CHA-LEE

I don’t think that match shooting is in the cards for me this coming weekend. Valentines day is on Saturday and I had already committed to helping another friend work on his car on Sunday. I might be able to get some live fire practice in on Saturday morning, but the weather forecast isn’t looking good and the outdoor ranges will probably be a mud bog, which isn’t fun for running in or picking up brass. I think a good dose of dry fire practice should be done in place of attending local matches. I really need to work on my draw and reloads. I have been slacking big time in that department and it is starting to show in the matches. Shooting Limited has really spoiled me on not needing reloads on most of the stages. Then on the run and gun stages where you do need to reload its pretty easy to incorporate a fumbled reload into a movement from one place to another and it does not screw up your stage time much. Time to do the “Not so Fun” stuff in dry fire practice to get the basics up to where they should be. Only 10 months left to make A Class in Limited.

With the GM's that I have seen shoot classifiers, they do it the same speed as any other stage. There is no more or less importance put on the classifier verses any other stage in the match. They ARE that fast and accurate on a consistent basis, thus why they have the GM card. I know from my own performance, I am able to shoot the classifiers pretty fast and accurate, but my times are getting hurt by my slower draw/first shot and mag changes. Right now I am able to shoot most classifiers stages right around 70%. If I worked on my draw/first shot and reloads to shave off 1 second of wasted time, which is totally doable, that would instantly jump me to the 80% range. To me that’s a good motivator because its basically “Free” stage time to make up on not only the classifier stages, but the other match stages as well. From what I have seen, it really comes down to the polishing of your core skill set. The more polished and "Automatic" it becomes the faster everything gets. If you try and force the shooting beyond your current skill set trying for a “Hero” run, it will almost always be worse than shooting it at your normal comfort level. I don’t know about anyone else, but what value does a XX Class card have when you know you can’t shoot at that level normally? If you had a few “Hero” classifiers that bumped you into the next skill class but you still shoot the matches at the lower skill level, what is the point of trying to artificially bump up your classification? I would rather be an overall solid B Class shooter than a barely B Class shooter that lucked into getting an A Classification by burning down a few classifiers. We all know our own skill level by how we shoot. Do you really need a card sent to you in the mail saying that you are now this class verses another? You should know what class shooter you are without the classification system.

I just counted up the Limited entries for the match and it's up to 118 competitors so far. This is about 35 ahead of the next closest division at the match which is Open. This match has already surpassed the amount of Limited competitors that attended the Area 2 match at Rio Salado in 2008. Iron Sights may be ruling the roost at this match.

Wow, thats hard core setting up the stages ahead of time at your local range. The bad thing with that is what is on paper is never exactly the same as what shows up in real life. I hope that the practice does not throw you for a loop if the stages are different at the Double Tap. I don't know about others, but once you program a stage in your head its there for good. If the stages you programed are sligtly different than the real deal, then there might be trouble. At least I know I would have trouble with it. Either way, getting some trigger time on full open targets is nice.

eerw> Thanks buddy. It was a lot of fun. Hope to see you shoot again at the WP monday match.

