Esther

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

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

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

Both, please! You too, Alma.

+1

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

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

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

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

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

Excellent performance on Sunday.

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

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

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

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

Silas - Thanks for the encouragement and advice! Cleats are on my (very) long list of shooting-related items to buy... Chris - Thanks! I like that paraphrased quote! Tim - Thanks! I had a series of very helpful conversations with Bo and Andy about shooting faster up close. Accuracy at (reasonable) speed and one-handed shooting are (relative) strengths; I can implement fine trigger control when required. But I get frustrated that shooters who can't hit the broad side of a barn at 50 yds are posting .2 splits on 7-yd targets while I'm shooting... .4-.5 splits? After a week of learning my gun's reset in dry-fire and dry-firing with barely releasing my trigger finger before bouncing it back into the frame, and a 200-round live-fire session of bill drills at 5 and 7 yds (it was nice to discover that I can hold the sights in the A zone shooting .18 splits, though... I could also see dollar bills flying downrange ), I can tell that my transitions have gotten sharper and crisper. Short reset trigger = Here is a video from yesterday's match:

DoubleL - I had been doing Steve-type draws getting a sight picture and the trigger prepped without pulling all the way through, but (for me) it ingrained a pause in my pulling through the trigger, and I wasn't prepping it enough, so that in live-fire I would have my sights up, trigger prepped 1/2 to 2/3 of the way, and then snatch through the rest. I'm now experimenting with getting my sights and then pulling the trigger straight through in a single uninterrupted motion. Glad Steve's drill worked for you! eric nielsen - Thanks and thanks for passing along Ben's drill! I've been working with the COC grippers since the winter. When I started, I could close the 80# a few times with each hand and the 100# not at all. I can now close the 80# easily 15 x 3 sets and the 100# fully a few times with each hand. I know I have a long way to go in increasing strength, though...

ChuckS - Thanks for the helpful link (and linked article)! emjei - Yes it is and Mink did a trigger job on it.

Magsz - I was shooting a XDM before. I think I never started pressing the trigger until my sights were on target, but because it was such a short, light trigger, it didn't make much of a difference. What do you mean by "pressing shots" into the target? And yes! I find myself trying to "catch up" sometimes which results, as you say, in snatching the trigger. Thanks!

I recently switched to a CZ Shadow in Production, and I'm having trouble with the DA first shot off the draw. I get the gun up fairly quickly, but I tend to start working the trigger only once my sights are on target, or only a little bit before (and not far enough), so that I waste a few tenths of a second pressing the trigger straight back after my gun is fully presented. I've tried working on this in dry-fire, but it's not translating to "letting go" enough to break the shot ASAP in live-fire. And when I consciously think about prepping the trigger earlier, my draw becomes less fluid and I start missing my weak hand grip or doing other odd things (probably because I am thinking about breaking down each part of the draw and when to start prepping the trigger, etc., instead of just presenting the gun). Suggestions?

caspian 38 - Thanks for the feedback! You're absolutely right that I tend to chop up stages into manageable parts, whereas on a good run (I've had a few of those), everything just flows. Interesting strategy re: oscillating between shooting matches super fast and focusing on your sights and forgetting about speed. Re: female GM's, I believe Jessie Duff made GM recently. It's been almost exactly a year since I shot my first USPSA competition. I'm still a C shooter (sigh), though I'm definitely better than I was when I started. Sometimes I see shooters who don't dry-fire as regularly, or who show up and shoot their way into B class, or who make M/GM in less than three years. Or who don't care as much, and still beat me. And I wonder, "Maybe this doesn't come naturally to me, maybe I'm not talented, or my timeline is unrealistic..." Some things do come naturally to me. Doing well in school, taking tests... In shooting, accuracy comes very naturally. It surprises me sometimes when people can't hit the A-zone of a 35-yd target with no time limit. "You just align your sights and press the trigger straight back, what's so hard about that?" Whereas other skills - like drawing fast, hosing targets, changing mags smoothly and quickly, breaking down and programming complicated stages - don't come naturally to me at all. I was talking to my friend Jeremy, who is a 5-time National Champion and a professional bike trials rider. He told me he wasn't a natural - for years, competitors who trained less and less hard than he did would beat him. It took him at least 3 years of training diligently and intelligently before he became competitive, and 5 before he pulled ahead. And he said he could remember the exact day it happened. He was riding on cars in a junk yard and missed a move, jumped backward, landed on a car door knob, then jumped to another car on the wiper blade stud and then to the ground without looking at all. That was when he realized that his skills had become subconscious. After tutoring kids for 5 years, I do think that some are more naturals at certain skills than others. But I also think that if you train hard and smart and for long enough, then what you can do starts to look a lot like talent. I'm not nearly there yet with shooting. But I want to be.

