If You Want It, You’ve Got To Work For It

I’ve been right on the verge of making A-class in Production division for about 3 months now. I’ve got a handful of pretty good classifiers in the 75-78% range, and I just need one more classifier above 75% to get my average into the A-class range.

I started feeling really confident when my scores were landing where they needed to be to make A-class, which was awesome, however I think it was that confidence that allowed me to step off the gas a think that I could make A without much effort.

I was wrong. 

Until this morning, I hadn’t practiced in a solid month. I was out of town for a week, so I can excuse that, but since then I’ve just been lazy.

About 3 weeks ago I shot a match and did very well without any practice for a week. Reasonable.

Last week I shot the East Coast Practical Shooters USPSA match and my performance more or less fell apart. I hit no-shoot targets, and threw deltas, which is really uncharacteristic of me. I’m generally a very accurate shooter, and I’ll go many matches at a time without shooting any deltas or mikes. I ended up shooting about a 70% on the classifier, which wasn’t good enough to push me into A-class.

Yesterday I shot the Sir Walter Gun Club USPSA match and had an… interesting day. 55% on the classifier, and lots of little mental mistakes that I shouldn’t have made. Looking at the video of my shooting, I could even tell that I was out of practice by the way I moved and shot the stages. I just looked and felt sloppy, which is what I should have expected given I hadn’t practiced in a solid month.

All of this to say: If you want to get better, you’ve got to work for it. Just shooting matches and hoping you’ll get where you want to be won’t get you there. I’m fired up. Ben is on the verge of making Master, and I’m not even A-class yet. That’s not acceptable. I was in the garage at 6:45am this morning banging out some dryfire, and I’ve made up a 5-day-a-week dryfire plan for the rest of the month.