NickBlasta

8/29/2015-8/30/2015 Match Days! Open Div - 11 of 55 - 77.095% B Class - 1st of 12 Overall - 19 of 190 - 77.046% Classifier 06-05 "Fluffy's Revenge 2" - 8.9835 HF - 67.95% 1432 of 1530 available points - 218A 83C 5D - 93.59% (No penalties) The reason I've been short on the posts in the last week is I was road tripping out to Utah for the state championships! I was very excited for this match because it felt like a redo of Area One. I ended up getting 11th overall and taking high B! This is my first class win at a major and also my first clean major, I shot it without any errors! I felt like my performance was pretty good, if a little slow... man, Kincaid beat me by like 4 seconds on several stages and I can only sit there thinking "where can one mine 4 seconds from this?" I have yet to unlock the secrets of go faster... I tried for consistency overall while pushing myself to go (a bit) faster without going off the rails. The squad was a hilarious group of guys and I'm sad it's over now. Stage One - This one gave the production guys fits with the large arrays in proximity. My plan was to attempt to shoot it without stopping if possible. I was close, and I got closer to the port on the left than I wanted to, but this was my best stage of the day (and last stage of day 2) with 92.69% of the winner. Stage Two - First stage of day 1. My hit on the activator popper didn't knock it over which kinda tanked my score- I had to wait around for the swinger.. I'm starting to see why Ben and the guys say steel ruins matches with its inconsistencies. Fell short of the first port and bumped my gun into it but amusingly I wasn't the only one to do that, quirk of the stage design? Stage Three - Lost my dot in a bad way on the crossbody draw. You can see the sun flaring into the lens on the video and the red washout everywhere. My plan wasn't very good as I saw many of the top scorers shoot this with only 2 positions where I used 3. Stage Four - Fumbled with the gun on this stage on load and reload. Thought my engagement order at the end was alright. Stage Five - I liked this one because almost everyone on my squad shot it to the left but I personally felt that shooting it to the right was faster and a better target presentation order. It was one of my stage class "wins" so I suppose I was right. Stage Six - I couldn't decide during planning if I should walk down the hallway shooting on the move or sprint down it and post up and shoot the last 5 targets. I went with the safer option and it felt slow. Stage Seven - This stage was really annoying because I had to do a reshoot because the RO didn't catch 4 of my last shots on the timer. I've never had that happen before as my gun is incredibly loud but my squadmates told me he was on the other side of the walls, almost on the other side of the stage. I didn't say anything but I made sure to glare at him for a moment. I stepped up and shot it again with almost the same result. This was another stage where I shot to the right instead of going left like almost everyone else because it felt like I could always be shooting something, whereas going left had a deadzone with no targets. Score was above my match average. I even 2 alpha'd the swinger which pleased me. Stage Eight - My only 'bad' stage if I had to pick one. I had a nasty little jam that cost me quite a bit and when it popped me out of 'the zone' I tossed out two mikes into the hardcover on the next target so I had to step back and reengage it. I did call the mikes though, so there's that. Stage Nine - I liked going to the right today. I think my plan was okay but I was just slow in general. Last stage of the first day got me down a bit I guess. Like the shooting in the final position, slooow. Arg. Stage Ten - First stage of day 2. Just average, but a class win. I called the mike on that one target and picked it up. I'm practicing short movements while having the gun still in both hands and it worked well on the hop to the last position. Stage Eleven - I missed the first popper and had to transition back to it which sucked. I'm really curious how Kincaid shot this because he did it in 9.16, a full (at least) 2.5 seconds faster than anyone else. Stage Twelve - The classifier. Shot terribly. I need to work on my turning draws, they are consistently a weak part of my game. Chrono - What can I say? Pleased with the consistency of my ammo. I've had about a 1 PF variance at most every time I chrono. Stage Thirteen - On this stage one could start on the right or on the left as the stage was mirrored. Most everyone chose left but I started right as the right-side lean is easier for me. My plan was to move across the building engaging all the targets without stopping but I lost my dot on the initial engagement and stood there for an eternity with my mind blank. Not optimal. Overall I'm pleased with the match and with myself. I just need to claw my way out of B-class.

