Eric Gambill Shooting Log

[Airic]

A couple weeks ago I decided I wasnt working hard enough.

I have been dry firing 3-4 days a week 30-45 mins. Starting last week I am going to hit the range 3-4 days a week for live fire. I have a training calender made out with all the drills preset. Lets see what happens.

Today I hit the range shooting the drills "Singles" and "Heads" out of Stoegers live fire book skills and drills. I ran them in the "super wide" setup because I felt like it would benefit my transistions more. Ran into some pretty interesting numbers:

Heads (2 shots per head, 3 tgts 3yds apart)-

5yds I had an average run of 4.25s. My draw averaged 1.3s. I ran the drill 5 times at this distance and all hits were there (forgot to record Alphas/Bravos)

10yds I had an average run of 4.65s. My draw averaged 1.45s. Ended up with 14 A, 8 B and 2 Mikes

15yds I had an average run of 5.5s. My draw averaged 1.7s. Had 5 A, 12 B, 8 Mikes

Singles (1 shot per tgt, 3tgts 3 yds apart)-

3yds: 11A, 4C, 1.8s avg run, .90 avg draw

5yds: 11A, 4C, 1.8s avg run, .95 avg draw

7yds: 12A, 3C, 1.9s avg run, 1.0 avg draw

15yds: 11A, 4C, 2.4s avg run, 1.25 avg draw

20yds: 7A, 7C, 1D, 2.4s avg run, 1.25 avg draw

I thought these numbers were interesting. They are very similar at the different distances. You can see theres a breaking point on my accuracy after 15yds. I wasnt trying to specifically shoot alphas, I was just running at match speed and calling shots.

 

[Airic]

1.5s par time on the first drill for Advanced Handling. Not sure if I would have had the second shot under 1.6s

After watching the video I just noticed how much the wife is invading my dryfire area with her "projects" lol

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3DpzkbEBAIYQ3dlTUUwRng5ajg/edit?usp=sharing

 

[Airic]

Broke a couple of my long standing plateaus today and I'm pretty excited about it. The drill reload challenge has been a thorn in my side from the first time I attempted it.

Today I broke the advanced partime on the first and second part of the drill, and I did it with called Alpha/Charlie's. Not long ago I couldn't get even remotely close.

It's refreshing to see some progress.

 

[Airic]

Ran the drill "Hard Moving Reload" in live fire the other day. I really liked this drill and I felt like I performed well on it. Ran it 10 times from the first distance shown in the video and only dropped 2 charlies out of those 10 runs. I decided to move it back to the 30yd line since I was having such an accuracte day. I dropped some points back there but I was happy with those runs also. Biggest thing is that I really felt like I was nailing the reloads during the whole session which tells me my focus on moving reloads is starting to show some improvement.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5yx1qn4I_A&list=UUjRIo1mEUZo-IZE1EscMsdQ&feature=share

 

[Airic]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYcQsS7DCss&feature=share&list=UUjRIo1mEUZo-IZE1EscMsdQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm9C5NvQWbE&feature=share&list=UUjRIo1mEUZo-IZE1EscMsdQ&index=2

Vids from the Double Tap Championship. I had a disappointing finish, 22nd overall. I feel really good about my execution of stage plans, my reloads, my transitions, my movement. Whats killing me is freeking accuracy. The amount of charlies, deltas and mikes are costing me match points. Accuracy is also costing me time on stages with the misses on steel. Out of 44 steel I had 13 missed attempts and had to makeup. Out of the 4 mikes I had, only one was what I call a true miss. I shot at the target and missed. Two of them were on stage 12 where I had planned to engage one last target through a circular port after the steel in the last position....but because I was missing steel I forgot to engage it. The other mike was because I called a hit in the wall on a stage when I was running the mag to 11 rounds and I shot two more rounds at the target and only had one left for the other one.

So what am I gonna do about it? Keep plugging away at my accuracy practice. If there was one thing I think that my training was lacking that contributed to accuracy problems it would be off balance shooting. I need to work in more positional practice where I'm shooting at a lean and off balance. Other than that, I feel like if I could get to a point where I keep my current speed of operations but consistently shoot 95% of the points and eliminate the mental errors....I would do great.

The long road continues....

 

[Airic]

http://youtu.be/xo-JON7rUV4

So im back to the CZ. Good God its easy to shoot Alphas with this thing. Total commitment. Im sticking with this gun until I change divisions.

We had a good amount of long distance shots today and i was nailing the A zone.

Going up to Badlands IDPA state match next weekend. The CZ fits the box and it weighs out at 40oz. Think shes gonna work.

 

[Airic]

No Badlands for me this weekend. Work is gonna get in the way. That means my next major is Area 4, which is a little while off. Time to reorganize my training:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j0_OOrpIZY&feature=share&list=LLjRIo1mEUZo-IZE1EscMsdQ

 

[Airic]

Wow, I didnt know it had been so long since I wrote in here. I've been training my butt off. Currently I am dry firing a couple times a week and shooting two 200 round live fire sessions a week.

