Stephen: Hello and welcome to the latest episode of the Hit Factor, starring host that nobody asked for, I guess, is really kind of the only way to introduce the show. I'm Steven Tomlson and with me as always on the Hit Factor, I have one Mr. Nick O'Connell. How you doing, Nick?
Nick: Doing all right. I'm doing all right.
Stephen: Are you just as surprised as I am that Jay and Saul opted to give us access to the feed?
Nick: ⁓ yeah, yeah, I am surprised. ⁓ you know, I would think two people as well developed and well rounded as shooters would have better judgment. But I guess being good at shooting and being make like making good life choices just don't go hand in hand. ⁓
Stephen: I don't know. I have it on good authority that Jay enjoyed the last episode with us, but I don't know what he sees in either of us. But we're back, much to everyone's chagrin. So we're gonna do this thing.
Nick: There's twos of us. Twos of us.
Stephen: Indeed. ⁓ so we are here today because both of us shot area five last weekend and ⁓ we wanted to get some ⁓ thoughts leading up to it, thoughts about the match and how we shot and kind of takeaways from the match ⁓ for everybody to hear. ⁓ there are a few hitbacker listeners that were out there. We ran into Mike Dublin ⁓ Hannah Malley. but Nick, you want to talk about why we ended up going to Area Five?
Nick: So ⁓ we ended up meeting some lovely gentlemen, ⁓ Skylar Davis, the preeminent stage designer of our time, and Harrison Marcot, the absolute degenerate scum of the shooting sports. ⁓ we met them at yep, we met them at our area match last year, Area Three. and, you know, squatted with them and had a great time, just great squat energy. ⁓ so
Stephen: He knows it.
Nick: you know, talking to the boys after Area Three, it was like, Hey, if you come shoot our major, we'll go shoot your major. ⁓ so ⁓ they came down and shot Cornhusker with us and ⁓ again squatted together, same great squat energy. ⁓ maybe even too great of squat energy.
Stephen: It was a good squad. I don't care what anybody says. It's a shame that between the two of them they only got to shoot like 62% of the match. But but it was an absolute treat having them. Good boys. It was fun. ⁓ yeah. So ⁓ Area Five this year was out at Oak Hill Gun Club in what town was that? ⁓ Portland.
Nick: Yeah, sorry Harrison. you can come to my place in N D anytime.
Stephen: Michigan or like Lions, Michigan. ⁓ out in Michigan. So, ⁓ which is quite a ways away from us. It is a ten and a half hour drive, and we made the bad choice of going there ⁓ in one stint. Just really went for it. Left here at like seven in the morning on a fresh belly of Taco Bell breakfast quesadillas. ⁓ or crunch wraps, crunch wraps, right? Yeah. Anyway, ten and a half hour drive plus stops. ⁓ and that led us to some
Nick: Yeah. Portland Lions, Michigan.
Stephen: kind of weird choices because we knew we weren't gonna make it there on time to walk the match at all. We got there after the range was closed and basically just got to town, got dinner and went to the hotel, right? ⁓ so while we were driving, we made some choices. ⁓ the big one being if we can't walk the stages, to commit to the bit and just not walk any of the stages at all, aside from our four minute walkthrough during the match, but we didn't get there early and preview any stages.
Nick: Honestly, ⁓ like I kind of fucked with that. ⁓ it really did not like I slept the best the night before a major I have ever slept. So like I have this habit, like I'll walk the stages and then I try and walk ⁓ kind of in a reverse order to where like the last ones I walk or the first couple that I'll shoot the next day. So then you know, going to bed, you're just like, Okay, stage one of the day tomorrow. you know, I'm gonna, you know, go left, I'm gonna shoot this, this, and this. You sort of like get in that loop until eventually you drift off to sort of a hate like a fugue state, you know, that's kind of sleep and kind of not, and really bad for performance, right? To, you know, hype yourself up that much. ⁓ but man, you know, going to bed with no expectations or idea of what I was gonna shoot the next day was fucking freeing. I I enjoyed it.
