I shot two matches yesterday. The first was the very first USPSA match at West Liberty, IA, and the second was at CRAPS. I had a day that was kind of up and down. I had a very rough time of it in the morning, I had a lot of malfunctions with the gun early. The RO pointed out that I was really hammering the mags into the gun and driving the feed lips into the slide. The bent baseplates on my mags and my torn up left palm are some good evidence of that. When I focused on being smooth with my reloads and taking more time, the problem (mostly) went away. I think though that I may have to try some new mags, I borrowed a Wilson mag from another single stack shooter and it worked really well, so I may need to invest in some. I did have some high points in my match though, because my match score was pretty well destroyed anyway I went for broke on a couple of stages and tried things I wouldn't have otherwise. Doing so I managed to do things I didn't think I could. On one stage there were two poppers and a drop turner activated by one of the drop turners. Since the pressure was off I shot the popper that started the turner, transitioned to the other popper, then back to the drop turner and got an Alpha Charlie. I was super excited about pulling that off, since the last (and first) drop turner I had shot at I sat on waiting for it to turn and still had two mikes. I also managed to shoot a faily close target (about 3 yards) while I was on the move getting two Alphas.
At CRAPS, I had a much better running gun. I shot a stage with a lot of no shoots, and managed to keep all my shots in the brown. I was very glad about this, because before I have fixatted on the no shoots leading me to shoot them. I shot the classifier with a pretty good time but managed to throw a mike which will give me a D, but I was still ok with my performance. I had a great time with the third stage, which was all about speed draws. You had to draw and shoot two steel in order at about 5 yards. My first run was right at 2.6 seconds, which is a great improvement since as recently as last month my draw was a lot closer to 4 seconds.
Overall my day was great, I shot upwards of 350 rounds, learned a lot, and had a great time. I need to focus on being smooth and not comparing myself to others (escpecially those way better than me).