Opening Day
Here in Cincinnati Reds country, opening day is practically a holiday, and those of us who play in the shooting sports get no less stoked for our first at bats of a new USPSA season. Well, the first pitches have now been thrown, and for both myself and the Reds, results were mixed.
Almost all of my matches are shot with me just having come from working a night shift at my job, which usually means I start out fairly strong, and then fade as the match goes into the part of the day when I’d normally be sleeping and fatigue sets in. This one was a little atypical, as I started out a little foggy but shot stronger as the day progressed, with the very last stage being my best of the day.
You will see evidence of this on my first stage (we started on Stage 5). As I began to engage the second array of targets, my thumb bumps the safety of my 1911 into the “on” position, though I didn’t realize it immediately due to the early morning brain fog. I waste a couple of seconds trying to get my foggy brain to figure out what the malfunction was and fix it. This is also evidence of my lack of off-season practice, as I normally ride my thumb on top of the safety, eliminating the possibility of this sort of issue.
The bottom line is that little practice + tired brain = muffed stage.
I went on to throw two mikes (misses) at the last target on the second stage classifier…and not even realize I had done it. I thought everything looked good as I fired the last two shots, but apparently that still foggy brain thought wrong. I then had one other mike on the third stage, on the longest target at the first position. But things improved after that, and I shot faster and better on the last two stages. The last stage was my best run of the day…I even shot fast enough in some places to catch two spent cases in frame for the cover photo of this piece. I did shoot the match pretty cleanly otherwise, without hitting any no-shoot targets or other penalties, and a pretty good percentage of “A” zone hits overall.
As always, I’d encourage even casual shooters to get out to a match and try their skills. As I have written before, although shooting games are not “tactical,” I firmly believe that they do provide extremely useful skills development and practice for any pistol shooter. If you want to become a better shooter, there really is no better way (other than professional training) to push yourself and improve your skills than competition. Besides that, it’s a lot of fun! Come on out and join us.