Stephen: I think ⁓ I I enjoyed it and it was the wiser choice to just get there late, hang out with friends, have a drink, get dinner, and then go to bed ⁓ presenting. I had the ⁓ kind of the opposite reaction to you. I do the same thing if I like walk the match beforehand, I can hyperfixate on like certain parts of it, and I'll just lay in bed and just like replay the same like sequences or whatever that not even something I'm worried about. Like my brain just like locks onto some entry or something or some target sequence, whatever. ⁓ but having not seen them live, my brain just went straight to Instagram. Like I took like two of the stages that I saw from Vleager and just locked into those. Had no idea what they would actually like present like, just saw like third person camera of him running ⁓ And ⁓ there was a in the morning when we woke up, like before my alarm went off, I was just like, Yeah, I'm gonna get to shoot this stage. Maybe. I don't know. I don't know where it's at.
Nick: Yeah. ⁓ yeah, I mean it definitely didn't help that like the matchbook was maybe intentionally vague too. Like you didn't really know what stage number was what, ⁓ as far as how it was gonna lay out at the match. ⁓ and then like the app that they used to design the stages doesn't do a great job of displaying depth, I don't think, compared to like practice in. ⁓
Stephen: It made everything look huge. Well, like it made the bays look huge. And they do have big bays, but like I guess practice and kinda does the same thing where the perspective is a little bit fucky, so things will look farther than they are, and then you get it laid down and it's like way more compact stage. But it made those far stages on ⁓ the left side as we enter the range, the bigger bays, look massive.
Nick: Yeah. Yeah, I mean ⁓ like especially any sort of hat cam footage of the s like the stage everybody talked about with the forty seven yard mini popper, thousand yard mini popper, I forget how far it was. I think it was like fifteen hundred meters or so. ⁓ about six football fields away were the mini poppers. ⁓ four hundred and ninety-eight cheeseburgers.
Stephen: probably kick this football clear over that mountain range.
Nick: Yeah, he has, you know, nine hundred cheeseburgers away. But ⁓ no I mean, the fisheye lens of like a insta three sixty hat cam made those poppers seem like they were a fucking truly impossible distance away. And then you get out there and it's like, you know, that's just a big popper at twenty five yards. The the presentation looked a lot better to the naked eye. ⁓
Stephen: And it ⁓ it was a mini at forty seven was the the number I kept hearing. So give or take, somewhere between forty five, fifty. We didn't walk it, we didn't have to reset it. So that was nice.
Nick: Yeah. That was great. Manny, thank you for that. I appreciate that. You're the man.
Stephen: Yep. But so yeah, we ⁓ we made this stupid choice while driving ⁓ basically a twelve hour day ⁓ to ⁓ that area of Michigan and just decided we weren't gonna walk it and we're gonna show up the next day and hit the stages and just do them as presented. ⁓ didn't quite stick to that because we did check out the 40 yard popper bay, but it wasn't a complicated stage at all. I think we just wanted to see it and it was because it was behind our starting bay. It's not like the plan changed or anything. We didn't discover anything ⁓ that we weren't gonna see anywhere else.
Nick: Yeah. We didn't really air gun it either. We just kinda looked at it and we were like, ⁓ you know hold the gun still.
Stephen: It's far. What are we gonna do? so yeah, that was ⁓ kind of like the big decision on the way up there. We talked a little bit about just the match vibe in general. There was some stuff leading up to the match. ⁓ what were your thoughts on the stages prior to it? 'Cause I remember like kind of the the thing that stood out was just like open paper, kind of everywhere.
Nick: Yeah, yeah, there were a lot of open targets in the matchbook and you know I shot you know, we both shot Race Gun Nationals last year, which was also like a lot of open paper at that match. And still somehow people managed I mean, it's unbelievable, right? People managed to get mics without hardcover on every single target. ⁓ And people still manage to get no shoots when there are only a handful of no shoots at the match. So you know, I've got a lot more respect for just the the penalties that are baked into the target itself after shooting that particular match in general, where it's like, you know, you can't separate on shooting a clean match. You just have to separate on speed and execution. ⁓ so you know, I was kind of looking forward to a match along that same
Stephen: Mm-hmm.
Nick: sort of vein where it's like, you know, we're just going to commit to the whole hit factor bit and just have a race. You know, just see who can do it. Yeah, it's a great bit. I like that bit. I think that's a good bit to stick to. ⁓ and, you know, I I'm I don't want to be critical, right? I've, you know, we run a match. ⁓ we know, you know, when you're proofing the stages, you know, decisions get made that, you know, you think you're going to make the match better.
Stephen: It's good bit.