Sunday’s match didn’t get rained out which was great. The weather was a little chilly and windy but we were able to shoot without being in a mud bog or getting rained/snowed on so I was happy. We had 41 shooters that day and 11 in Limited. My friend did great for his first match. He was safe and took his time like he should and had a great time. I hope he comes back again for some other matches. We had a small squad, only 9 shooters, and two of them where new shooters. My other friend that also shoots an EAA pistol forgot his holster so we shared mine and had to switch back and forth with him every stage. The shooters on our squad were really flexible though and allowed us to switch around the shooting order to get everything ironed out each stage. Its really nice to shoot with guys that are laid back and there to have some safe fun. I can see the whole new shooters situation plus the holster swapping thing cause some other ultra competitive shooters to start throwing a fit because their shooting order was not shifting around the way they wanted. But our squad was great. Lots of fun, patience, and laughs. I shot the match fairly solid. My stage times were good, but my hits were a little sloppy. Through six stages I had three Mikes, and eight Deltas. Two of the three Mike’s I called while shooting them but once again, I didn’t make them up. One Mike was about ¼ inch into the hard cover of a head shot only target which I “Called” a good hit, but wasn’t. I can somewhat live with the Delta hits I got given the stages we had. Three of the stages had really far away targets covered with no shoots and one stage had a target which only presented the D scoring area to save about 3 seconds of stage time by engaging it that way. So on that one, I just figured that it would be worth taking the D hits instead of the time hit of getting into a different shooting position to pick up higher points on the target. The number one absolutely hurting performance on my part that day were my reloads. Every one of them were fumbled to some extent. On one stage I missed the reload so bad the magazine almost flipped out of my hand. Over all of the stages I probably “Gave away” about 5 – 6 seconds in fumbled reloads. I have not been practicing reloads in dry fire practice and it is really showing in my match performance. I really need to get back on the band wagon with the dry fire practice and spending some solid time on reloads. When the scores were posted, much to my surprise I ended up winning Limited class by 4 points over a Master shooter. The regular “Heavy Hitters” were not in attendance, so I figured I would do better than usual overall, but I didn’t expect to win. Very cool indeed. I think if the regular Limited crowd was shooting I might have ended up with 3rd or 4th overall given my performance. I am fine with that and wouldn’t expect my performance to win overall anyway. It would be nice to get a match where everything was hitting on all cylinders though. But I think that is still many months off. Lots and lots of practice is still needed on my part before I will get there.

I got some good practice in today. We setup a 22 round stage with lots of movement and ran through it a bunch of times. I was able to shoot the stage at a good pace and had great accuracy. I switched up the target engagement order a couple of times to see what way would be the best/fastest. I also helped a friend of mine get use to the USPSA style shooting. His first match is going to be tomorrow so I wanted to get some practice in for him today to get use to all of the range commands and what not. He did good for his first day of practical shooting. He took his time and was safe and best of all he enjoyed it. He is really looking forward to tomorrows match. I just hope that it does not get rained out. The forecast for tomorrow isn’t looking so good for the match. There is still a 60% chance of rain and that might shut the match down. After the live fire practice I did some dry fire practice with the surrender and facing away from the target. I tested it both directions and was able to get the first shot off in about the same time going either direction, but going to the left (non-holster side) put me in my normal stance once I was turned around. Where as going right would leave my feet in a strange stance that I am not very comfortable with. It would also mess with my shooting index once the gun was up and on target. Some times it was where it should be and other times it wasn’t. Going to the left allowed me to get the gun up and on target in my natural index/stance every time. So, I think that is the direction need to go. The key to it for me is to snap my head around and get the target in sight as soon as possible. If I do that the rest of my lower body follows pretty much automatically. I am ready to shoot the match tomorrow, I just hope it does not get rained out.

I think its hard to define exactly how/when something in your shooting stops being commanded by you consciously and transitions to becoming subconsciously controlled by your built in auto pilot, essentially becoming automated with zero effort on your part. I can tell you that when I first started shooting my conscious focus was on my grip pressure and trigger control, at some point it just became automated for me and did not require any thought to perform. The only thing I can truly say that I do different now is to stop thinking, analyzing, worrying, or commanding anything right before the buzzer goes off. I just let it all go and know that my internal auto pilot will get the job done. When I do that and let it just "happen" that is when I shoot my best. When I try to force a situation the outcome is always worse. How or when does someone have enough confidence or faith in their "auto pilot skills" to truly let go and know it will happen the way it should is very hard to explain. There isn't a hard line in the sand or switch to flip to enable that in a shooter. You really can't explain how to turn it on either. Each shooter needs to be able to turn it on for themselves. I competed in other competitive hobbies which required 100% faith in your skills for many years before starting shooting, so for me it is easy to let the auto pilot take over. For others that have never experienced that it is an elusive thing to find. Is this a thinker or feeler mentality? I have no idea.

