It's interesting to think about goal setting as planning out training instead of setting goals for scoring. Up until recently, my only goals had been based on scores. I was concentrating on a goal of moving up one class per year. This last month's shoot I had a breakthrough, though. I had been sick with a stomach virus on Thursday and Friday, so I was a bit out of it for the cowboy lever action matches on Saturday. Amazingly, I shot pretty well, and I attributed it to getting more sleep than I usually do. For the smallbore match on Sunday, I wasn't feeling that great but I thought I should at least shoot the match to get some practice in. After not shooting for two months and being sick, my mind was in turmoil trying to execute every step of the shot. I started the 60-shot match on pigs and missed four out of five for each of the two banks. After essentially "wasting ammo" on those two banks, I knew my score for the day was shot and I wouldn't be reaching any goals that day. I decided to just enjoy the rest of the day and not care about my score at all. Yep, you might guess where this is headed. After that point, the targets just started falling, and they kept on doing it.
By the time I made it to rams, I knew something great was happening. I dropped the first four on the first bank of rams and missed the fifth when I got excited about cleaning a bank (big deal for me). The exact same thing happened on the second bank, four straight and then a miss. I just missed the second ram in the third bank, so there was no excitement to keep me from cleaning the rest. That gave me a total of 12 rams out of 15, a feat I haven't come close to before. It was during the rams that I figured out what was going on. I was relaxed, plain and simple. There was nothing in my head but the target. There were no thoughts of shot sequences, of breathing, of scores. It was like the gun just fired as the dot came in on the spot I was focusing on and it was the easiest thing in the world.
It occurred to me then I hadn't been that relaxed while shooting since the very first day that I had ever shot smallbore silhouette, scoring a 30/60 without my forward arm anywhere close to my body or anything about offhand shooting other than some practice for hunting. That day that got me hooked on silhouette had been the key to my lack of improvement the whole time. Back then, I didn't know what I should be doing to shoot offhand well. I was just enjoying shooting. Of course, with this realization came a flood of thoughts of how I'd screwed up in other matches, including Pe Ell, by not realizing the problem earlier. Just like that, the relaxation was gone. My mind was in turmoil as I stepped back to the line for my relay on the chickens. In a panic, I tried to think of anything else to get all the stuff running through my head out of the way. Oddly enough, the first thing that came to mind was The Star Spangled Banner, since I knew I could hum that without even having to think about it. As I started very quietly humming it and focusing on doing that, the relaxation was back and I finished off well on the chickens.
Now, after all of that long-winded story, I'll get to my point. I don't focus on goals for scoring anymore. At the beginning of that match, I was an A-class shooter with 30/60 being a good score for me. If you'll remember from above, that 30/60 is the same score I started with my first match over a year ago. Once I just relaxed and enjoyed shooting, I ended up with a 40/60, which is a AAA-class score, and I did that after dropping 8/10 of my first two banks of pigs. Also, at the end of the match I wasn't tired at all. As Dave Imas can verify, I'm usually mentally exhausted at the end of a match and a nervous wreck the whole time. If any of you who went to the Pe Ell match remember the guy in the bright yellow raincoat pacing the whole time, that was me.
I do intend to take the advice of some others here and set a goal for more training time, more sleep, and more exercise. That training time isn't just to try to get my hold steadier. Even more than that, it's to get so accustomed to my rifle that I don't have to think about squeezing the trigger. I want to be able to have absolutely nothing in my head but the spot on the target and have the gun fire as the dot touches that spot.
