How's it going, folks? The end is almost here----how's the daily dryfire practice?
For me....there were issues. There was a section of time in there where there were sufficient other things going on in my life that I wasn't doing the dryfire. Just didn't do it. Matter of fact, there is one full week of completely BLANK spots on my dryfire report. (Not a couple of days here and there, but just one completely blank week of nothing.)
Now, I
could have done my dryfire. It wasn't as if I couldn't have found the time, and it wasn't as if I was in a place where I couldn't dryfire---but I let the other things in my life be an excuse for not practicing.
In the weeks after that, I got better, though I wasn't at 100%. On the good side, though, I
did go back to my dryfire. Though...it wasn't always pistol dryfire. I thought about doing a second sheet for PCC dryfire, but I just kept it on the regular sheet.
For next year, I think I'm going to add a color for "non-iron-sight-pistol dryfire." (For when I practice PCCI, PCCO, Rimfire Rifle, and Rimfire Pistol Open variations. Also....perhaps some Carry Optics when my G17 MOS shows up.
)
So---assuming my practice for the remainder of this week continues, some takeaways for me regarding the Dryfire Report...
1) I will have done a
considerably larger amount of dryfire this year than in the past. If absolutely nothing else, that made using the Dryfire Report worth doing for me.
2) I actually spend a lot more time at the range (whether in live fire practice, or at a match) than I thought. 34 days of that consisted of being at a match where I was shooting. (Close to 10% of the year I was at a match!)
3) I need to more efficiently have my live fire practice a) verify what I'm doing in dryfire, and b) work on what I
can't do in dryfire . Much of the time I did good livefire practice, but sometimes---I really didn't, and ended up just blasting rounds doing drills that I suppose were useful, but not optimal for what I needed to work upon. This year, my goal is to make my livefire practice better. (Noting that some of that will be with a PCC, since I'm going to Optics Nationals for USPSA this year, shooting PCC division.) Some of that had to do with my frame of mind, and that type of self-discipline is ALSO something I'm planning on working on this year. Which leads into...
4) I'm going to work on NOT letting the rest of my life interfere with my dryfire. That doesn't mean that dryfire is a priority over the rest of my life--instead it means that since I can do Drill Zero in less than three minutes, no matter what else is going on in my life taking three minutes to shut everything else out and simply concentrate on the simple basics of physical self-discipline is probably going to be good for me, so I should do it. Every day? Sure, that's the goal. I'm not going to beat myself up if I miss a day---but I'm not going to let my mind talk me into taking a week off again, either.
I got better at certain things this year. Not all the things I wanted to improve, and not always to the degree of improvement that I wanted. But it is certainly true that the dryfire helped me, and doing it again next year will help me again.
How did everyone else's year go? What did you learn? What do you need to do differently, to learn more?