As we all know it is some times hard to find the .40 S&W EAA Witness Limited pistols to buy. I found the below one on Gunbroker.com. I am in no way affiliated with the seller, just trying to pass on the news. I know that I was pulling my hair out trying to find one when I wanted to buy one. Hopefully this helps someone find their own easier. http://www.gunbroker.com/Auction/ViewItem.asp?Item=122275437

This weekend will be some practice on Saturday and then a USPSA match on Sunday. I am really looking forward to the practice on Saturday. I need to work on my shooting on the move from right to left. I am also going to practice surrender starts when facing away from the targets. I want to try both going left and right a bunch of times to see which way is really faster and more consistent for me. It always seems to be a soul searching event when I get a full day of practice where I can try things over and over. Sunday is a match in Pueblo, they have a great range and usually do 6 stages which is an extra bonus. I am getting a friend of mine into USPSA shooting and it will be his first match so we will have to get there really early to run him through the safety class. The only thing that sucks is that the weather is not looking good for Sunday. There is a 60% chance of rain that day and the match may be canceled. I don’t want to shoot in the rain as everything will be a mud bog. But if they have the match I will go. If they cancel the match I will just get some practice in locally. The progress of my classifier scores is going well. I now have three 70+% classifiers logged and three high 65+% classifiers. My initial goal is to get six classifiers in the 70% range and that should make moving up to “A” class all that much easier. The thing that sucks is that I feel that I am able to produce “A” Class performances on the normal stages, but seem to run into some issue during the classifiers. Botched draws, missed reloads, misses, or whatever seem to creep into the mix when its time to shoot the classifier stage. I am still yet to have a classifier where I felt like it was a solid 100% effort on my part with no mistakes. I have been slacking on doing dry fire practice at home so it’s really not a surprise that I struggle with the basics. I have been so busy lately that I barely have time to reload rounds for the next match, much less set aside time for dry fire practice. That’s just an excuse though, it needs to be done to get better. So I need to make time for it just like everything else. Oh yeah, its by Birthday Today….. Happy Birthday To Me!!!

I was thinking about doing something just like that. Get-r-done!!!

I was a Thinker, then found that it slowed me down and made my speed and accuracy less consistent. I found myself always thinking about my grip and trying to adjust it in the middle of a stage. Now I am a Feeler and its amazing how much faster I can build the grip and engage targets. The cool thing for me is that I am now automatically increasing/decreasing my overall grip pressure depending on the shots needed. For example, if I am engaging a series of targets that are somewhat far away and I need a relatively good sight picture my grip pressure will be about medium strength. If I am engaging a bunch of close targets that require point shooting with a marginal sight picture at a really fast speed, my grip pressure will be high strength. Like I said before though, I don't even think about it any more during the stage, it just happens. The only way I can tell the difference in grip pressure is if I watch a video of me shooting the stage and see the muzzle flip/arm pump difference between the two shooting conditions. There isn't enough time to think about your grip during a stage, it needs to just happen on its own.

I seen you battling the jams on the first stage. That didn't look fun at all. I wish I would have seen you run the classifier stage, it sounds like you tore it up!!!

In your live fire video it looks like you are not bringing the gun up and out fast enough. Most of the GM's I have seen draw explode the draw up and out in a punching motion. Your draw seems to be more of an upward swoop motion than a punching out toward the target motion. Check out the video below of Matt Burkett, Rob Leatham, and Nick Saiti doing some drills. At the 1:08 minute mark Nick is doing a drill with a surrender draw with a reload in the middle and it is absolutely SICK. The reload Nick does makes it look like his gun is sliding on a rail between his eyes and the target. It pulls straight back for the reload the straight forward after the reload. If you look at the footage enough times you can see that he is actually pumping the gun in and out twice. Once to get the mag out, then another time to get the new mag in. There is only about 2 inches of pumping and it does not look like he is losing any time. I had never seen someone break down a reload like that in two separate steps before, but it seems to work pretty darn good for him. Most people pull the gun back as the mag is being released and pick one position for the new mag to come in. Him doing it in essentially two steps shows yet another way of doing a wicked reload. At the end of the video it shows Rob and Nick doing one shot surrender draws in the .7 - .8 second range. If you watch their arm movement they are using a up and punch out motion. I have watched that video about 50 times and have picked up a LOT of good information on proper draw and reload processes from it. Can I draw or shoot like that? Hell no, but at least I know where I should be and just like G.I. Joe says "Knowing is half the battle".

