The Start of the 2019 Shooting Season

Last month I posted an article about my pre-season preparation for the 2019 shooting season.  The season has started, so I thought I would post an update on how things are going so far.  I’ve shot two Level I  Steel Challenge matches and two USPSA matches since the season started.

STEEL CHALLENGE

In March I shot one six-stage Steel Challenge match in Lexington, KY at the Blue Grass Sportsmen’s League, and one at Pickaway County Sportsmen Inc. in Circleville, OH.  Both locations are a bit further than I like to drive – BGSL is a 2-hour drive, and PCSI is about an hour and a half.  But, with the World Speed Shooting Championship coming up in May, I was willing to make the drive to get as much Steel Challenge practice in before the big match.  In both matches, I shot reasonably well, but well below my potential.  I had hoped that, based on my shooting faster par times in dry fire practice, I’d be shooting at or better than where I finished the season in 2018.  Apparently, it just doesn’t work that way for me.  BGSL was a particularly poor showing.  In PCC I finished 5th out of 5 shooters.  Of course, three of the four shooters who beat me were “M” (Master) class shooters.  But I really didn’t shoot to my potential.  In Cary Optics (CO) I was the only shooter, but I’m normally accustomed to winning the “Main Match” at any local/Level I match in which I shoot – that didn’t happen.  I came in 3rd, which was disappointing…but only .17 seconds separated 1st through 3rd place.  Still, I was feeling very rusty that day.  I did add a personal best on one of my PCC stages, so it wasn’t a total loss of a match.  PCSI wasn’t much better.  I took 3rd out of 16 shooters in PCC,  and 3rd out of 7 shooters in CO (4th in the Main Match).  I think my PCC shooting was starting to “dial in” but my pistol shooting was not.  This was a six stage match, but only 2 stages were “official” stages – the rest were “outlaw.” No personal bests were achieved on the two sanctioned stages we shot.

USPSA

Things looked a little brighter at the USPSA matches I shot at the end of March and in early April.  First up was the Miami Rifle and Pistol Club (MRPC) – my first USPSA match at this location.  I shot in Carry Optics, and really didn’t do too badly, all things considered.  I finished 6th out of 10 in CO, and 30th out of 72 shooters.  I had hoped to do better in my division, but I’m a mid-pack USPSA shooter, and I finished in the top half at a pretty challenging match.  The real bright spot here was the classifier stage I shot (a new one from the 2018 Nationals called “The Condor”), which added a solid “B” score to my classification calculation and lifted me from “C” to “B” class.  Moving up to B class was on my list of goals this year, so I’m happy to check that one off so early in the season.

The reality is that I’ve been shooting like a B class shooter for quite some time – I just have never shot enough USPSA matches to improve my classification.  Then it was back to PCSI for their April USPSA match.  Normally I would have shot the Oxford match which was Sunday, but the weather forecast called for rain on Sunday.  The PCSI match was on Saturday, and the weather was quite nice.  I shot in PCC for this match (I’m hoping to shoot at least once a month in CO, and once a month in PCC in USPSA this year) and made a couple of mistakes (ran past a target which is not uncommon for me) and had a malfunction.  But I came in 3rd in PCC, and 15th out of 73 shooters overall.  Not too shabby.  At the MRPC match, I felt like I was moving and shooting slow, but I felt faster at the MRPC match.  I also RO’s and ran the score pad for much of the PCSI match which was VERY helpful as I’m taking the National Range Officer Institute (NROI) Range Officer class and exam this month.

I also shot a local 3-Gun match in February – the first in over a year for me.  It was freezing so I didn’t particularly enjoy it.  I came in 19th out of 41 shooters so it wasn’t a stellar performance for me.  I actually did reasonably well until the final stage – it had a couple of steel targets I failed to engage…because all the paint was shot off of it, and it blended well into the gravel background.  I skipped the March match due to the weather.  And the April match conflicts with the NRA Annual Meeting which I’m planning on attending.  And the May match conflicts with a major I signed up for in January.  But I’m committed to shoot more 3-Gun this year so I’ll try and make it to the match in June.

PRACTICE

Clearly my dryfire practice didn’t completely replace live fire practice – the matches I shot in February and March (particularly the Steel Challenge matches) didn’t really show my true potential.  But they did help “knock off the rust.”  My live fire practice is, however, validating what I’m doing in dryfire (whew!).

I have about 4 drills that I routinely run at my local range, all from about 10 yards/30ft:  The Bill Drill, my 8 shot reload drill, standard plate rack, and “Outside-In” on a plate rack.  I can run these drills with either a pistol or a PCC, and I can vary them a bit (strong hand/weak hand for example when needed).  As I’m about 5 weeks away from the World Speed Shoot Championship and the Ohio State “Buckeye Blast” USPSA State Championship the following weekend, I’m going to try and practice at least once mid-week leading up to the match.

At my most recent practice, I did something I hadn’t done since August of 2018 – I shot a sub 2 second Bill Drill:

As you can see, this was well below the two-second mark.  If you back out the .99 draw time, that’s an average split time of .15 per shot – I don’t think I’ve ever shot that fast.  I ended up shooting 3 strings – all of which were under two seconds, and the hits weren’t bad at all on my similated alpha zone:

I’ve REALLY been trying to push my speed in dryfire and this seems to point to the fact that what I’m doing is indeed working.  My 8 shot reload drill (shoot 2 on left target, 2 on right, reload and repeat) yielded similar personal bests:

The hits I was seeing weren’t quite as good as what I did in the Bill Drill, but the speed of execution was really exciting.  Sub-four seconds on this drill really is not easy.  To perform it three times in a row at this speed is a true milestone for me.  Now I just need to make them all “A’s.”

While my Steel Challenge performance is not where I’d like it to be quite yet, I’m not terribly disappointed by the start of the season.  I’ve also dropped 15 lbs. of the weight I picked up from my back injury last year – my goal was to lose 20lbs. by The World Speed Shoot Championship in May, and I’m on track to hit that and maybe 5 lbs. better which is exciting.  Over the next few weeks, I’ve got two more local Steel Challenges matches, and two or three more local USPSA matches before I shoot the World and the Buckeye Blast.  I’ll be trying to get a mid-week practice session in each week, and one on the weekend when the weather permits and doesn’t otherwise conflict with a match.