Nick: But we get to the match and everything is absolutely partialed up. Right. And I mean I'm not talking just like, ⁓ they just put a no shoot on there for flavor. Like I mean it's like two inches of it of lower A zone, you know, super tight partials. ⁓ which you know made the shooting not you know, a lot of those partials were really close, so it didn't necessarily make the shooting ⁓ harder. It just really kind of ⁓
Stephen: Mm-hmm.
Nick: How do I say it? ⁓ didn't reward taking risk as much as I would like to see at a major. Because there were a lot of like really obvious entry targets that they just like, you know, partialed them up. So, okay, I gotta slow down a little bit on the entry. I have to settle here, which is fine. ⁓ but there was just a lot of that. And then there were targets that could have been like really, really good blending targets that just the positioning of the target in relation to. you know, other areas of the of the stage that you had to get to, ⁓ that target would have been, you know, so good to use as a blending target. You know, there was going to be some risk baked in, maybe a delta, maybe a mic, definitely Charlie's. ⁓ but instead of allowing that that risk to be managed and that separation to be gained there, ⁓ instead we saw like really tight partialing. ⁓ so if you did want to, you know, do some aggressive blending on stages. It was very risky. ⁓ and that definitely yeah, on on several of ⁓ And again, I'm not I'm not trying to be critical. Like these are choices that are made. and it gave the match like a flavor and a unique set of shooting challenges. And it's what, our job to figure them out and not suck at them.
Stephen: Several of them. No. Sorry dude, you're being too critical. And this is the only podcast you're ever gonna be on again. Manny is gonna have you blacklisted from the podcast ⁓ realm, I guess. Never gonna have you on. Casual shooter, not you.
Nick: But most importantly most importantly, the match was really fun. I all of the stages were really like super fun. They were enjoyable to shoot. ⁓ I don't I don't care if I
Stephen: Okay, okay, let's take a step back. Let's take a step back. Nobody cares about your fun. Don't care. Right. So the right, so the open target versus the hardcover thing, because it's been kind of a discussion. I know Saul's talked about it. Jay's talked about ⁓ it ⁓ because it comes up a lot with the fixed time discussion they were having a couple weeks ago, all that sort of stuff. ⁓ there's a question in the hit factor discord right now. I think Mike ⁓ asked about proper use of hardcover. So there's a discussion in there if you want to go into the hit factor discord.
Nick: I don't care if I hit something. I don't care if I hit a hardcover, you know. I don't I don't care about that.
Stephen: And read through the ⁓ replies to that. But like you said, some of the like the close partials, like I don't mind a partial that is ⁓ placed intentionally to kind of trip you up, slow you down, make you rethink something, or take like that extra tenth on an entry ⁓ or have to wait for it on the entry kind of thing. But some of them, ⁓ the activators specifically, were like just grossly frustrating because we rolled up to the match, we like checked out the scores like ahead of time, and we were like, there is You have to go like thirty places down to find the first shooter that didn't have a penalty from staff day, ⁓ which included all of the staff and ⁓ what the Friday, Saturday shooters. ⁓ right. So we checked on like Friday afternoon and we saw half of their stuff and it was just misses forever. ⁓ misses and no shoots. And the ⁓ yeah.
Nick: Lotta lot of heat on staff day too. Like it wasn't, you know, just local heat shooting staff day running their own match. Like there was like ⁓ Vleager shot staff day, I think Joey shot staff day, Lane Grease shot staff day, like well, Friday, Saturday, yeah, sorry.
Stephen: Or Friday, Saturday ⁓ schedule, I think. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it was just ⁓ it was kind of weird going from what we saw in the matchbook, seeing the scores and not seeing the stages, and then seeing a whole bunch of misses, and then getting to the match and seeing more hardcover in weird places that we didn't expect it. ⁓ especially with those activators, because one of them, what do we have? There was we started on stage eight and there was a was it USPSA targets, and that one was partialed up to like above the A, like upper third of the torso A zone.
Nick: Yeah. It was
Stephen: And everything else below that was just hard covered out. And then we had the yeah. ⁓ and then the other activator was the ⁓ twenty ish yard swinger Ipsyc. ⁓ partial to fuck too. Just it was
Nick: It was tight, yeah. It was That one was even tighter. Yeah, that was a even tighter. Activator and then the bobber with the tucks on it.
