Post Thanksgiving Observations

Post Thanksgiving Observations

Great Holiday! Kozy and I started the day by trying to play some football, he lasted 3 plays before he hurt his back, and I was 5 plays before I rolled an ankle. I’d make the old guys should know better joke, but he ended up in the hospital, and can barely walk. I’m on crutches now, and neither of us is going to shoot on Sunday. Day after Thanksgiving, we took the train down into the city with the Brown’s, hit ice skating at Millennium Park, walked the Macy’s windows, and the Christkindlmarket  in Daley Plaza. Kids had a blast ice skating, were cold near the windows, and I thought the schnitzel was awesome! I also discovered Rum Almonds. Get you some!

So, a brief time travel trip back a couple of days to the IDPA match, via The Inner Game of Tennis. One of the concepts in the book, is that there are 2 self’s. Ever talk to yourself, tell yourself what to do? Who are you talking to? The concept is that those are the two parts of yourself, a part that feels it needs to tell your subconscious what to do, and how to do it. The truth is, your subconscious often is inhibited by that, it already knows what and how to do things. It does not need governance, and direction, it needs to just the ability to do things on its own.

IDPA, I realize that my mind was cluttered, I was giving my subconscious orders almost non-stop, and I was not allowing myself to just execute what I know, even thought that’s what I was trying to do. I was so worried about rules, where I could reload, how I could reload, and so on, and so on, that I had so much going on in my mind inhibiting me from performing at my peak ability. I was as far from “in the zone” as one could be. I’m going to keep shooting USPSA exclusively thru March,  just so I don’t add something to what I do, USPSA rules are already in my subconscious, so I can keep my mind focused.

Fast forward, today was live fire class with Dave and Les, and it was supposed to be “turn and draw” and reloads. In my case, turning while drawing was just not going to happen. For the first time, I felt like I made some observations from Self 2, rather than negative judgments from Self 1. I was shooting low, and Les observed that I may still have some flinch going on. I felt that my sight picture was not right, instead of looking across my sights, I was looking down on them, much like I was back in August and September of this year, and we corrected that and I had much improved accuracy. I made a small adjustment, and had a decent string, and things felt like I practiced them. Shots were still a little low, indicating the trigger control issue, but that’s fixable.

On reloads, I've always had some issues, today though, I watched Les explain it, and I got a picture in my head of how his body was working, and what was going on, then when it was my turn, I had some very solid reloads. Instead of dropping the gun low, my elbows came back to my body, I got the gun canted, and was able to reload up high, watching the magazine right into the magwell, and then drive the gun right back out. Reloads from 7 yards were consistently in the 1.70-1.85 second range.

I had a rough finish, got some trigger freeze, had a .16 split, which means I had no sight picture at all, and basically got all tense. What I really need to do, is just relax, don’t heap the pressure on, and shoot. I had no issue all practice long, but once we were running El Pres for time, I did it. The good news, is that today I felt in touch with learning visually, and how I was doing it. I saw instant progress on the reload, and my draw was solid. When I did not get the hits I wanted, I could observe what I might be doing wrong.

Because I’m on crutches for the next few days at least, I’ll have to limit my turn and draw, but I’m going to get a little extra dry fire practice, and I’m going to practice one thing at a time, for 15-20 minutes each time. I can feel how close I am to breaking thru this. It’s right there in front of me. Strangely, the biggest obstacle now is keeping mentally relaxed and focused as opposed to a fundamental or gun-handling issue.

I’m pretty excited right now.