I haven't kept a Range Diary since the OG Doodie, but -inspired by a disaster of a practice session yesterday- I'm going to give this another try. My hopes are twofold: 1) An additional form of accountability. I'm already my toughest critic. But, making everything public may help clarify flaws. 2) Maybe some other idiot will learn something from this idiot. My apologies ahead of time.
General baseline: Sandbagging (against my will) A Class production shooter. Did okay-ish at Iron Sights Nats, and now doubling down to try to run with the bigger dogs thanks to that inspiration.
Yesterday's Disaster:
Equipment:
Apparently, I own the only Shadow 2 in existence that won't light off S&B primers with the 11.5# HS. Last range session, I switched to the 13 and resolved the issue. Stupidly, I couldn't leave that alone, and decided to follow Rowdy's method of clipping off the last 2 coils. In theory, it should still light off everything, but make the DA pull a little less shitty. Did not work. So, nearly every run on the Accelerator was slowed down even further thanks to light strikes.
Shooting:
The plan was to shoot The Accelerator, one sheet of dots to confirm everything was OK on the match gun, and then do mini-stage drills. What actually happened was I shot so poorly on the Accelerator that I spent the rest of the time working on those issues:
- All of the issues were on the closest target. I would really like to blame it on the temps being in the 30s, it's early in the season, etc etc. But, I know better.
- Draws were consistently glacial at ~1.15.
- Reloads were even worse. ~1.2 when I actually stuck it, and up near 1.8 when I would bobble.
- Consistently kept leaving the close target early, and thus shot a boat load of Cs on it.
- The good: transitions and hits were excellent on the 15 and 25 targets. Though, that just made it even more infuriating that I was fucking up the easiest target.
By the end of the session, I had focused and removed the early transition. However, draw and reload times still sucked. I switched to 4 Aces and got the times closer to normal. Draws got down to ~.9, and loads to 1.1. That said, I was definitely cheating on my grip to hit those times.
None of the above is particularly earth-shattering, but it stung deeply in contrast to past performance. Last week, I hit my PR in Distance Changeup; I consistently was shooting it in 2.2 clean. Last year, my 4 Aces times* were in the 2.2-2.3 range thanks to much faster draws and loads. (*The hits were shit, because my training sucked in 2016).
Looking at the big picture, my training and shooting have evolved greatly. It's going to be a good year. I spent 2017 and this winter working on good hits at speed (a crazy idea, I know) and it has paid off greatly. But, it was horribly demoralizing to be floundering around on two of the most basic shooting components like a D-class newbie.
Solution in Dry Fire: Incorporate more gun handling / hoser type stuff into the mix. I switched to almost-exclusively shooting tight partials at distance, hence my growth last year, but I've definitely neglected some of the "easy" stuff.