Like Riding a Bike....Almost

[RacerX1166]

After over a decade away from the sport, and actually shooting a gun half a dozen times in that decade, I'm shooting a match this coming weekend.  Saturday was the first time I've shot at an IPSC target in a decade.  Even that was a bit unstructured, because I went with a colleague and his wife to their club.  Couldn't exactly tell them to bugger off while I did drills all afternoon.

 

Since my acquisition of a new to me Pro Sx, I've been building my dry fire routine back up and I noticed, to my surprise, there are a few skills that came back quite quickly.  I guess the decade I spent in the sport developed some solid muscle memory. 

 

What dry firing couldn't (re) condition me for was the proper trigger feel for follow up shots. How far to allow the trigger finger to come forward after the shot breaks.  So, I wound up slapping the trigger and my first few strings consisted of one alpha, then C's and D's.  After reminding myself to only shoot as fast as I could see, my hit improved dramatically, without much loss in speed.

The other little thing I noticed is that even though I promised myself my return would be a casual one, I found myself saying 'what do you mean there's only one match per month to shoot here?'

[Hi-Power Jack]

Sounds good     

 

You might want to reduce your speed just a teeny amount your first shoot -

just to be safe - get "up to speed" a little more slowly.     

 

Good luck this weekend.    

[RacerX1166]

Oh, I have no intention of attempting to go full bore on my second, first match.  My goal is to remain safe, have fun, and don't do anything supremely dumb.

[Hi-Power Jack]

8 hours ago, RacerX1166 said:

 I have no intention of going full bore.  My goal is to remain safe and don't do anything supremely dumb.

 

Thank you.     

 

BTW, I'll bite  -  How did you wind up in Kansas ?

[RacerX1166]

Why does anyone come to Kansas?  Work or family.  My reason was the former; company made me a nice offer and I thought 'eh, how backward could it be?  The country's mostly homogenized at this point.'  Wrong.

[RacerX1166]

To close the loop on my post, I shot my (second) first match yesterday.  In some ways, it felt as though I'd never left the sport, so it was easy to drop back into the typical squad banter and comradery.

 

Because of my lack of practice, my shooting improved throughout the course of the day (thankfully).  My ability to make a plan, then not have it vanish on the beep, will require some work.  There were was one awesome stage, a bunch of 'meh' ones, and a few I'd rather not talk about.  My performance met my expectations, because I had none.

 

Maintaining my commitment to be more casual, this time, may be under jeopardy, since I've already signed up for matches for the next two weekends.

 

 

 

[rock751]

Where at in Kansas? I live in Coffey county. Also, why did you stop shooting years ago?

[RacerX1166]

I'm in Johnson County - KC Metro.

 

Packed it in because it stopped being fun and was spending too much time on the sport to not have a card with an 'M' on it.

[Steve RA]

Johnson County is one of the better parts, grew up there back in the 50s.   

[Hi-Power Jack]

1 minute ago, Steve RA said:

 grew up there back in the 50s.   

That explains that      

[Steve RA]

Is that like "is is" ???

[Limitless13]

It's funny, I'm almost in the exact same position. I have shot semi-regularly over the last ten years, but not one match. Got really sick, changed careers, had 4 kids, and now I feel like I can dedicate myself to the sport again. That crazy thing called life. 

[oldtrucks]

I shot USPSA matches almost weekly between 1994 and 1999. Got heavily involved with club politics and working or running matches, then our second daughter was born. I took what I thought was going to be a brief break but didn't shoot another match until a friend drug me to an IDPA match in 2016. Before the layoff I hit 85.3% in Limited, I'm shooting well now but really struggling to see any classifiers near that.