Class Today

Class Today

Usually after a match I'd have my match review with video up, but I'm waiting for a video from Les to complete that entry, so I apologize for the unusually long gap. Some serious work stress, and a start on another commitment are taking some time from writing, and that's okay, we are winding things down here, and once we hit the major mark, "B" card, I'll probably keep this blog going for match review, and progress tracking, and less practice work. That's a month or so down the road however.

Today the focus was shooting on the move, because up until today, both Dave and I have been point to point shooters, and while it makes us nice and accurate, it also means giving up substantial time. The lesson today moving forward was that I need to get low, keep my feet at shoulder width, and take many small steps. Doing that, I can keep the sights reasonably flat, and instead of a perfect sight picture, I get an "acceptable" sight picture. The difference for all three of us shooting station to station, to on the move, was about .5 seconds on a 5 target stage. That's actually a pretty substantial add-on, if you consider a stage could be a 30 round stage, and now we are talking 1.5 seconds per stage.

I've got several issues, I need to keep my feet wide to maintain my balance, I tend to start to bring them too close together, and I'm suffering from a case of Kozy foot. In a tight area, I tend to lean high, and pull the heel of my foot off the ground, this slows me down getting out of a position, and the correct way to move, is to get lower, keeping better balance, and then I can take off out of a position, and cover ground more rapidly. I know that a half second does not sound like a lot, a few months ago we were talking about shaving multiple seconds off a run, now we are talking about a half second, and we need that for progress. This means that the improvements are going to take more effort, and more work, but damn it's fun.

The other two stand out items on my list today, is an ongoing issue where I'm settling for breaking a shot in the middle of the target, and limiting myself to only 1/2 of the A zone, and my targets were shot low. I've said it since my earliest blogs that I need to train myself to find the high point of the shoulder target. I gradually got there by my last couple of runs, but this is something I need to practice and do naturally, not have to consciously tell myself I need to do.

My other noteworthy item to work on is still my reload. In dry fire I'm on a reload in 1.4 seconds, today I was between 1.9 and 2.3, and I struggled getting my mag out of the gun. Not getting the mag out screws up my entire run, I start canting the gun, and mag is then sideways and does not want to come out, and the magwell is moving when I'm trying to insert the new magazine. Talk about one little thing causing a lot of issues downstream. I'm going to focus on this in dry fire, hear the beep, and the mag is out instantly, if I'm doing it fine in dry fire, and I must be doing it better to get solid par times, then I need to keep that going in live fire.

We have one more class and we are done, thankfully there are a few classifiers coming up, and I really believe we can get it done, it's just going to be a matter of execution. Do or do not, there is no try.