What a fun and furiously fast match today. My total time for the entire match was 48 seconds! None of the stages were over 10 seconds. I still have match mode focus going which is great. Worked on transitioning and shooting faster which I did but had some extra shots here and there which should be eliminated. Just need to keep working on improving transition speed and shooting earlier.
I did wear my Mono Vision contact lens pair today and it worked well. It was a little disorienting in the beginning but it was great during shooting.
Here’s a quick video about two very useful tools for the 1911/2011 platform. I got this tip from John, my gunsmith at http://www.jplprecision.com. They’re super useful for disassembling and reassembling your firing pin / pin stop and extractor.
I came in to this match with a mental objective. I used to be so affected by shooters around me, times and places in the standings that I didn’t get to shoot my game. I ended up shooting someone else’s game and that caused me to falter in my execution.
This time round I managed to keep it sound. I enabled “match mode”, and called my shots. If I had a bad stage, I mope and swear but leave it behind. If I had a good stage, I celebrate and laugh but leave it behind as well.
This allowed me to shoot my game and I’m very happy to be able to achieve 9th in Open. There were some stupid things I did but I knew exactly how I got them. I called all my mistakes and identified what caused them so I will not do it again.
It was a fun and fast match with lots of options. Thanks to the SLUSPSA guys for putting together this major match.
Shoutout to my squad mates, SQUAD 40, Super Squad… D.
I’ve been struggling with keeping my head in the game at matches. I’m sure many of you have felt some or all of the following mental challenges during a match:
Develop a plan (memory)
Committing it to subconscious
Saw someone DQ or hit a no-shoot (fear)
Competing with another shooter (pushing yourself more than your ability OR worrying about the competition)
Getting distracted (fumbling with camera, gear, magazines etc)
Distraction from peanut gallery
Trying to recover from a disastrous previous stage
Trying to recover from a slow stage because you know you can be “faster”.
Feeling high from a fantastic previous stage performance (over confidence)
Running shooters as an RO and not getting enough time to prepare
Giving in to these changes in mental states is not only taxing but will affect your shooting. It’s even worse the larger or more important the match becomes. I told myself that throughout the day, my only job is to :
Think of a plan
Commit to subconscious
Call my shots (ala Steve Anderson).
I must not feel the need to go faster, slower, do better, or anything of that sort. Just performs steps 1-3 on every stage.
I felt that I stayed true to it the whole match. There were times where I catch myself thinking I could have gone faster, could have stayed lower, or tried a different plan. I quickly quelled that “feeling” and moved on.
Also, Throughout the day a buddy of mine who flew in to shoot our local match was competing with me (as any good friend should) and that was an added distraction. I can proudly say that although I enjoyed the competition, I managed to ignore it and not let it affect my match performance.
Now that said, I could have won the match if I did “push” a little bit at the end but that wasn’t what I set out to do. I could have lost the match by a larger margin too if I made more errors.
So my takeaway from this match was that I know how it feels to play this mental game and I will be able to unlock this at every match. (hopefully)
Now I just need to work on the weak stuff and keep pushing my speed during practice/dryfire.
Gunbot! 