Acting in a milisecond is always unconsciously
Thought patterns ...
- Thread starter dquarasr
- Start date
Acting in a milisecond is always unconsciously
I don't know where the line is but you are right, at a certain point we are not weighing things, we work off of endstink which may be the unconscious or perhaps muscle memory. I'm not too sure. People hang names on things but I don't know what is right as far as the things they believe.
There was a steel plate match before Katrina. Five eight inch plates at twenty-five feet. Max Michelle and a few more shot this match every week. They got the time down to 1.71 seconds before the hurricane ended things. That is to start in the surrender position, draw, and shoot the five steel plates. That doesn't leave much time for thinking. The buzzer sounds, action starts. I was a bit slower than some but fast enough to receive respect.
Thing is, there was little or no thought before the buzzer, none afterwards. I do the same thing on a pool table when practicing alone and my stroke is a bit gimpy. Step in and fire, one stroking over and over. Before long with no thought things start clicking.
Speed thrills!
Hu
1.71???
Holy shit.
Story time. Those not interested have been warned.
With my bad ears I am slow on the start. I can't go on the first click without risking a DQ. I have to be sure what I am hearing. Once I start I roll pretty good.
I have a bad habit of starting to do something for fun then finding I can compete at it and I spend my time tuning for competition or competing. Partially for entertainment and partially for practice I had added a "mad minute" at the end of my practice sessions.
One quiet day it was just me and a federal agent on the firing line. I put my usual target at ten yards to finish the day. A standard police B-27 silhouette. I was shooting a high capacity .45, 1911 of course. I loaded fifteen rounds in two magazines.
Fiifteen shots center, reload, fifteen shots head. This was done at speed, about three to four shots a second. All told it took ten or twelve seconds. When I got through there was a hole about the size of your wrist in the X ring and another the same size in the head, no fliers.
I hadn't done it to impress anyone but when I turned to pick up brass I couldn't help noticing the fed was literally white as a sheet! No blood in his face! Not likely at all but he realized if he ever ran into a bad guy that shot like that he was dead.
He started coming once or twice a week to practice and got quite respectable himself. Better than any LEO in the area including the instructors. Better than anyone other than a game warden that is. The game warden is Jerry Miculek's brother and was the class of the field shooting competition back then.
Talking about speed, some of the fastest competitors could run faster than some submachine guns! Max shot for the military and then Sig last I knew. When he was twelve or thirteen he was a little pudgy, the kind that gets bullied at school which struck me as funny. He was one of the best in the world with a pistol even then!
All of the different forms of competition don't directly translate but I have learned that competition itself is a skill set and some of that skill set always transfers. Speed doesn't translate to pool but accuracy does. So does the mental game.
Hu
Losing a lot of money only matters if losing that money matters to you...You most definitely can if playing for large coin!!
Lose and you're walking home to an empty house.
Increase the element of risk involved.
You'll figure it out real quick!!
Well said!!
A competitor is a competitor in all things.
I think it comes down to personality types. You're either an Alpha, or a Beta.
How much time do you think you lost on the pull bcuz of your hearing??
.10 or more??
Less??
The electronic timers of the time clicked a tenth of a second before they buzzed. I couldn't hear that click so that was a tenth lost right there. Then when the timer buzzed I had to be very careful to identify the buzz, starting on a false sound would disqualify the run at the least.
There is a strange contrast when drawing a gun fast on signal. If the hands start down early it is a DQ but naturally you want the first part of the signal to start on. The click is short, clean, gives a clean signal to launch on. The buzzer is a long comparatively soft sound. It is similar to other noises in the building. Not hearing the click before the buzzer cost a tenth as already mentioned. Then pausing to confirm it is actually the buzzer costs another tenth or two.
Average cost per start was probably a quarter second or more. That is a lot to give up when talking about around two seconds flat for a total run.
There was another place I lost time too, stopping on each target. Faster to sweep across the targets firing as you swing onto and past a target. Stopping is better practice for self defense in my opinion and that was the real objective for me, practicing for real world.
In the shoot off at an event we could start with a round in the chamber. The winner was determined by the fastest of three runs. I was putting seven rounds in my pistol figuring that two misses were a half second or more lost. I was saving weight with fewer rounds loaded that wouldn't do me any good anyway.
I had shot all seven rounds one run, rare. I assumed one in the chamber and the next run was met with the dreaded click. I had aligned properly, my stance was perfect from earlier runs. The buzzer sounded, I had a near perfect draw, the gun came up perfectly, and I snapped the hammer on an empty chamber. Stunned by the very rare failure to fire it took me long fractions of a second to figure out the problem. Put me out of the competition.
I racked the slide and brought my pistol up. Unusual for me, I just panned across the plates shooting as I went. It was poison fast, maybe a quarter second between shots on separate targets. Afterwards I asked a very facetious "Did I win?" Needless to say I wasn't in the same zip code as a win! The match was stopped for a few minutes while all of the young guns checked my splits between shots though, those splits were wicked tight. A semi-auto was claimed to jam if shooting under .15 second splits. My Hubilt pistols would cycle at 0.10 seconds without issues. I have seen them cycle properly at 0.08 seconds but that was just somebody playing putting bullets in the berm, no aiming involved.
I set four records with Hubilt guns. While they were local records, nationally and internationally ranked Masters and Grandmasters shot those matches so I was pretty pleased. I could build guns, had built close to a dozen, and I could have stayed busy just doing trigger jobs. My trigger jobs were well respected locally and my guns ran like seven day clocks.
Early morning bragging but I have never let time of day interfere with bragging!(grin)
Hu