I'm a little behind in my blog reading and podcast listening, but with the warm weather this weekend, I got to do a lot of yard work, and, thanks to noise-cancelling ear buds, catch up some on the podcasts.
In his most recent podcast, Walt White at Walt in PA talked about his first USPSA match of the year, and that led me to the collection of videos and stage debriefings on his blog.
I am a fiend for good descriptions of stages and how they are shot - visualization, planning, and the actual "Red Haze" shooting of the stage, and Walt really delivered. Check out the hat-cam video Walt provides. Coupled with his insightful and no-holds-barred self examination, I found it a really great read.
I am almost convinced that Walt and I are separated at birth. He doesn't cut himself much slack in reviewing his performance, and neither do I.
On a related note, one of the other podcasts I listened to was Episode 254 of Down Range Radio with Michael Bane. Michael has been competing as long as there have been competitions, and this episode he talked about Winter Range, the big Cowboy Action Shooting match. He didn't do as well as he thought he should have, or could have, either.
But he talked a lot about how the top shooters are able to shake off a bad stage, and go on to the next stage. Without that ability, they could easily let a poor performance take down their whole match.
I've been looking into this concept some, and I plan to write about it some more in the near future. In the meantime, I will take away the good and try to learn from the not-so-good.