I shot an indoor USPSA match tonight. Two stages, one box to box stage and a classifier stage (99-08 Melody Line). I shot the first stage “ok” overall. My reaction time to the buzzer to the first shot was not so good, just took too long to break the first shot. My movement from box to box was ok, but I could have done better on leaving the first box sooner as I was finishing up the last shots. Overall my shooting cadence and accuracy was good. Lots of A hits with some C hits, but no D’s or Mikes. This is good as it tells me my shooting pace was right in my comfort zone. The results have not been posted yet, but I believe that I won that stage. The second stage is where the wheels fell of the wagon. The 99-08 Classifier has you start in a surrender position facing away from the targets. You turn and engage the six targets (two are open and four have varying amounts of hard cover on them) with one round each freestyle, reload and then do it again free style. Its Virginia count so no make up shots. Well the buzzer goes off, I turn and start engaging the targets and call two misses as I go though the fist string. Then I fumble the reload a little and finish with all of my hits on the second string. When it was over I looked at the targets where I called the misses and sure enough one mike over the shoulder on one and one in the black on another. I shot a 2nd gun on the classifier and was able to shoot it clean with a mixture of A’s and C’s, but no D’s or Mikes in about the same time. I don’t know my exact score but I believe my second gun result should be a low 70% result, which isn’t bad. The interesting thing about it is that on the first attempt at the classifier I turned to the right (holster side) and it felt a little strange as if I had to wait for my legs to catch up and get planted before I could start shooting. I snapped my head and shoulders around fast but it still felt like my waist and legs had to unwind before I could settle down the sights and get shooting. The second time I turned to the left (non-holster side) and it felt a lot better and more natural to me. I didn’t have the twisted up needing to get planted before shooting feeling like I did before. I also felt more comfortable with leaving my gun in the holster until my hips were pivoted around then drawing. An advantage to that I think is that it allowed me to have a little more time to get a nice and secure grip on the pistol before I actually pulled it out of the holster. Then by the time I was pulling it out of the holster my foot placement was where it should be and I felt totally stable and ready to shoot as soon as the gun was up and out. My time didn’t suffer going this other direction, but there is the risk of breaking the 180deg rule if I pull the gun out of the holster too soon. I will have to do some more practice with each method to break it down even further. I must be doing something wrong with the footwork when turning to the right. Maybe it’s a leg dominance thing where I am trying to leverage my non-dominant leg for guiding the movement and its not up to the task? I know that in my normal shooting stance that my right leg is about a foot behind my left leg. I can see how turning to the left would be optimal for this kind of stance, where as going the other direction would force me to move my right leg a long way around before its in its normal position. All I can do is practice both ways and see which one ends up being the best for me. Enough rambling, Listed below is the YouTube video of me shooting Stage 1.

There are two different fame types to the EAA pistols. There are the "Large Frame" and "Small Frame" types. I am not sure which one works with a .22 conversion though. Try reposting your question in the EAA thread un the "Forum Dealers" sections of this site. Someone that watches that thread would probably know the answer to your question.

Other than the obvious of practice, practice, practice the things that really helped improve my one handed only shooting are listed below. (1) Always bring your non-shooting hand up against your chest. I like to bring my non-shooting hand up in a fist and press my thumb into the center of my chest as I shoot. This keeps your non-shooting hand from swinging around as you shoot. (2) Bias the shoulder of the hand you are shooting from slightly forward. You shouldn't have to change your stance to achieve this. You don't want to go too extreme with the bias as that will hinder your ability to move from target to target or physically move from one shooting position to another. (3) Do not shoot the pistol with the sights straight up and down. Cant the sights at a 45 deg angle toward the center of your body. This amazingly helps a LOT with controlling the recoil and keeps the gun recoiling in an up and down motion instead of an up and to the side motion. (4) Always use your thumb as a primary point of gripping force. For example, with a 1911 type of pistol, your thumb should be up on the safety and pushing down and in with quite a bit of force. Then your fingers should be gripping only front to back. Just make sure that you don't have a "Snow Cone" type of grip on the gun with your thumb pointing down. If your thumb isn't high up on the gun and pushing down it will be a lot harder to control the recoil. (5) Most guns like to recoil Up and Right when shooting one handed. Use that motion to your advantage when shooting strings of targets. Whenever I have to shoot weak handed I try to engage the targets from left to right as the guns natural recoil will promote the movement over to the next target. Strong handed it does not seem to make much of a difference if I got left to right or right to left. But I can feel an advantage in going left to right when shooting weak handed. The shooting seems to flow better that direction without having to fight the gun. (6) Do not lock out your elbow. You lose a lot of recoil management and target transition control when your elbow is locked out. Plus when your elbow is bent it serves as a shock absorber soaking up the recoil as your shoot. Other than that, all you can do is incorporate a good amount of one handed shooting into your practice schedule and before you know it you will look forward to leveraging one handed shooting to tackle a stage better or faster than everyone else. You will see that it is rare that a shooter transitions from a free style grip to a one handed grip during a stage, but when it does happen its usually rewarded with a bunch of time saved. I know that I have been able to save seconds on a stage by engaging targets one handed because it puts my body in an optimal position to get in and out of a shooting position. Where as other shooters get all pretzeled up trying to squeeze into a shooting position and engage the target with a two handed grip.