Bradley - Thanks for the suggestion. I upgraded to running shoes for this season, and so far they seem to be working fine (though I might buy black cleats just to match the rest of my outfit ). I shot my second match of 2014 on Saturday. Here's video from one of the stages. (It's split into two because Kevin stopped the video partway through.) I went way too deep into the second part and had to lunge back to find the last target in that chunk. I need to work on movement and stage programming (there were a couple stages where I lost seconds from hesitation). And of course, shooting faster and more accurately.

Thanks, Steve! Donovan - You've already heard my observations! Are you prodding me to share publicly? It's been a cold and snowy off-season in Virginia, and I haven't shot a match and have barely live-fired since November, but I've been consistently dry-firing. I can't wait to get back on the range and to see my friends again. In January, I took a class with Manny Bragg. It was my Christmas present from Max's parents. If you're curious what the class was like, you can read this review of a class by Frank Garcia. (The differences were obviously that mine was with Manny, not Frank, and 1-day, not 5.) But the focus on the fundamentals and emphasis on learning the feel of doing something - a draw, reload, prepping the trigger before the sights are on target - perfectly, once, and then being responsible for going home and practicing until I can't do it wrong, were identical. I learned as much about shooting instruction (something I would like to try, someday, when I suck less ) as I did about how to shoot. On the gobbling front, I still gobble more frequently than I would like (on average, once every five or six days or so), but it's now the exception rather than the rule. I've also been reading - and thinking - a lot about addictions in general, and food addictions in particular. I'm now convinced that addictions are (usually) not an extreme form of intemperance (overindulgence in sensory pleasure), but are rather attempts to attain moral and intellectual, even spiritual, goods that are hard to come by in our culture/society (e.g., freedom from loneliness, lack of purpose, etc.). The Canadian scientist Bruce Alexander, who conducted the famous Rat Park experiments in the 1970's, theorizes that social factors are much more important than individual, genetic, and biochemical factors in determining addiction. In his studies, rats who were kept in the standard, sterile, isolated laboratory environment became addicted to morphine ("rat heroin"). But when rats were placed in an idyllic, "Rat Park" environment with fellow rats, toys, and aromatic bedding, they didn't become addicted even when morphine was freely available. Even more interestingly, rats who had forcibly become addicted to morphine (in a laboratory environment) "chose" to undergo the physical symptoms of withdrawal rather than continue their morphine consumption when placed in Rat Park. The results suggest that social interaction and "meaningful" activity were more important than the availability of morphine in determining susceptibility to drug addiction. I'm coming to agree with Alexander that the same is true of humans. Yesterday and this morning were huge mega gobbles, and I realized that I had been not only feeling lonely, but also angry and ashamed at myself for feeling lonely ("I'm such a loser for not making more of an effort to find community in Arlington.") I then realized that when friends who were stay-at-home moms confided feelings of isolation, depression, etc., to me, I never said (or even thought), "If you were less of a loser and got out more, you wouldn't be feeling this way." Constructing one's Rat Park environment is hard! There are social factors (our highly individualistic, mobile, pluralistic society) that make assembling a Rat Park generally harder, but there are also situational/individual factors (being at home with a baby, working as an artist or an entrepreneur, being in school with a bunch of similar individuals) that make it harder or easier. Not shooting matches or seeing my friends during the off-season contributes to making me feel more like a rat in a laboratory than a rat in Rat Park. The answer to what Bruce Alexander calls "psychosocial dislocation" isn't easy. I don't think it's possible - or desirable - to return to a more traditional culture with clearly defined roles and shared values. But finding and building our own Rat Park is a challenge. I'm still working on mine. * *In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke says to "have patience with everything unresolved in your heart... Live the questions now. Perhaps... you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer."