8/23/2015 Match Day! After having a serious time at the USPSA sectional, I decided to do some funhaving.. So I brought out my BAR. I entered into Open so I could use my bipod if I wanted (I ended up not using it) and get some more trigger time for the week on my STI. It doesn't really matter what division I enter into, does it? I made errors all over, the BAR is really tiring to fire on a stage (I'm not a faceshooter) and I can't hit mini-poppers with it at 100 yards. It was a great time with a great squad of guys and gals. Got a few more majors coming up. I'm excited.

8/21/2015 Match Day! Open Div - 15 of 32 - 75.236% B Class - 2nd of 11 Overall - 21 of 145 - 75.227% Classifier 03-14 "Baseball Standards" - 81 HF - 67.50% 889 of 995 available points - 125A 1B 38C 4D 1NPM 2M 2NS - 89.34% (94.37% without penalties) I shot the WA-OR sectional, my first level 2 match and my second major. I was more confident this time than I was at Area 1 and I really enjoyed it! I had some slip-ups, 2 mikes and 2 NS that I could have avoided by taking things just a hair more deliberately. I got 2nd B Open. The margin was only .7% to first, which means I could have taken it by having just one of the many wrong things not happen. Could have had first without one of the mikes, one of the no-shoots, or one of the jams. It's frustrating but also I know that it can be mine! Also...I should get more than 2 hours of sleep before the drive to the match. I'm hungry for the next major.

8/20/2015 Match Day! Classifier 06-10 "Steely Speed VII" - 7.7720 HF - 75.91% 249 of 275 available points - 26A 1B 7C 1D 1M - 90.54% (94.18% without penalties) Pretty low stress midweek match. I won handily over the other Open shooters and didn't really try to push myself, just shoot consistently. It was a good little livefire practice for the sectional this weekend. Stage One - The classifier, speed steel. I went as fast as I could while knowing I wouldn't miss. Not as fast as I could go, but as fast as I would consider consistent. Worked out, just barely squeaked an A-class, about 76%. Stage Two - My reload was good, thought I tossed out a mike on the upper left target, second array, but I was so into keeping my cadence that I didn't pick it up. It was a mike. Stage Three - Straightforward but I had a pickup shot on the first popper- pretty lazy not waiting for my sight to actually settle, considering it's a giant popper at like 6 yards. Stage Four - Not a great stage plan, I lost overall to the M Production shooter for it. I thought I'd be slick engaging all the targets on the left but I probably could have more quickly taken them on the move. I also spent way too many shots on the popper on the right which cost me a good bit of time.

8/18/2015 Match Day! 594 of 715 available points - 86A 13B 36C 4D 4M - 83.08% (88.67% without penalties) I decided to try and up my comfortable pace a little in this match to take advantage of my recent training. I thought that even if I went off the rails a little, I was likely to win the match. That basically proved to be true- I ended up with 4 mikes and still won first and high overall by a very comfortable margin (10%+) over the A classer who was my primary opponent and second place. Pushing myself worked on some stages and not on the others. I should take care with the 25 yard shots and the partial targets. Stage One - The classifier. I suffered on this greatly. Two mikes and they were both on the weak hand, which is atypical for me. I was pushing myself too hard to get the shot and ended up pulling the trigger without the dot on target. Dumb mistake. Even with two mikes I landed a 50% on it which I thought was interesting but I should be a little more consistent next time. I think my turning draw and reloads have improved. Stage Two - A stage win. Fairly straightforward stage where you had to engage 25 yard poppers from the start position then move down the shooting area doing wide transitions to engage targets. Not much to say. Stage Three - The sun went away! This was the last stage I shot. Extremely straightforward, run and shoot at point blank targets, pure hosing. I got first Open but I placed overall behind some Limited shooters. I think that the darkness cost me time, I didn't want to trip. Stage Four - Kind of a standards style stage. 3 boxes, must fire 8 rounds from each box, targets are best 6 hits. I fired too quickly from the far box and tossed out two mikes. I should have included a reload between second and third box because I could easily have made them up in the close box, but didn't. Make it a mental malfunction. Mildly annoying- my scoring for the stage was incorrect. I had two mikes but on practiscore it says 3, which bumped me from 2nd to 3rd place. Stage Five - Lots of wiiide, essentially 180 degree transitions, including one on the back of the bay with 6 targets spaced out on the 180 arc. I felt like I was slow on the very wide transition. Maybe I should practice that in dryfire. Stage Six - Felt good on this. Burned down the platerack but had some pickups on the poppers. I was slightly slower on the paper than I wanted but it worked out ok. Misc Using some harder primers than I normally do I found I had infrequent light strikes during some livefire practice. I dropped in an extended firing pin and I'll see if it helps. I'll probably take it easy on the practice tomorrow because I have a level 2 match this weekend.