Stephen: And those yeah. Yeah. ⁓ so it was ⁓ it was certainly a choice, surprisingly. ⁓ I think we both came away clean on those.
Nick: ⁓ the so the only one that like I liked the tucks on the bobber because I think bobbers like as a as a moving target are like kind of easy to disrespect. And the way they set that bobber up was was pretty clever. They had a really high ⁓ hardcover steal to where the bobber had a whole bunch of dead time. So like if you didn't get it on the first pass or you didn't time the second pass correctly.
Stephen: On the activators.
Nick: Like you're gonna be waiting for, you know, three quarters of a second to see it again. ⁓ and then on top of that, it was a tux on the bobber. So it was like a bobber you actually had to respect a little bit, which
Stephen: And because the the front steal was set so high, ⁓ off if you miss it off the first pass, you lost like target. Like you weren't gonna see the whole A zone in the second pass. You didn't see it on the first pass, so
Nick: It was Yeah, you got maybe three quarters of the A zone on the first pass, if not a little bit less, you know. ⁓ I'm sure we could play some crazy fractions games with it, but it was you know, you never got a full A zone off of it. And, you know, a lot of times those like when you see a bobber at a match, like everybody above a certain skill bracket is gonna have two alphabets on it. ⁓ it's just kind of a gimme target. ⁓ you know, I know at Cornhusker, like the bobber we had on
Stephen: Mm-hmm.
Nick: our little suitcase stage like there was not a ton of drop yeah, fucking gimmicks. There's not a ton of drop points on that. I mean one it I mean it was super close, but also, you know, at our club matches when we run a bobber, it's just not a place you typically see a lot of drop points. And it's more of a a test of timing, right? A way to pace out the the sequence. But no, I thought that that one was was probably the the most tasteful partial on an activator. ⁓ and that is the only one that burned me.
Stephen: Fucking gimmicks. Gimmicks. Mm-hmm.
Nick: ⁓ I had a partial hit on the hardcover steel and it fucking went into the shoulder. ⁓ I took a really aggressive plan on that and it fucking absolutely backfired on me. But ⁓ that
Stephen: Stage 14, everybody, check practice score.
Nick: ⁓ yeah, yeah, you'll have to scroll pretty far down. I think it's like
Stephen: No, that was stage seven. That was stage seven. Sorry. Yeah, it was stage seven.
Nick: Yeah, I think I'm like sub forty percent on that. It went really bad. ⁓
Stephen: It was a it was a good time. What a way to finish the match. And also thank you for the phrase. What was it? Tasteful partials. That's that's going into the lexicon for sure. All right. So ⁓ yeah, thoughts on ⁓ the hardcover stuff. Yeah, the activators, that one was the easiest one. ⁓ the other ones, I think we just we took I know I took some extra shots on them. and they were fairly easy to track versus trap. I think trapping kind of like would screw you up because you'd try to speed, you'd try to like
Nick: Tasteful partials. ⁓
Stephen: drop a quick double on them. ⁓ but they were available for so long that they were easy to track but risky. So I put three on one of them and they were all on brown and put four on the other and it had like a pretty deep ⁓ hardcover hit on it. But just yeah, like you said, it's it's not going to catch everybody out. And a lot of the other hardcover stuff isn't there to catch out Jacob Hetherington and Joey. It's there to catch out like your your B's and A's, ⁓ people that are kind of pushing probably and haven't quite gotten everything together as far as like the speed and execution aspect of it. ⁓ because who would miss a who would miss a right side hardcover at three yards on an entry? Who would do that?
