Now that I have an entire month to stew over my mistake at the USPSA shoot, it also means I have a month to learn from what I did wrong. Here’s an illustration of what happened.
This is halfway through the stage. I started out on the lower left with a wall that made me run to the right to engage a target. There was a ‘hallway’ to my left as I ran and I focused on the target on the upper left rather than remembering there was a gap in the wall through which to engage the two targets on the right. I shot the target at the end of the run, started to move toward the next lane and saw the targets I missed behind the wall, turned, and shot, clearly breaking the 180°.
First and foremost was my situational awareness. That was dumb. I knew I had screwed up because I realized trying to take the second, further target was impossible without possibly plugging the people walking behind me and pasting targets. There is no excuse for this. There is, however, the newness of the game to me which hopefully becomes more ingrained as I get into this.
The second problem was the running. I don’t need to run, I need to saunter. I’m going to be battling for dead last for a few months, I need to get over it and just accept it. Until I get comfortable with this whole deal, I’m not going to beat the grandmasters or even the D-class people. Rushing through, I missed some targets. Had I moved at the speed I should have, I would have not focused so hard on ‘getting through’ and probably not have missed the window.
Which brings up item # 3 – visualization. I am going to complain that the walkthroughs were not exactly thorough although again, the blame lies with me for not raising my hand and saying ‘I don’t understand the course of fire’. It’s intimidating having 50+ people trying to walk through the course at the same time, many of them Open class A people who are pros at this stuff. However, I need to come up with a better system of recalling where these targets are before I go through. I was 3rd in line (mistakenly called 2nd) so I didn’t get a chance to tape any targets and thus was shorted a few more times to walk through. I should request being put further down the list next time.
All in all, I’ll accept my quasi-DQ* with a bit of shame and chalk it up to a learning experience (*looking at the scores, they didn’t mark me as DQ, just a 0%) and do better next month.