That thing looks great!!! Let us know how it runs at the matches.

Try rounding the front edges of the sight notch so there isn't a sharp edge to cut into the sight. Thats what I had to do on mine to keep it from carving away the sight as I installed it.

Since I had an AD today I did a trigger pull weight test on my pistol and it was at a 1lb 4oz pull weight, instead of the 2lbs I was expecting No wonder I had an AD. With a trigger that light the hammer will drop even with the slightest touch of the trigger. At least with my big hands that is. I reworked the trigger and got it back up to a 2lb pull weight. It feels a lot better and secure now. I have to conciously pull back on the trigger to get the hammer to fall. Instead of before I would just place my finger on the trigger and it would be close to dropping the hammer. I guess this is a two fold lesson. Keep your finger off the trigger unless engaging targets and regularly double check your equipment for its proper function.

I would really like to do some testing with a 105/125 setup. For some reason I think it would be easier to get a more clear and faster sight picture if both the front and rear sights were wider, but done proportionatly. But logic and reality some times don't like up. When you get your 105/125 sight setups done let me know because I want to do some back to back testing against the 90/117 setup I am currently using.

Well there is some Good, Bad and Ugly from this weekends matches. The good is that my fairly solid shooting on Saturday netted me a 3rd place finish in Limited out of 14 shooters. I was even able to win a couple of the stage. But a miss and a no shoot blew my score out of contention for the win. Not making up my misses I guess would be the bad. The Ugly was today's match. It started out good, I was shooting well and pushing the ragged edge on speed. On the first stage, the stage plan I came up with was flawed and luckily another shooter on the squad pointed out a better way to shoot it. The only problem was that the different strategy was recommended right before I was going to shoot and I had already programmed the other method in my head. So I was only able to give the new way a couple of tries before it was time to shoot. Needless to say I felt clunky shooting it the new way, but I ended up with a time that would have been at least 2 seconds faster than the original plan. I shot the stage clean and got all of my hits, but was about 2 seconds off the top time in the squad. The second stage was a box to box to box stage where you had to engage three targets from each box with varying hard cover and no shoots covering the brown stuff. On the first string of three targets I called a miss on the last target but once again failed to make it up because I was already exiting the shooting box. I know, lousy excuse but for some reason my brain put a higher priority on getting moving to the next box over making up the missed shot. It sucks because my time on this stage was more than a second faster than the other shooters on my squad. Ok, so here comes the real ugly stuff. The next stage was a 32 round memory style stage with many of the targets able to engage from many vantage points. Lots of walls and other blocking items on this stage. You had to plan the target engagement strategy in an order that was a little out of the normal process to minimize having to run all over the place to engage all of the targets. I had the stage programmed really well and after the buzzer went off I was doing good against my plan until I finished with two close targets where I planned on doing my mag change. I engaged the two targets well but it put me in an awkward stance because my next target was almost 180 deg from the last close target. I was pushing it to the limit on speed and as I pulled my gun back to start the mag change I had an AD. Luckily for me, and everyone else, the AD happened right as I started pulling my hand back to initiate the mag release button push and the round went safely into the berm and not over it. As soon as the AD happened I instantly stopped myself and unloaded and showed clear before the RO even had a chance to tell me to stop. So I basically DQed myself since I knew a round went off unintentionally. The other guys on the squad were talking about how it may not be considered an AD since the shot went off only about 6 inches high of the target and still hit the berm. But to me, it didn't feel right to try to wiggle out of being DQed. My pistol discharged when I did not intend it to, whether the gun is pointed in a "good" position when it happens or not, its still not safe. It was a good lesson to learn about pushing yourself far past your skill level and comfort zone. I got some good recommendations about training in the calling/making up missed shots without having to push yourself too fast so I am going to go down that path now. Overall I was pretty bummed about allowing myself to be pushed too fast and cause an unsafe situation. Going a tenth of a second faster isn’t worth pushing yourself to the point of being unsafe. I hope that this is the one and only time for this "Lesson". I apologized to the other shooters in my squad but I know that is little consolation for putting them in a dangerous situation. I stuck around the rest of the match though and helped with scoring and what not. I have seen shooters get DQed before then jump in there car and leave right after it happens. I didn’t want to be "That Guy" so I figured I could at least help with scoring, taping and brassing to make the shooting more enjoyable for the other shooters on my squad. I am going to participate in an indoor match tomorrow. It will be interesting to see how much today's "Lesson" will impact my performance. I know that I will not be pushing the limits on speed though. I will focus on going at a pace that feels good to me.