Nick: Yeah. And you know, part of that Nobody good, that's for sure. ⁓ but ⁓ another thing too, like when you ⁓ partial up a moving target, you make it easier visually to pick out the scoring zone, right? You reduce the amount of wrong spots to put the eyes. ⁓ and this is something we kind of figured out ⁓ what was it like two years ago in practice, we set up like a tux on a swinger. We both had like a rough match on a swinger. Like, ⁓ we're gonna make it so hard. We're gonna put tucks on a swinger and we're gonna shoot designated target with it. It's gonna be so hard. Like, kind of by the end of it, like, you know, when you tux a target, the only thing really to look at is the center of the A zone. There's really nothing else to aim at. You you know, if you're looking at the hardcover, you know, most people at this point have figured out that bullets are generally gonna track where you're looking, right? Most people beyond a certain level are not going to be looking at a black target or a white target. They're just going to be looking at the center of the available scoring zone. So, you know, hardcover on a on a moving target, like it's very easy to track where you want the bullets to go with your eyes. And I think that's probably got something to do with why most of the people at the top of the scoreboard were able to to skate away unscathed. I mean, also being better at shooting helps. But ⁓
Stephen: I mean a lot of them didn't come out unscathed. They just they they moved quick enough. Like there's a there's a kind of a time gap difference for ⁓ for a lot of the stuff at the top. But ⁓ all right. So hardcover stuff aside, the stages were great. ⁓ I think most of them, like our second day was populated with a lot of more open stages. There was one that was even called cursed hardcover and it barely had any threatening hardcover. I guess it was just fast. So I guess somebody could throw it, but for the most part, our second day was a lot more ⁓
Nick: This is true.
Stephen: freeing. ⁓ it was just a little played into a little bit of that leans into like the hit factor type stuff. Like lets you punish yourself by shooting Charlies and deltas collect the penalties that are on the paper. So as far as the ⁓ not walking stuff showing up we started on stage eight ⁓ zone two. ⁓ the that was the first stage in zone two when we shot it left to right, ⁓ eight to fourteen. ⁓ so we rolled in warning of checked out our stage and we're like cool this is manageable, right? And then we briefly checked out one for the next day and then came back and we started shooting. ⁓ and we played that plan out the whole day. We didn't walk a single stage ahead of time, just our four minutes with the squad and everything was cool. How do you feel ⁓ the plan worked out as far as that match and the stages that we shot?
Nick: ⁓ honestly pretty good. stage planning or like stage memory has never really been a strong suit for me. So I feel like I'm maybe a good bellwether for whether we should have like walked the stages ahead of time. I didn't really find anything to be like so complex that it's like, man, I wish I had an extra day to mull this over. And I think that's good, right? I I don't think that adding like so much complexity to a stage that like only really good competitors can remember the target order. I don't think that's like a fun mechanic. ⁓ considering like the match is generally subsidized by people that are not M's and GMs. ⁓ does that make sense?
Stephen: Yeah. ⁓ it's it's one of the things that like I kind of liked ⁓ doing that. And we don't get a lot of that here. Like usually a lot of the stages in our region in Area Three are a little bit more ⁓ dependent on your ability to memorize like cursed target orders, as it were. Like you have to do the certain thing. ⁓ and your opportunities to blend might be limited by that, or you have to do some weird choices. But ⁓ this one kind of had like an ipsy light type flavor where it was like you can You can see that stage in four minutes and like you'll see everything. There were very few surprises. ⁓ a couple like a couple targets had like a or a couple of rays had a target inside the wall that you had to do like a pretty aggressive wide lean ⁓ before exiting on, ⁓ or a target tucked away behind a barrel stack or something. But nothing nothing that was like intentionally trying to catch you out to forget, right? So I think it kind of lent itself to us going in and be like, This is the one we're not gonna do walkthroughs on. And it's like, congratulations, boys. This is the one you don't need to walk, because they were very not very straightforward, but they were just the the skill that they were testing was your ability to shoot a stage. Like it was to do the points in time thing versus memorize some complicated bullshit, right?
Nick: That's I think that's a pretty novel concept. like what if we just measured our ability to shoot fast and accurately at a match? ⁓ that'd be neat. But ⁓ go ahead.
Stephen: Yeah. And I think No, I was just saying I think it was it was largely successful in that it's like it largely did the thing we looked for it to do. ⁓ there were just th those weird choices we talked about a little bit. So again, I just
Nick: Do you do do you think ⁓ it altered your performance in any way? Do you think the match that you shot is the match that you shot? ⁓ whether you walked the stages ahead of time, do you think you would have done worse had you walked ⁓ ahead of time?
Stephen: ⁓ yeah. ⁓ hard to know ⁓ because I don't know when I'm gonna do good or bad. You know, it's just you show up and you see what happens when you're done, right? softest GM in the Midwest. I'm too too simple to have a mode, dude. Finding a hundred? Never, I'll find ninety-two and be happy with it. ⁓ sorry, Mason. No, I don't think 90.5, sir, 90.5. Spoilers. ⁓
Nick: Modeless freaks. Modeless freaks. Yeah. You'll find ninety and be happy with it. I'll find seventy something and be happy with it, I guess.
