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My day was going great this morning at the local IPSC competition.
I hadn’t been practicing nearly as much as I should yet I had finished Stage I nicely and internally had a smug smile of confidence. My time hadn’t been great (its usually not) but everything that needed to get shot got shot, plenty of alphas and none of the no-shoot targets had a hole in it. I had started the stage with a fast pling! pling! pling! As the first three metals went down and finished with a double alpha so close you had to look closely to see the two circles almost perfectly overlaid.
And then there was Stage II
I cant put into words how much I sucked. I nailed the first metal, missed the second. Tried to quickly nail it with a follow up shot and missed that one two. Now I’m thinking I’ll have to reload before moving to the next series of targets an how much time that will take which pissed me even more. It took 4 rounds to put that one down and from then on it was downright embarrassing.
The angrier I got with myself the more I missed. Complete disaster. Great Stage I. Terrible Stage II.
That’s just the rule of the game. You don’t practice enough, you shoot slower, you make more mistakes, the more of those you make the less you focus and the worse it gets. But driving back home I reminded myself why I do this. It’s just practice. I don’t care one bit about points. Even if I had done poorly in both Stages, it would have still counted as practice, as trigger time under pressure and working on being accurate and that is ALWAYS better than not competing at all, always better than not shooting.
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Its usually a nice group of people and if there is a little bit of drama, which is something people have mentioned to me in the past, don’t mind it, just do your thing. But compete, shoot with the timer chasing you, with others watching. Shoot when uncomfortable and even a bit stressed. It is not tactical defensive shooting but even if you have to follow the rules it still counts as trigger time in which you develop speed, accuracy and problem solving instincts.
FerFAL
Fernando “FerFAL” Aguirre is the author of “The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse” and “Bugging Out and Relocating: When Staying is not an Option”
1 comment:
I too shoot IPSC and I too find it useful as a training tool. I try not to go to fast. I try to go accurate. Missing fast is easy but getting 100 % hits is not. Hits count in real life.
Resetting your mind under pressure if you miss is something I find tremendously useful and no other form of shooting lets me do that in a more practical and realistic way. There is no other way for me to apply more pressure to myself then when I shoot competitive. Taking back control and focusing on the fundamentals under pressure is a powerful tool to learn. Dry fire is where you lay foundations for good trigger work, but competition is proof.
Anywhere where men gather there will be someone wanting to be top dog. There will always be some super competitive people around, and some may crave attention, but if you approach this as a game that lets you shoot you can get a lot out of it and not be annoyed.
Keep up the good work.
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