Last night after work I drove up to Bay City to Duncan’s Outdoors Shop to compete in a pistol league match. It’s the second one I’ve made it to, and shot some of my best…and worst scores.

Starting with a 95 was great. It’s been a long time since I’ve fired a 95 on a slow fire target. Maybe 10 years. There were 5 tens and 5 nines, which speaks to the consistency of the group.

As to what I did to bring about that score, all I can think of is that for each shot, I:

• took some good deep breaths to counter a little match pressure I was feeling
• closed my eyes, tipped my head up, and visualized what I wanted to see in the sight picture
• during visualization, also mentally reminded myself on the grip (middle and ring fingers pushing towards me, thumb pushing towards target)

After that great target, I completely fell apart and shot a 91 in a timed fire! Yikes. I probably average a 97 in timed fires, and don’t have a record since I’ve been keeping track in June of shooting a timed fire target that low. Same story on the 92 rapid fire.

So why the low sustained fire scores? Lack of recent match experience. When I’ve been out to the range this past summer, my practices haven’t really included range commands with enforced 10 or 20 second strings.

Basically, I seem to have no confidence in my ability to know how much time I have for timed or rapid fires. I can’t think of a way to remedy this except to practice with enforced times.

So, I ordered a refurbished iPod shuffle and I’ll record range commands onto it (I already have them in iTunes) so I can play those commands to myself when I go out for practice.