Stephen: You're making me sad.
Nick: ⁓ well, you know, can't win ⁓ all, man.
Stephen: But I I don't think ⁓ I don't think I perform better because of the nature of the stages. I don't think ⁓ if I have a a strength, I think mine is probably in execution of stage plans, more so than an ability to shoot accurately or particularly fast. but I'm gonna get through the stage ⁓ n ninety percent of the time the way I intend to get through the stage. ⁓ because My wife brought me a beer. She's trying to be sneaky, but she did a nice thing. Thank you, Taco. ⁓ she can't hear you. But I don't ⁓
Nick: You're the best. ⁓ bummer.
Stephen: Yeah, I don't think it would have changed anything for me. For better or worse, I think if we had shown up to the range on Friday, like after driving for that long and being tired, ⁓ I would have just been like, ⁓ cool, like the stages look good, but we wouldn't have had to dedicate a lot of time to it. We would have walked through all the stages like forty five minutes, got back in the car and have been like, Well, that was forty five minutes. So I don't know. I don't think it changed my performance though.
Nick: Yeah, and I I think that yeah, I you know, I didn't shoot particularly well. ⁓ I did meet some of my like training objectives, you know, with what I've been working on in training, like I did see a lot of that come out in the match, but unfortunately that did not score particularly well. so since it didn't score well, I have to find the silver lining, right? because, you know, it's pickleball, right? You get you gotta find a win somewhere.
Stephen: really really really locked into you hear a phrase one time at a match it's pickleball for ⁓ for gun owners.
Nick: That shit just put me on my ass. Like ⁓ we were spotted with a a a pretty decent open shooter bow ⁓ Veneri, right? Ven yeah. And ⁓ you know, he heard about somebody, you know, having a bad stage and like, you know, throwing a magazine or something. I don't remember the specifics of it, but you know, somebody got upset about their performance on a stage. And he was just like,
Stephen: Ven Neri, yeah.
Nick: Man, what are you getting so worked up for, dude? It's just pickleball for weird adults. And it just fucking killed me. ⁓ yeah, I d I can't stop rotating that ⁓ exchange over in my mind. And No, I mean
Stephen: It's nothing's ever been truer. Absolutely perfect. Sorry, we've we've we've ⁓ we've left visualization. Now we're rotating phrases in our brain. I'm sorry, Saul, can you do this one?
Nick: I'm rotating a phrase in braille in my mind. I'm feeling it, I'm seeing it, hearing it. ⁓
Stephen: ⁓ crazy. Alright, so God almighty do you have another point with that? 'Cause I was gonna try and get to the next
Nick: I just
Stephen: We've got bullet points, people. We have a plan. We're professionals.
Nick: I I think I probably would have shot worse ⁓ had I spent a bunch of time like trying to visualize a rush walkthrough of stages the night before. ⁓ you know, I have a tendency to like kind of really get in my own head. So just showing up and shooting it like a local was was dope. It was good. I was gonna shoot the best I could shoot and that was just it.
Stephen: It did feel like uniquely local in that kind of way, I guess. Like, because where we didn't have to like stress it and we weren't doing any of the work for it. So like it was it was like showing up when you're like new to the sport and you're not engaged with the club. And so you're like, yeah, I showed up and you guys set these things up for me, and I just blast and leave. This is crazy. It was ⁓ it was nice, it was refreshing. ⁓ so as as far as that plan, we talked a little bit in the car on the way back. Back after the match, ⁓ and I think after day one, about how well that kind of worked ⁓ for these stages in particular. But like knowing that, is that a thing that you want to carry forward? Like, is that something you want to try at other matches, or do you think it's match dependent on like basically the qualities of the match? ⁓ like is that something you would do at Cornhusker 2026? ⁓ is that something you'll do at Free State in a week and a half ⁓ from date of recording? Are you gonna show up to nationals this year and be like, nope? I'll see you guys at the hotel. I'll show up tomorrow and shoot my six to seven stages and then fuck off.
