Revision of Progress and Restatement of Training Plan for Coming Months

For the last while, my primary intention has been an improvement in basic fundamental skills and their consistent application. I would say that this has been a qualified success. I have been paying more attention to my position and the way in which I orient my firing point each time. I have been more keenly observing a consistent positioning of my support hand and arm and the relationship of the sling to them. I've been much better with regard to my head positioning and my right elbow. Currently, my physical position feels good, solid and tight. What I'm currently experimenting with is grip pressure. From an academic point of view, my understanding of wind conditions has improved greatly, and while I won't claim I don't get caught out, I've gotten much better at it.

Where I am currently failing is in my mental game. The physical skills exist to take good shots, consistently. What I am lacking is the mental wherewithal to consistently execute them. I am releasing shots on insufficiently good sight pictures, failing to focus strongly enough on trigger control and not following through as well as I want to. The issue is that, having built the technical skills to shoot well, and having learned the ability to read wind conditions, I am still taking sloppy shots for some reason, and I don't know why. I know it too. It's not as though I'm surprised after a lot of the shots. Even when I shoot well, however, there are conditions I cannot as yet fathom, being mirage and intense light (light changes I have largely been able to deal with). Having gone over my score sheet from yesterday and highlighting demonstrable effects of intense light and mirage in the placement of shots, I found eighteen points I could have had otherwise. Now, fifteen shots is still too many to lose sloppily, but it would tie roughly with my own assessment of my diligent application of technique yesterday. Had I been less focused, the result might have been significantly worse!

From here, I intend to further my improvements on position and fundamental technique. I want to develop my trigger control and attention to sight picture better, and particularly the relationship between the two. I want to pay more attention to my follow through and to calling the shots as I take them and observing the recoil patterns, the standardisation of which I also intend to pursue over the summer. The trick for me is going to be the mental isolation of shots, which is very hit and miss for me at the moment. The problem is that I might achieve it, and then get the shot, and then I might get the next one, and I might start to associate the two and then I get a few more, but eventually I start to think of the group, or the string, rather than the shot, and then I lose some from the group or the string. Sometimes this doesn't happen and I put in six or seven good shots in a row, but then I drop one, and then suddenly it becomes about the string. So the problem occurs from different causes, but the results are the same. The issue is similar with regard to the lack of due diligence to sight picture. There's something telling me that I can always make up for a sub-standard shot later, when really I can't, and it's not the point one way or another. It's something I have to drill out and I'm not sure how best to do so.

The other plan for the summer is to get some running and physical training going and then spend some range time and dry-firing time working on standing and kneeling, and shooting a few 3P matches. This will be a new development for me. While I shot a few sessions kneeling and did some work on a standing setup for my rifle this year, I never got to shoot that much as I have been very much focused on my prone shooting. I intend for this to remain the case, but to include some supplemental 3P stuff, as ultimately, more shooting is just going to reinforce the same techniques and fundamentals.

I'm hesitant to state where I want to be over the next while, but I'd really quite like to average 580+ over the summer. However, since I'm not able to train at the moment with exams and the like, I'd happily settly for 580+ over the last few matches by the end of the summer. I am improving, and I'm still seeing my flaws, vividly, so the work is still all ahead of me.

Match - Prone - ECSC - 11th April 2010

Remember where this was supposed to be child's play? Yeah, that didn't happen. I arrived at the range this morning, saw still flags and a beautiful, clear day, not a cloud in the sky, steady light levels, and thought "Awesome, may as well book the flight to Munich now!". Oh, this was not the case. :p

I started the day with the intention of keeping some very simple principles in mind. These were:
Obtain a good sight picture
Pay religious attention to trigger control and hand position
Follow through strongly.

Now, the trigger control was excellent, and the follow through was good, if not as good as I'd like, but the sight picture was massively problematic. The light and heat caused two problems. In the first place, its direct effect on me was to seriously affect my vision, burnt the sight right out of me. Not sure whether a bigger rearsight unit which shields the eye somewhat might be a better idea. The second is the mirage effect on the target. Now there was nothing bad enough to cause more than perhaps an eight, but it became bloody hard to keep the shots in the ten. This was a phenomenon visible across the board, with various patterns appearing on people's targets, from arcs where getting the foresight visibly centred in the rearsight has become difficult and the shooter is straining to try and achieve this in spite of the optical illusory effects the light was causing to vertical stringing and groups appearing at various points along the arc of shots. The wind was absolutely negligible. I can't think of a single shot today that the wind cost me for definite. Might have been one or two, but it really wasn't an issue.

A personal issue I noticed was something my focus on trigger control made quite visible. Firstly, my sight picture tends to move slightly low and left as I apply pressure to the second stage of the trigger. This may be due to excessive pressure on the grip. I'm going to have to experiment with this somewhat and see what I can come up with. I'll do this as part of my tweaking in the early summer, which will be designed to improve my recoil patterns. The second is that whatever way my trigger is set up since the repair, it's got a bit of creep in it. Not being a fan of this, I'm going to fix it as soon as I have time.

The match was not good, at 567. I'd like to say there were a lot of mistakes which made it that, but it was just sheer inability to deal with the light and mirage. I still haven't found a useful way to keep in control when the light has my eyes messed up. Having largely gotten a solid handle on the wind, I think this is going to be the big challenge over the next few months, along with overall consistency improvements.

IoM - 3rd and 4th April 2010

Operation NotMakeTitofSelf was a comprehensive failure. My rifle was borked, and would only fire about one time in three. This is extremely debilitating, as you effectively have to shoot three matches to get one in paper. In fact, I only got fifty match shots on paper on sunday. It really was a disaster. I spent monday on the range though, and the rifle is fixed. Shot a match to confirm, and in very tricky winds, and with not much concentration and shooting quickly, I managed a 567. I fluffed a good few shots there, so it should have been a good few points better, and that ammo cost me some points as well (I hate using Eley outdoors. It has never performed for me in such a way that I didn't think it cost me points unnecessarily. Lapua and RWS all the way from now on), so in retrospect I was very disappointed with the weekend's results. I suppose focus was the big killer, since I could have happily focused for the duration of a match, but couldn't have done so for three matches a day. The first day was very, very easy, and I don't understand how that wasn't a mid 570s score (I wasn't that comfortable, but it should still have made a decent score, really wasn't a tough day at all). The second day was an unmitigated disaster and there's nothing useful to be drawn from it beyond making sure the rifle works flawlessly before travelling abroad with it. Not the first and not the last time this will happen to someone though, so it's a learning experience. Given the lack of training days available, I'd have been happy to post two scores in the 570s, and monday's training tells me that was only too easy to have done, with a better score possible on the saturday, but now I just have to go home and train and train to hopefully make a better show of myself next time. Since the exams look like falling around the time of the Easter shoot for the next year or two, I may be finished college before I make it back. I'll then be shooting the 3x40 and possibly the air rifle matches as well if that's the case, and making a damn sight better show of myself at the same time. Next week in ECSC should be child's play after the weekend in Sinclair. Now to see whether that turns out to be true...