8/17/2015 Dryfire for today: 50 yard distance draw - Easy. This is one of the advantages of shooting with a dot, right? No equal sight equal light just a dot? I killed the par times and cranked them down pretty far. El Prez - Okay, I gotta confess, I've never practiced or shot El Prez. Man, the 3.5 second par kicked my butt! I only made it 4-5 times out of 50. But I was getting a lot faster and a lot less sloppy with my sight picture (not racing the timer). I like this. Gotta do it again. Entering position ready to fire - Easy. I do this in my sleep. I was practically running across the room and keeping it under the par. Seated start - I've had a lot of seated starts in live fire lately (maybe that's the influence of Prod Nats?) but I had no problems with this drill. Turned down the par by .5 seconds to challenge myself. The drill suggested maybe drawing to the center open target but I find it worked best for me to draw to the right, even with the no-shoot. Fun but not particularly challenging. Misc Popped a new battery in my C-more for tomorrow.

Thanks for the reply! You mention holster adjustments - I'm curious as to what you think? 8/16/2015 Match day! I took second narrowly behind the M shooter that I frequently squad with. (95.89%) Beat the 5 others in B-class. 570 of 620 available points - 92A 12B 16C 4D - 91.93% (93.54% without penalties - 1 procedural) I'm already seeing my dryfire pay off here. I considered this to be a consistent match but I did push myself slightly in a few places. I thought that my movement was a little faster, my transitions were a little faster, and my splits on multiple-target arrays were a bit faster, my cadence was improved. Pushing did cost me in a few places. I spent way too much time shooting at steel when normally I clean it. I must keep in mind my consistent pace for steel to avoid this. I probably shoulda changed my C-more battery. It's getting decently faded in the brighter bays and I think cost me a few make-up shots on what would be easy steel for me. Stage One - My plan was to shoot this mostly while moving. Extra shot on the rack had me stopping at the fault line for a moment, but I liked this stage overall. Stage Two - The classifier. I rarely throw mikes so this vexed me, I tossed a shot just above the top of the headbox but I called it and immediately took a makeup shot to add the second alpha. Obviously my classifier score is ruined but the makeup (and procedural) gained me a few points on the stage over a straight mike so it helped my match standing. Stage Three - I hate potato targets with noshoots so I perhaps shot this a little more carefully than I could have, but I thought my plan was okay with spreading my legs and just leaning left to right, right to left. Stage Four - A weird kinda stage where all the targets were B-zones hanging around noshoots. My hits were good and I thought I did pretty fast movements between the ports by keeping the gun up and quickly shuffling my feet. Stage Five - Augh, wrecked by the plate rack which is uncharacteristic for me. Ran the gun completely dry, narrowly avoiding disaster. If I took just a hair more time on the steel I coulda avoided so much time in makeup shots. The paper was okay though. Stage Six - I also spent too much time on the 25 yard B-plates due to the lean, it was throwing off my holdover. Hitting up and to the left? Wha? Oh yeah... Not too much disaster here. I nailed the disappearing pendulum in one shot. Dryfire for today: I cooled down after the match with a slowfire trigger control drill. Just drawing at random spots on the wall and breaking the shot without wiggling the dot. Easy drill and maybe it will help me not trainwreck in the future.

