Triangle Tactical Podcast and Blog on Guns, Gear, and Competition Shooting
At this month’s match, I really tried to put in to practice the two main things I’d been practicing for the last few weeks: controlling recoil by really gripping the gun hard and moving with a sense of purpose and urgency. Both of these things manifested themselves in this first stage, which is one of the best I’ve ever shot.
A good run on a stage relies on two things: good stage planning and good execution. In this case, I think I ended up with a little of both, and shooting the whole middle section of the stage on the move saved me a ton of time that most shooters spent posting up in multiple locations. I flubbed my stage plan by reloading after the first target in the last port instead of as I was going in to the port, so by no means did this stage feel like a great victory. But when the scores and times came out, it went pretty well for me: second in Single Stack.
The next stage went well in terms of shooting while leaving positions and on the move. I also had to make a tough choice, since I only had 32 rounds (4 mags of 8 each) on my belt and the stage required 32 rounds: load my first mag out of my pocket and have an insurance magazine on my belt, or load off my belt and have the insurance in my pocket. I airgunned it a few times and ended up deciding that loading out of my pocket wasn’t that slow, but if I had it to do again, I probably would have just gone off my belt.
In the end, though, I didn’t respect the 14 turtle-shaped classic targets and had more than half of my hits end up as Cs. Even before deducting points for the mike on the second to last target, I was 8 charlies behind the next best Single Stack score. Sloppy. Probably shouldn’t have had such short splits on those middle targets. Turns out it isn’t just enough to shoot at brown in this sport.
Stay tuned for the other five stages from this match next week.
Nice shooting!