I haven’t updated the ol’ blog in a while, but I have still been shooting!
The intervening time included one major match, a bunch of local matches and a couple of months fighting off a return of my childhood nemesis, asthma.
Asthmatically speaking, it’s now well controlled. I’m essentially symptom free once we found the right combination of treatments, which turned out to be Singulair, Breo Ellipta, albuterol and occasional Allegra for good measure. Once I was able to get it under control with medication, I have been able to wean completely off the medication once more.
I haven’t stopped tracking all my matches, but I have stopped deeply analyzing bad stages. A tip from With Winning In Mind is to make note of bad stages and their general causes, but to not exhaustively analyze them as I have been. That actually reinforces bad behaviors by dedicating a lot of mind-space to them.
As I have begun looking at stages that way, I have also realized that, while the actual details may vary, the root cause of…. I’m going to go out on a limb and say probably all…. of my bad stages is…. prepare yourself for this nugget of wisdom…. not doing everything right.
What looks like a quote from Captain Obvious is more subtle than it seems. Obviously, I didn’t do everything right or I would not have scored badly on the stage in question. But the subtle bit is that rather than agonize over what I did *wrong*, I need to add to what I did right.
I have cranked out a lot of ammo lately, about 2000 rounds of 40 S&W, split between 155 and 165 grain bullets. 155/165 grain bullets on 4.5 grains of TiteGroup has become my routine ammo. It makes about 140 power factor from the Glock, so it should make better than 125 even in the Kahr.
My press issues have all been addressed, as have the quality assurance issues. I have not had a single ammo issue since before June of 2014. I like having a sizable inventory because I can just go shoot without being overly concerned with whether I have suitable ammo.
I *have* had troubles with misfeeds that seem clearly to be caused by a limp wrist when shooting weak hand. At least two matches in the last couple of months featured a course of fire requiring shots fired weak hand only and on both occasions, I had ammo feed problems with the weak hand only element and full reliability with all other shooting. Reliability, not necessarily decent scoring 🙂
This weekend, I am taking the IDPA SO course. I’ve been with IDPA for over a year, shooting almost every week, so no excuses not to take on a little more responsibility.