8/15/2015 Dryfire for today: 25 yard SH/WH distance draw - I slayed the par times on this. I'm confident in this drill with my existing skills. I played around a little with swinging various feet forwards and back on the draw while starting square to the target. 6 reload 6 reload 6 drill - I like this drill because it's hard for me. I don't reload that much in Open, and my reloads suck! I need to repeat this drill fairly frequently I think. Made good progress though. 10 yard move and shoot on no-shoot partials - I did well with this drill as it's something that I'm both experienced with doing and also doing with a dot. I concentrated on gripping the gun hard and shooting the headboxes, mostly. Clipped a no-shoot a few times but for the most part it felt good. Gun and ammo table start - Destroyed this one too since I've done the exact scenario so many times in live fire. The drill is grab gun and mag from table, load and 2 / 2, and second string is grab two mags off table and put on belt, then grab third mag off table and load gun and 2 / 2. I stack my two mags for the grab and I was a good 1.5 seconds under the par time every time. Builds my confidence! I tore my gun down afterwards and cleaned it for tomorrow. Two of my scope mount screws were loose so I tightened them back up and checked my zero, still dead on.

In July 2015 I made B-Class at 68.95%. This month I'm up to 70.08% and I hope to make A-class soon. This was my latest match as of this post which I think is very representative of my current skill level. I can shoot very consistently without much trouble. I have things I do very well. I think my stage planning is above average, particularly with regards to gaming stages and finding holes to exploit to shave off time. I usually shoot with Masters and I'll point out things to them they didn't notice. My SHO/WHO is pretty good. When I do dryfire I'll often repeat a drill SHO/WHO just to improve. I'm good with shooting on the move and I can usually shoot out pretty far while moving and call my shots. I'm good on steel and can usually take it 1 for 1. I feel like I have a solid base of skills now, and I need to work on making it faster. My draw is sometimes what I would call lackadaisical- dry fire is helping me there a lot. My transitions are slow. My movements are slow, but I've been getting better at going balls out. Feel free to post and offer me advice. It's a log but I would love comments too. Thank you!

Try incorporating that into your dry fire. Set up a target, draw to it, and then move to another "position" (I like to move through a door in my house or something) and see what you need to do to have the dot. Also make sure that the gun is up and ready to shoot before entering the position. That way you'll have the dot before you have to fire, not after, which costs you a lot of time.

It kind of used to be, in that I'd carry my G19 and compete with the G35. They had little in common beyond both being Glocks- my 35 was raced out and my 19 was stock. I don't notice any loss in proficiency with my G19 now that I shoot an STI though. The root of the issue might be that it's important to train with your carry gun, and action shooting is probably pretty great training for it, so why not compete with the carry gun? But if you compete with something else, training in your off-match time with your carry gun is something you should still do.

I can't get contacts that work, been trying a different set about every 2-3 weeks for 6 months. Nothing The ones I get are "for astigmatism"... not sure if that makes a difference?

I find that I do this on really close arrays, or targets that you would normally blow past, because hitting the target point shooting is easy and stopping to get a good sight picture will actually cost you time. I present the gun so that it's a line out from my arms to the A-zone, and I don't think I've ever miked doing that. On a far target I wouldn't point shoot though.

