it difficult with the lean.  Then, the idea of a much faster split on the open coupled with another careful aim on the left side lean position.  For added benefit I made the start position outside the shooting area. 

So we kept score the entire time and my best run was 10.00 seconds with 1 charlie.  I never managed to get a perfect run.  Heather did very well and learned a lot about some leaning techniques.  When we had both sufficiently proven that making sure the shots were properly called felt slower, but actually decreased our times we went home. 

 

Practice was put to the test at the WAC match we attended on Sunday.  That's the one with the strange half covered berms.  I created one vid to show how brutal the lighting can be.  I had a mike on the first swinger.  I shot 3 times at it, but when it entered that hyper light band the dot became impossible to see. I was screwed a couple of times by that particular lighting scenario, but this is the only one that cost me a mike.  The other time was on a partial no-shoot and I didn't want to pull any makeups without having seen the dot.  I got lucky and had 2 deltas, but there's no doubt that this is an unusual condition that you have to give yourself a break for.   

 

Besides the lighting, I perceived the match as a disaster from a performance standpoint.  Without getting into detail I wanted to reflect on what's happening.  Why do I think I'm in a slump or basically sucking?  There are two things that I think are affecting my performance.  

 

First, is my general feeling.  This is a weird place to be where I don't know ANYBODY for EVERY match I go to.  It's not like a major match where there's a general feeling of wanting to meet new people that you may, or may not ever see again.  This is like "I'm new in school and don't know who to hang around" type of thing.  This makes me feel a bit weird about whatever I do.  I don't know what people are thinking about me and I'm actually worried about how I'll be perceived when I shoot.  This coupled with the fact that Heather is with me so I could actually shoot an entire match and never speak to anybody.  We are a pretty outgoing couple so that doesn't generally happen, but I can't deny that it occasionally stops some contact outside of us as a couple.   Maybe I'm self sabotaging because of my "fear" of how I'm being perceived?  Maybe it's just distracting knowing everyone is watching "the new guy."  I don't know but I need to get over it and make an effort to find some freinds.   

 

Second, sort of falls into the same category.  Expectations.  I have identified a "GM's don't do that" or "I have to do this because top GM's do it" sort of feeling.  I may be thinking each mistake I make is somehow new, or worse because "I'm not supposed to do that shit."   Cha-Lee and I had a chat about these expectations a long time ago.  I now completely understand that conversation.  

 

What does this boil down to for me?  I need to just continue training, shooting, and work on getting to know people.  I'll STOP beating myself up for the mistakes and use the match summary to identify what we'll practice on the following Saturday.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Heather and I shot a match this weekend at the Hansen Range in Punta Gorda.   It was a bitter disappointment from a performance standpoint.  
I allowed myself to get lazy and didn't perform any dry fire practice all week.  We also skipped practice on Saturday.  In my defense, I wanted to work on 
my miter table to try to get the frame shop back up and running and spent every evening working on that.  Whoa, it's a complex beast.  By far the biggest woodworking AND engineering challenge I've taken on with wood.  I got sick of using crooked ass construction lumber and blew about $300 in Maple multi ply prefinished plywood.  (3 sheets at $90.00/ea) 
It's been a whole new world of accuracy and mindset building a structure from something only 18mm thick that needs to stand up to weight and remain perfectly flat and aligned.  However, since this is a shooting journal and not a woodworking journal I digress. 

 

The physical training has been going well.  I feel like I'm really getting used to the workouts and find it easy to continue.  I haven't seen a major physical change yet, but did decide to really start pushing my arm recovery harder.  Although there's still some pain, I've noticed that if I really work it hard it feels the same, not worse.  So I'm going to keep pushing it every other day and make a difference in the muscle mass.   Part of the reason is that when I was doing dips Heather noticed that my elbows were different.  Upon inspection (and an initial panic that it was a joint coming out of socket) I decided that the only difference between my left and right elbows is that the right has a noticeably thicker layer of muscle over the radial joint.  This is precisely the area that needs to be strong to avoid tennis elbow.  Therefor I need to work it a lot harder to really build the muscle and stop pussy-footing around.  I've done this for 2 workouts now (4 days) and the pain is at least the same, if not slightly less.  Good sign!  As long as it's not worse I'm going to keep working it way harder.

 

So, onto the shooting:

I had a couple of decent runs where I was really shooting solid and calling shots.  One of them was a weak hand only stage that went really well.  Another was a strong movement stage and a bunch of partials that I really nailed.  So I did get some moments of calling alphas and keeping the shooting time separate from the moving time.  However, I created quite a contrast with the remaining stages that were a train wreck.  I allowed myself to shoot some pretty careless shots and found that I was giving up a lot of shooting quality in an effort to increase moving time.  That's not what I'm supposed to be doing so I'm going to get back into identifying some areas for improvement and keeping a goal list.   This was something I thought I could get away without doing but screw that.  If there are things to fix, there are goals to set.

 

Moving forward I'll work on this:

 

Shed the expectations.  Certain times, or certain placement are not part of performance.  Just shoot and enjoy.

No matter how long it takes, get the alpha. 

Increase alphas by 2%/month at least. 

Keep the energy up.  Be more encouraging, and more engaging to everyone on the squad. 

Remember your most important tool for shooting.  Work on the body and get the arm back in the game.

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