In dryfire I have been focusing on my grip out of the holster at speed and my reloads. I've been going through a spell of inconsistent grips since switching back to the CZ. Everytime I push the draw, it comes out. In live fire I can pretty consistently hit .95 Alphas at 7 yards but when I push it down into the low .80s or high .70s I really get inconsistent. With reloads, it just seems no matter how hard I work I can't get down to one second shot to shot consistently. When I hit a reload in live fire its 1.25 or 1.3s, when I bobble a little its at 1.5 or 1.6s. I ran 4 Aces in live fire today, the target time for that drill (Production) is at 2.6s. If I hit my reload, I was at 2.6 or 2.5. Any bobble and I was at 3s. I pushed really hard on this drill today trying to squeeze every little bit of speed out of everything else since my reloads were sucking. I wasnt really focusing on being accuracte in the drill but I ended up only dropping a couple points the whole time I ran the drill. Shot a couple dot drills also today. I pushed the drill back to 7 yards, which I have never done before. The normal par time for the 6 shots is 5 seconds and I was running in the 5.85 range to get all the hits in the circle. At 5 yards I can easily shoot all 6 in the dot at around 4 seconds, but the drill isnt about speed....its about consistency. Can you do it in under 5, six times in a row.

 

[Airic]

http://youtu.be/c7lUaxrdapc

Heres a vid of a couple of the Stages from SCRAP this month. They had a stage (last one in the vid) that was very simple but posed a huge question to me scoring wise:

Take the miss or not? The stage was 12 rounds, which meant I was gonna need to do a reload. The targets were very close and I knew the hit factor was going to be high. Its not very often that you get a chance to make the decision on whether intentionally leaving a miss will be a higher hit factor than not. I broke it down like this:

I figured without the reload I could run the stage in the 3 second range. The targets were close so I used all alphas as my standard. That put me at 45 points (11 A's, 1 miss and 10 pt penalty) in 3 seconds = 15 hit factor

With the reload (I set a safe time of 1.5s for a reload while moving down or crouched under the table) I was looking at 4.5 seconds and 60 points thats a hit factor of 13.33. I then took into account the risk factor. I could miss or blow the reload, pushing the hit factor even lower.

I decided to take the miss. I ended up running it in 3.39 seconds with 53 points ( I shot a very close charlie). That put me at a 12.68 hit factor and finished 6th overall combined on the stage. https://practiscore.com/results.php?uuid=21713E59-7B4F-4F1A-B725-8CE2242BC5EC&page=stage6Combined

Although the hit factors didnt come out close to what I calculated, the concept was the same. To me this stage posed a very interesting scoring problem for the production shooter and I enjoyed it.

 

[Airic]

Yay! I'm first non-GM....rofl

 

[drmitchgibson]

What is this a picture of?

 

[mike cyrwus]

yo mamma.

way to go, Eric!

 

[45recoil]

Damnit Eric quit dickin around...and get your GM card already. Lol

 

[Airic]

Damnit Eric quit dickin around...and get your GM card already. Lol

Screw that, throw the G on there and you're expected to know what your doing.

 

[45recoil]

I vote that we change the designation to BAMF

 

[SpaceFlunky]

badass!

 

[Airic]

I vote that we change the designation to BAMF

That should be for the "super GM" class. You know, the 5 guys who win all the time.

 

[Airic]

When the gun ran, I shot really well. In practice I had been getting failures to extract every once in a while the last two weeks. The extractor is slipping off the case rim and the slide will blow back and try to feed the next bullet. I guess some it hit its breaking point at the match yesterday because it was happening a lot. Time for a new extractor spring and I'll replace the extractor just in case. Only two stages out of the match it didnt happen. Here's a vid of one and the other was the classifier, 09-02 Diamond Cutter. Ran that in 4.13 with 40/40 points. Classifier calc says its a 92.68% which would put my national average at 94.91%. Cant get much closer than that.

http://youtu.be/tbwHk0e5BbM?list=UUjRIo1mEUZo-IZE1EscMsdQ

 

[Airic]

Fixed the CZ this week. Getting that little pin in the slide out was a huge pain in the ass but theres an extra power extractor spring and new extractor in the gun.

Today is the first day of the Ben Stoeger class I'm attending in New Mexico. Figured since some of you guys are taking the class later this year I would give you a heads up on what went on in the class. More to follow....

 

[Airic]

Back and recovered from 2 loooong days of training in Clovis, NM with Ben Stoeger. My main goal in the class was to try to get some help or advice on what I could do to get closer to the top guys (other than the obvious like not missing or making mistakes). Overall I am happy with what took place. I came back with a little list of things to work on, a couple are things that I havent been training.

We had like 12 people in the class. It was a good mix of skill levels. There were 3 other GM/M class shooters. Some mid level guys and some brand new guys. I brought 1200 bullets to class with me but only ended up shooting around 500. At the beginning of the class, we kinda just threw up a random long field course stage with a mixture of easy/hard shots. Everyone shot the stage, made some adjustments from his advice and then shot it again. We then moved to the next bay and started working on drills. We worked drills that broke down almost every aspect of the sport. He pushed everyone to thier breaking point on the drills. Ben is very blunt and unforgiving about your failures. He will ask you why you did what you did, let you explain and sometimes offer an opinion and sometimes he just let me sit on what I said.

Thats how the two days went. Run a stage and run some drills. We kept the same basic wall/prop setup for the stage the whole time but just changed targets and start positions. If your going to take a class from him, be prepared to work. Some of the drills he runs will leave you gassed. The man will train until you quit for the day. Getting close to the end of day two, the group was pretty wore out and he looked like he could go all night. There were people who were pretty much done and decided to leave. At the end of it all, he handed out his dryfire book and we talked about dryfire and the book. We then ran the stage one last time and ended the class.

It was a good time. I got my money's worth out of it. Some of the things on my list are easy changes that I can work in this week before going to Area 4. I'm gonna try to train it up pretty hard this week.