I will also use this thread for my match analysis. I make videos (1st and 3rd person) of every event I go to so that I can analyze myself and see what I need to work on. Some history/milestones to start off: This was my very first USPSA match on 3/7/15. I like to look at it every once in awhile to see where I came from. I shot Limited with my Glock 35. Everything is slow. Extra shots everywhere, standing reloads, so many misses on 25 yard steel. I'll leave it here if anyone wants to watch it. I classified into C-Class on 4/16/15. I'd actually ended up purchasing my open gun earlier in the year- I saw a good deal on it and jumped on it, just to own one. I didn't particularly want to abandon Limited when I was making obvious improvements (I knew switching guns would be a setback) but I had a particularly frustrating match later that month that made me pick up the open blaster and give it a try. I've been shooting Open since then. My first Open match on 5/5/15. Still slow, and I fumble with the gun (it's a bit more complicated than the Glock) but man, it's fun! I ended up classifying into C in June, but just barely, like 58.5%. I shot my first major (level 3) match on 6/27, Area One Champs. I didn't do as well as I knew I could. I make a point to be honest with myself, but in this case, it was really out of my control. The heat killed me and I should have prepared for it better and hydrated. I'll learn from that for next time. I ended up getting 2nd C-Class though.

Hi everyone! Long time lurker on Enos. I was reading everyone's diaries on this forum and decided it would be beneficial for me to make one of these. I told myself when I made B-Class I would, so now I am! I'm NickBlasta and I've been a "shooter" for ten years. My shooting was purely recreational, square range 'sit and plink' style shooting. Which is fine, but there's no real focus other than the enjoyment of firearms. In July 2014 I became somewhat unsatisfied with the amount of physical activity in my life. I started counting calories and took up physical hobbies. I lost 80lbs and now enjoy things like camping and hiking. But man, I really wanted to do that action shooting thing I saw on the internet! Handily, in January 2015 I got asked by people at my wonderful new range to come out to their Tuesday-night plate rack match. It's a very interesting match where the setup is two 10 yard plate racks, one 25 yard plate rack, and two 10 yard poppers. You race your opponent to knock over your 10 yard plate rack, then your half of the 25 yard rack, then hit your popper, with two 6 round magazines. Whoever does more plates faster, wins. This was my first competitive shooting event ever and my experience shooting handguns before this was extremely limited (I always thought of myself more as a rifle guy), I got into the final round in my first match and had a lot of fun. I did that every week, and since the match was shot by a lot of USPSA members... I got invited to come out and shoot matches. I got my USPSA safety check in February and then I went and shot a USPSA Multigun and the week after that, my first USPSA handgun match. I had purchased some gear, a belt, holster, and magazine pouches, and went out. Ever since then, I've been hooked. I'm not just hooked on the shooting but I'm hooked on improving. I spend huge amounts of time watching other people shoot on Youtube and analyzing why they do things, and try it myself in the match. Multigun remains a diversion for me. I thought it would be my primary interest at first but as of now I shoot it for fun. My focus on getting gooder is USPSA, and I hit every handgun match that I can. I tried Steel Challenge a few times and while it was fun, carnival-style shooting just doesn't really hold my interest. What I shoot in USPSA: Open Division! I shoot a STI Competitor, which is kind of like the old version of the Trubor. I'm not a very gear-focused, arms-race kinda guy. I buy the things I perceive to be necessary and that's about it. It's mostly a stock gun but I added a 'wing' to prop it up for table starts and I've changed out some worn out springs. Most of the problems I've had are actually magazine related, which gives me fits. My Training: I must confess, prior to making B-Class I would dryfire maybe once a week. My 'training' was basically just 'shoot a lot of matches'. We have lots of matches up here (as many as 4 a week!) so I did see improvement just from that. Recently now I have adopted a dryfire schedule. I picked up Stoeger's books and have been doing drills for about an hour each day. I'll post my training each day, along with the updates from any matches I do. Current downside for me is that my awesome range was closed down in a legal battle with the county, so I no longer get to go down in the awesome action bays for live fire practice. I need to find a new range to live fire at. My goals: Immediate goal is to make A-Class. I feel I can make that happen in the next few months. I'm chomping at the bit for it, even. Long term, make GM. I want dat GM card!

Uncorrected my dot turns into a line. I got contacts and it's perfect now.

We do. Practice looks fun!