First USPSA Match this year

[les snyder]

when I first started shooting USPSA (1982), I was fortunate to take a mini school with Bill Rogers... at the time Bill was one of the forward thinking trainers that recognized the value of immediate feedback and reward as a teaching tool...his technique was based on the immediate visual feedback the bullet strike makes on a steel target... I built one of his targets.. 3/8" steel plate duplicating a USPSA target, a section of box beam welded to the back so three pieces of 1/2" rebar (with slight dog leg bent to them) could be inserted to form a tripod...all was easily transported on a hand truck/cart... the target was painted with ordinary house paint and a trim pad... draw and shoot one shot or pairs, no more than 10 rounds before your repaint the target so each bullet strike is visualized... by the time  you go thru a gallon of house paint, you have the draw and presentation pretty well figured out... the first year with a Dillon 450 (pre 550) I was casting, sizing, and reloading for the .45...I shot 34,000 rounds... by the next year or so, I was shooting 4 major and 4 mini matches a month, and the matches became practice...we started shooting some local 3 gun and later the  Chevy STC around 1995... with weekly skeet and 5 stand practice...3 gun is now my favorite shooting sport, managed to shoot 4 of Kyle Lamb's North Carolina Tactical matches and all 6 of the Ft Benning matches....

on the visualization topic... I had plateaued and was looking for help... I used my student as lab rats... one of the labs I made up was to determing the time of fall of a tennis ball off the school's football stadium... student's determined their reaction times needed to correct the stopwatch times, by working backward from the distance they caught  a dropped ruler to the calculate the time of ruler's fall...., with and without a warning.... used this to identify 4 reaction time indicators... quickest were left handed students (~.10s).....then right handed with dominant left eye (<.15s)... then when fingers are interlaced and thumbs crossed, those with left thumb on top (>.15s )... and finally the slowest, right handed, dominant right eye, and right thumb on top (.20s)... unfortunately I was in the latter category...