Training and Matches - Prone - Last Week

Going to do a general update on the training sessions running up to the weekend of matches and then the weekend itself.

The couple of training sessions before saturday were not satisfactory. I wasn't shooting for anything except groups and responses, but I wasn't happy. Groups weren't round and weren't tight, and the sensory feedback didn't perfectly match up with the evidence in the paper. I thought it might be the ammo, but I discounted this. The ammo was good quality and had been an accurate reflection before. Now, it wasn't great and I've had better ammo (A leftover hundred Eley Match I had in the safe shot very well for me when I first got it) but it was definitely good enough that the results were not the ammo's fault. This was apparent over both training sessions in the week from monday to thursday.

So I went into the match off the back of some very modest results in training, but with my head cleared and my focus on good technique. Started off with the 50m 60-shot match. Sighters were good. Wind and mirage was a little tricky, but I was getting shots off in good time in conditions like those I'd observed, so while there were one or two in the sighters I didn't get right, it wasn't bad. I started off with three solid tens in a row, then dropped an eight due to poor focus and something not quite right that I was too lazy to correct (more fool me) and dropped the last shot in that diagram, probably in annoyance and lack of focus over the previous shot. Things continued fairly normally for a while, though with a few more nines than I would like and would be usual for me. Then a pulse developed and, like a fool, I thought I could shoot through it by timing it right. The result was, of course, a seven and a red face for me. After this, the match went on with me shooting nine after nine. I couldn't identify why, as they weren't consistent. The position felt good, inner and outer, the hold was excellent, the sight picture was excellent, recoil was good, trigger control was good, and yet, no tens. This was extremely disheartening, obviously enough, and I never got hold of the match again, despite several breaks to try and sort the problem. The result was a 555, which I just can not understand.

I won't go into the hundred yard stuff from the weekend here, as it's not what I'm training for, bar later, in part of an anecdotal note for one of my biggest problems and my next big block of training material. Suffice to say, it's extremely challenging, and I didn't get into it at all this weekend.

I went home after work on sunday and spent an hour or so trying to sort out what might be the issue. Everything felt fairly alright and I couldn't think of any reason for it not having worked, so out of desperation, I reverted to the absolute basic setup I'd had when I first got the rifle. (Going to have to start taking better and more useful notes on changes I make however, or it's all going to get a bit confusing soon) It didn't really feel noticeably better, but I decided to run with it for sunday anyway after some dry-firing. The buttplate needs more work for the best fit, but I'll manage that either later today or tomorrow with some dry-fire training (maelstrom outside, not a range day) and I need to find some way to place my forward hand to take pressure off it. The stock is much narrower than my old one and is absolutely agonising after about fifteen or twenty minutes. Comfort being all-important, that's got to get sorted soon.

So, setup having been revised, I got down for the 40-shot match on sunday. Conditions were definitely easier. There were no excuses now. Sight picture was still good, trigger was still good, hold was still good, and ten after ten fell right into the middle, with a good few of the bad shots being called, and one or two wind errors, also called. There was no excuse in this one and while the shooting didn't really feel better, the result was a 384 (dropped a couple of points unnecessarily when a wasp landed on my hand as I was about to take the shot and cost me an eight and broke one or two shots before I was perfectly happy with them for nines). Really should have been about a 388 or better, but it's definitely my fault, nothing else going on there, with the range nicely readable and the shooting predictable. Since I'd have been happy with that standard (576) on saturday, I'm calling that a qualified success and going back to the drawing board with more work now.

The weekend's anecdotal evidence for my head problems is the hundred yard card I shot when I was running out of time and just rattled the shots through the target without even checking them in the spotting scope. The result was a 96 or a 97, I don't recall, but the group was very tight, and it was certainly the best hundred yard shooting I did all weekend. The annoying thing about this is that the shots didn't look great and nor did the responses. I was not expecting much from it as from a technical standpoint, the shooting was not good. There's definitely a problem with my mind and how it perceives the information being fed to it. The empirical evidence tells us here that the shooting was better than my eyes and my head were telling me. It's this lack of proper correspondence between the perception of the shot and the empirical evidence of the target that's confusing me. As illustrated by the 50m section, sometimes it's there (and, notably, the results are almost always distinctly unremarkable) but other times it's not, and it may be either very very good, or awful. There's a problem with getting myself wrapped up in it and somehow I've to get my own head out of the game and develop a set of automatic responses to conditions to let me shoot to the best of my abilities all the time. I don't know how to do it, but I'm going to acquire and consult some material on psychological training to try and make inroads into the problem.

A small note is that there is currently no way to guarantee a consistent supply of quality ammo. I have to get this fixed by importing a good quantity from Intershoot, as buying mixed batches from day to day is ridiculous, as it prevents proper training which, for me, is that which will lead to the exact correspondence, all the time, between my perceptions and reality. Having ammo as an untested variable in the equation makes this significantly more difficult.

I'm going to spend some of this week trying to make the position more comfortable and revisit my stock setup with this in mind. I'm also going to look to acquire ammo of a known quality in sufficient supply that I'm not wasting my time. After that, it's all mental, as my technique is solid. Unfortunately, this is far and away the most difficult thing I've got to get over. I'll be shooting some kneeling and possibly some standing later on in the week as well, but for the psychological aspects, my focus is going to remain firmly in prone, where it's most important to me and where I'm most familiar.