One of the things that strikes me in my conversations with my friend who is quite a good shooter (Donovan) is how imperfect you can be and still get pretty far. One time I expressed frustration at programming myself extra hard to "shoot - move" and throwing in an extraneous reload anyway, and the newly minted GM replying that he still has trouble doing extraneous reloads sometimes too. We all want to improve constantly, to learn from every shot we fire, every repetition we do; to give our best every day. Some people - Ben Stoeger, for instance - seem to come pretty close to that ideal. Recently, I realized that over the last four and a half months, even with some truly spectacular strings of gobbles, I had managed to drop very close to my pre-bschool weight and gain some strength, too. I'm always shocked when people tell me that I'm lean and elegant and/or dedicated. "Really? But you didn't see the boxes of cookies and toffee I ate last night. Or the twelve king-sized chocolate bars I devoured this morning in an aftershock gobble." "You don't realize the days I skipped practice - and even matches - because I had mega gobbled so much that I felt like the boa constrictor who sat around for days digesting its prey." Progress - at least in my experience - is like the stock market. If you look closely it looks like an incoherent scribble of ups and downs, but if you step back you can see the market trending upward (with some truly shocking dips in the middle, like the Great Depression of the 1930's). As an aside, in the same ongoing correspondence with said awesome friend, I mentioned that the real reason I believe in God isn't purely rational. Of course I believe the object of my faith is true, too (I think that thinking anything is false is automatic grounds for disbelieving it), but when I dig down, my reasons for believing in God aren't rational. They're existential. For example, the consciousness of being very flawed and constantly needing and asking for and receiving forgiveness, and the possibility of still doing great things. I'm in California now and dug up a notebook in which I'd jotted down some lines in books that had touched me. Here's one (by Fr. Depp, a Catholic priest who was martyred by the Nazis): "Unless a man has been shocked to his depths at himself and the things he is capable of, as well as the failings of humanity as a whole, he cannot understand the full import of the Advent." I think that every year, Advent - God condescending - "coming down to be with" - means a little bit more to me. Happy Advent. Merry Christmas. Onward!

Jim - Thanks for the suggestions. I'm actually getting light strikes with a variety of factory ammo. Steve - Nice to know I'm not the only one. I was listening to one of Ben's podcasts, and he said that while we all warm up (at the safe table) at matches, the goal is to get to the point where you don't need to warm up before shooting well. I'm finding that it helps me to pay attention when I do my first dry-fire run as if, "Now! This is the only run that matters..." Tim - Yeah. In the rest of my life too. I really like Paul Buchheit (the creator of Gmail). He strikes me as someone who is not only very smart, but humble and wise and funny as well. Here he says: Fear, jealousy, insecurity, unfairness, embarrassment -- these feelings cloud our ability to see what is. The truth is often threatening, and once our defenses are up, it's difficult to be completely honest with anyone, even ourselves. But when I am nothing, when I have no image or identity or ego to protect, I can begin to see and accept things as they really are. That is the beginning of positive change, because we can not change what we do not accept and do not understand. But with understanding, we can finally see the difference between fixing problems, and hiding them, the difference between genuine improvement, and faking it. We discover that many of our weaknesses are actually strengths once we learn how to use them, and that our greatest gifts are often buried beneath our greatest insecurities. and Until we let go of our mental images of who we are or who we should be, our vision remains clouded by expectation. But when we let go of everything, open ourselves to any truth, and see the world without fear or judgement, then we are finally able to begin the process of peeling off the shell of false identity that prevents our true self from growing and shining in to the world. I want to be smart. I want to be thin. I want to be a good shooter. I want to be making progress towards my goals. But when I let go of that, I can see the problem that's right in front of me and work on fixing it. I'm getting a new gun for next season. Its name is Hadrian. More on that later...