Hot And Cold

In the midst of the craziness which has been my life for the last month, I did manage to squeeze in a USPSA match last weekend, with mixed results…as usual. Despite high temps and the usual night shift fatigue, I had one really good (for me) stage, turning in a 5.1060 hit factor on Stage 1 (though it would have been better still without the one miss). The rest of the match ran from mediocre to awful, the worst being the three no-shoots I hit on Stage 2. I also hit a no-shoot on the Stage 3 classifier, where I learned another important lesson.

When moving from the second position in that stage to my third and final position, I performed a reload which was totally unnecessary. The round count worked out so that I would not need to top off before moving to that last position (and had not planned to), but when my feet started moving, autopilot took over and I hit the mag release anyway. Although I often tout this automaticity as one of the benefits of competition…and still do…in this case it worked against me. While it didn’t really cost me anything in terms of time on the stage, it does bother me that I performed an unnecessary action simply because I had programmed myself to do it.

I often consider this when I see folks who insist that you should always be moving once you’ve drawn your gun. For example, there are instructors who drill a sidestep as part of the drawing motion, insisting that you should always be moving or “getting off the X” once the action starts. I tend to question always doing anything; what if you were already in a covered position when you drew your gun? Would you automatically move from behind cover, just because you had drilled yourself so thoroughly? Maybe that’s an extreme “what if” argument…and maybe it’s not. At the very least, I think my flub on this stage indicates that we probably shouldn’t be doing any gun-related task without at least some level of conscious thought.

Think about it.