365 Days of Training

Today was the first time in over 5 weeks that I was able to live fire any of my guns. While my performance suffered from the extended break, I’m sure it would have been much worse without my daily dry fire practice (although, it probably could have been better — more on that later).

At my bullseye league tonight we continued to use the reduced targets at 50′. As I mentioned before, I find these much harder to shoot than the standard sized targets at the usual distances (25 and 50 yards). Tonight I scored a 796-13x:

• Slow Fire Match: 159
• National Match Course: 273-5x
• Timed Fire Match: 176-4x
• Rapid Fire Match: 188-4x

After bullseye, I went to the adjacent range and shot 400 rounds of 9mm through my P30. I worked mostly on slow-fire accuracy drills (3×5 cards and 2″ circles) from 3 to 25 yards and a few 10-shot bursts at an 8″ circle at 10 yards. The pistol-training.com target continues to be an excellent target for practice sessions, allowing me to work on a lot of drills with having to constantly repair or replace it.

The biggest thing I learned tonight is that I’m not getting a proper grip during my dry fire practice. The gun kept “squirting” out of my weak hand and allowed my strong-hand thumb to interfere with the slide release and prevented the slide from locking back on an empty magazine. I think I’m not getting my weak-hand far enough around and towards the backside of the grip. I’ll experiement with using different sized grip inserts and see if this is somehting that can be addressed via hardware. However, I suspect that more than anything it’s more a matter of me needing to slow down during practice and ensure that I’m properly establishing my support hand grip.

I also noticed that my WHO shooting had suffered. I had gotten to the point that I was about able to keep 90% of my WHO shots inside a 2″ circle at 7 yards. Tonight while I was able to maintain a mostly 2″ group, I was impacting the target an inch of so low and right of where I wanted to. While this is likely just do to a lack of practice, there is a possibility that my carry gun has a slightly different POA/POI relationship than my practice gun. I did notice that during 2H and SHO shooting that I was consistently a little low and to the right, but not as much as during my WHO shooting (which make me think this is more of a software problem).

I was at the range for 2 hours and 15 minutes and fired a total of 490 rounds.