A poor performance

Finally shot a match today, for the first time since I shot the IDPA Classifier. And I didn't do very well, which was dismaying, but not wholly unexpected. I finished 6th out of 12, which to me isn't as good as it might seem.

That basically put me last in the group of experienced shooters. Many of the other six were either dealing with a handicap, such as the older man that had a severely broken ankle earlier in his life that hindered his movement and made it difficult or impossible for him to kneel. There was a young lady that had only been shooting for a couple of years. I should finish in front of that group, and should have finished further up than I did...but I didn't.

I found that, once again, mashing the trigger and trying to go faster don't work well together. I dropped some points that I shouldn't have. I caught myself looking at the target instead of the sights a couple times. I missed a relatively easy head shot on the second of three targets, and pretty much center punched the other two. I dropped one point on the hardest stage and felt like I should have gotten that one, too. That's where the points were missing, but it was all my fault. The one I have a hard time living with was the head shot I missed. 5 down on an easy target. I hit the target, but managed to put it outside the perforations. Yeah, it's a talent.

I mentioned expecting a less than stellar performance, and to a degree I did expect it. I was shooting a new Glock 17 with new sights. I'm not dead certain the sights are adjusted to where they need to be, but they worked good on the pepper popper that I hammered with about five rounds. The trigger in that gun is quite a bit different than my MnP, which I shot my Classifier with. It was the new gun and I wanted to run it, so I did, expecting that I might not shoot as good as I might have.

I also ran a new Safariland ALS that was tighter than my MnP ALS is. I didn't practice much with it, and had to borrow my mag pouches, too, as my Blade Tech double mag pouch has come up missing. All that new gear meant that I was going to struggle a little, and in the end, I struggled about as much as I expected to. If there had been mag changes in this match, I would have made up a lot of ground, as some of the malfunctions I saw were not handled expertly. Oddly enough, the ones I saw were with 1911's, with at least one of them being a Kimber. That doesn't mean that Tactical Tupperware shooters wouldn't have had trouble. Its a skill that has to be practiced.

It all comes down to this: you will not rise to the occasion. You will revert to the level of your training.