Glock26Toter

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

Oh, I just realized I wrote extractor. I meant ejector. It has nothing to do with the closing of the slide. It happens on the open. At any rate, I was just giving my opinion that there is risk. Detonations do happen from it. Although rare.

Just like driving. Look at where you want to go. For some straight on engagement like draw-fire... the first intended hit. If it's a table start of some kind, look at your pistol. If it's a "go there and start" look "there." Of course... if it's "facing downrange" you have to look downrange.

You are doing great. Keep up the work.

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

I have known several people that have had detonations from the round catching on the extractor. It does happen. I flipped and caught for a long time, and suddenly I did it once and the round caught. There was a dent on the primer that should have set it off, but it didn't. Out of habit, I did it again later and same dent. Lucky me. I don't know what exactly changed on my gun but I no longer do it and use the "slow and steady" method to ULSC now and at least two more times rounds have caught on my extractor right on the primer. However, no dent since I was racking the slide slower. I'm not aware if my gun still does this. Been a long time since a round has caught.... may have just been a fluke but I don't do that anymore.

You should be able to grip with both hands very hard, like 80% of your max grip strength and be able to move your trigger finger ONLY with no other movement. It takes time, and lots of dry fire practice. I use the Ben Stoeger mini dry fire kits and dry fire at least 3 targets (usually 1 open, 2 partial and plate rack or a couple of poppers) for each exercise I'm doing. Grip very firmly, and evenly with both hands and the sight should pretty much not move. Grip strength training will help a lot. The more tuned all your muscles are the easier it is to isolate their movement. Another thing to think about is that when you are gripping "evenly" with both hands you will probably perceive that you are gripping much harder with your weak hand. At least, until serious grip strength training makes them actually even.

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.

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)

My only issue with stuff like this is that it, does hurt businesses. This is a small industry (USPSA I mean, not guns) and many of us actually know Saul Kirsch and recognize that he's given a LOT to this sport over the years. I know that stuff is expensive, but the reason is really because of the relatively small industry. As an example I looked into producing a product for the Alpaca industry. At the time there were around 300 US Farms. I would have had to invest $10k to get the item produced. If I sold one to EVERY FARM for $100.00 I would have a very measly profit. (and we know it doesn't work like that so in fact, I would have been in a deep hole.) Ramp that up... naturally, but not into numbers of mass produced and mass appeal products like the iPhone. Somewhere in between anyways, and you can see how a large R&D and Tooling/manufacture investment can't be spread into a huge customer base from a company like DAA. Not to mention the fact that this is a guy that "we all know." Not really, but the point is, he's one of us. Just like all the other products we buy. This is why I (of course, with a wince of pain while whipping out the credit card) support genuine products created within, and for our industry.

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.

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.

Interesting suggestions on the drift issue. I have had every cmore (3 in total) drift on me. I have never seen a consistent enough issue to know whether it's one adjustment screw or the other. I've talked to plenty of people that say the same thing, but not enough to characterize it as a "general or known" C-More issue. i.e., I don't believe all C-Mores do it. I think it has a lot to do with the mounting position. I don't believe upright mounted C-Mores would see the issue. Suggestions on getting the adjustment screws locked down better are awesome and I'm going to try these. I wonder how often some of the people that claim to never (or rarely) see drift put their guns on rests and sight them in. I'm not claiming they are wrong or don't do it, but just actually wondering. The drift I'm talking about is normally between 1/2" to 2" at 20 yards. So not something you would notice unless actually on a rest. And on the battery thing, I use 2 - 357 batteries instead of the 1/3N. These up the voltage slightly and I've had excellent battery life. I measure the voltage after every match. When the batteries hit between 1.8 and 1.5 V (with full dot brightness) they get tossed. Back to the original thread: I believe it's a matter of just finding a formula that works for you. There is a reason that there are so many different types of sights out there. Although we like, smaller, lighter, and newer technology it may not be up to the task of phasing the older stuff out just yet. That said, in another couple of years I may try another go at a mini dot sight of either newer tech, or another brand. For now, I'm just going to shoot the hell out of these C-Mores and have fun.

I have a Mobius. It's like a $70.00 camera with a dash-cam mode and a sport cam mode... or two sport cam modes. I've had it as a dash cam for around 2 years and it's still working great. I don't use it for a hat cam anymore but did when I first got it. It's a $70.00 camera so don't expect it to perform like a $300 one... but it certainly does the trick if you are after performance analysis and maybe posting some FB/Youtube vids on the cheap.

1/8". I use old 1/8" drill bits cut to size with a Dremel cut-off wheel.

I changed from sideways C-Mores to DPP's and just couldn't get used to the DPP. All dot, and glass size differences aside I found that I could not obtain consistent recoil (dot track) management in a match. In dry fire I could consistently draw to the dot, but in a match I routinely found myself dot hunting when entering odd shooting positions such as hard leans and especially from a low position, coming up into another position. When I went back to my C-Mores, I immediately reacquired my old shooting performance. It was night and day. I attribute this to the fact that I was using the sideways mount as a thumb rest. This kind of side thumb rest and the weight made the gun track very differently and since I have been shooting so many years that way, I decided it was not worth the effort to get used to the new sight. The drag is, I still have that old C-More drift to deal with. Making sure I practice (SIGHT IN) once a week is a small price to pay for the performance I get with my C-Mores as opposed to the DPP. Of course, this is personal experience and I make no claims of how these differences will affect others.

Nice work on making the Open GM Class! It sure has been fun watching you grow as a shooter bro. I'll miss that when I move, but we'll see each other at the majors and hopefully I'll be able to give you a run for your money by then. On the popper calibration, I always tell people there is only ONE answer to "would you like to challenge that?" It can ONLY go in your favor. No extra penalty points given, and even at .01% chance there's still only a positive outcome from it. Always say Yes, and hope for one of the many things that could cause that sucker to fall early. I calibrated a crazy 50 yard mini popper once. There was slight evidence of an edge hit so we all knew it was going to fall. But I relied on the calibration gun being an iron sight gun. Sure enough, the dude hit the thing way above the calibration zone. Gamer's gotta game!

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.

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.

There are certainly a bunch of "cross eye dominant" people out there. I too, am left eye'd and right handed. Never made much issue about it. I personally feel (I get hammered every time I say this, but here goes) I personally feel that having both eyes open is more important than worrying about which eye you are using. My same thought process goes into just drawing the gun to your left eye rather than tilting or moving your head to make it line up. I developed a weird head-tilt for a bit and things were much better when I got that worked out.

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.

I try to ask myself what purpose each prop has when setting up a stage. If it's not contributing to the overall challenge of the stage, then why bother to set it up?

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!

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.

I was not aware of who brought the treats. Thank you! I've now promoted you to "Stand up dude, in my book." HAHA.