I shot a USPSA match today. I stuck to my plan on pushing speed over everything else and forced myself to make up my called misses. Much to my delight I was able to make up all of the misses I called. I had one miss that I didn’t call but it was a marginal hit that dropped about 1/8th of an inch in the black hard cover on a head shot only target about 10 yards away. I called it a good hit, but it wasn’t. That wasn’t a surprise to me though as I was pushing the limit on speed. Going faster than my comfort zone ended up with some extra work with having to go back for called misses, but overall it was good training for me. I am not sure how I finished overall for the match as the results have not been posted yet, but I felt like I had a solid performance today. No major screw ups, but some bobbles here or there. It will be interesting to see how I ended up against the rest of the Limited shooters. There is another match I am going to be attending tomorrow. Its suppose to be a high of 39 deg tomorrow, so the first couple of stages will be cold ones. I look forward to shooting the match though as its always a bunch of fun. I think I will stick to the same plan of pushing speed over smoothness to force myself to pick up the shots I call misses. I need to get to the point where I am picking up the misses automatically and don’t have to think about it.

Is it time to shoot yet??? I cant wait

I have two USPSA matches planned for this coming weekend. The weather is suppose to be decent on Saturday but some snow is expected for Sunday. I hope that we don’t get any snow on Sunday, but there isn’t much we can do but wait and watch. I have been working on my dry fire practice and setting up some mach stages where I have to run through them and engage the targets on the move. This kind of practice is hard for be because I have a hard time with engaging the targets without the gun going “Bang” when I pull the trigger. I have been thinking about getting an Airsoft pistol for the dry fire practice so there is at least some mechanical happening when I pull the trigger, but all of the decent airsoft guns I can find are 2011 STI/SVI based pistols. I am shooting an EAA Witness Limited pistol in competition so I think it wouldn’t be wise to practice at home with a completely different style of pistol. I have looked all over the place for an airsoft version of the EAA Witness Limited but none can be found. I think this is where the STI/SVI shooters have an advantage. Those guns have a lot more aftermarket following than the EAA pistols. Either way any amount of dry fire practice with my EAA is better than nothing. I have been thinking about the matches this weekend trying to figure out what I want to focus on and am coming up blank for a specific skill I should work on. In the past I always tried to pick one aspect of my shooting and focus on that during the match. Overall I feel pretty solid with my basics so maybe I should focus on pulling all of these basics together during the match. I know that I will squad with the “normal” guys again to force myself to worry about my own shooting and no one else. Then just let it happen I guess. Right now my best feedback device is my own critique of performance after the stage. When I review the video of the stages after the match its now rare for me to see a “New” screw up that I didn’t notice while shooting the stage. This is good because I am a lot more in tune with what is happening while shooting. Maybe a good strategy for this weekend is to go a little too fast and force myself to make up shots when I call misses. I know I need to work on that aspect of my skills. Man, this feels like a brain dump ramble. But I guess this is the main purpose of a range diary