Nick: I don't know. I mean I think I I could definitely see myself doing it for free state. ⁓ I will say though that those guys do like to make some complex stages and there were some stages last year that like I walked ahead of time and I wish I had showed up a day earlier even to try and get some of those stages into my thick, thick skull. But ⁓ you know, I'm not going to majors to win them because I can't. I just don't have that in the tool belt, right? It's like I'm not in contention to win anything. So I might as well go to these
Stephen: I'm trying so hard to not sh I'm just trying so hard, dude. All of my basest desires to shit on you in public.
Nick: I mean it's You've been nothing but nice to me today. I'm waiting for the other I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. But ⁓ no, I mean, I'm not in contention to win ⁓ so it's like I might as well, you go and and and really try and test the skills that I'm there to have pressure tested because I I can't, you know, divorce my expectation for performance from, you know, my planning for the match, right? Like it's inseparable. I'm
Stephen: Yeah, today's b today and only today.
Nick: I'm so committed to training and shooting that I wanna do well. And there's no amount of like mental management that's gonna change that. ⁓ so maybe
Stephen: Have you tried? Have you read the books?
Nick: I I have read the books actually and I think they made me dumber.
Stephen: I don't know the title, so I can't riff with you and salt like last week.
Nick: Trust me, making me dumber is a feat, dude.
Stephen: I'm doing everything I can. ⁓ yes, Freestate in particular, like you said, they have a flavor. ⁓ I think I probably got like ⁓ some of my like stage design inspiration just from like kind of the vibe that they put out. It's a lot of maybe like available from several places kind of thing with ⁓ big movements, weird ⁓ transitions from side to side as you try to blend. ⁓ not necessarily to fuck you up, but just harder to do efficiently if you lose your footing somewhere or like you're just out of You if you miss the pocket that you have to take a target. ⁓ so I don't I'd like to try it again and I'd like to try it at a ⁓ another major that's like nearby. Like doing it for an area match that wasn't our area. ⁓ like sure, whatever. We went out there, we were there to just like shoot with the boys, have fun, have some drinks and whatnot, and like see some cool people. And we did that. ⁓ so I don't think I had a lot of stress or anxiety going into it performance wise for this one anyway. It's like pretty low expectation. ⁓ and I think I have a harder time doing that at like our regional ⁓ matches. Like going into Great Plains, I had like a ton of anxiety because I was just like, ⁓ I gotta earn my factory gun slot for next year, even though it's probably gonna be in the worst place on earth for some reason, right? ⁓ but I just had that pressure because it's our section match. But area five, that's somebody else's area match, who cares?
Nick: I mean, yeah, nationals is really just somebody else's section match, right? 'Cause you know, we're in the flyover states. Nobody it's not our nationals, right? It's
Stephen: Ha ha ha. It's it's just it's just another Utah local, right? With with all the heat shows up. ⁓ so I think it
Nick: Yeah. Yeah. But no, I think ⁓ you know, maybe maybe not Free State, but area three. ⁓ I'd be down to do that. ⁓
Stephen: Our our area match. We're gonna return the favor to Arya. Okay. Okay.
Nick: I mean I just you know, ⁓ I just don't think the stages at area three will be as complex as they will be at Free State. ⁓ I just I mean, the amount of stage designers they've got at I mean, I guess it's the same group of stage designers. Maybe not watching walking the stages ahead of time is just a fool's errand. You know, maybe maybe that's
Stephen: ⁓ yeah. Cause yeah, Milk Milk Creek is the yeah. Milk Creek is the sponsoring club for Area Three this year 'cause ⁓ the Keith is out of there and ⁓ Jeff Pikman is I think the primary match director for that match. So good crowd. All right, so we're resolved to try this again. Do we at least want to look at the match book like see what the vibe is before we make this choice?
Nick: ⁓ what kind of fool would read a match book?
Stephen: Hm. I I've already seen the freeze date one, so I hope you make some choices. That's just me.
Nick: ⁓ speaking of Free State, what division are we shooting for Free State?
Stephen: ⁓ boy. ⁓ man. ⁓ I'm in CO.
Nick: You're in CO. No thoughts of
Stephen: Yeah. I contemplated changing.
Nick: For if we
Stephen: I did consider it. I d no that so I did consider it. I've already gone through this, like myself, 'cause what do we have? So heat wise, there's more numbers in ⁓ there's more GMs in CO. I think the only GM in LO is Peyton Garcia, ⁓ 'cause he just moved back to the area. I think he just separated the Marines ⁓ and is back in the Kansas City area. ⁓ Jace is shooting L O. He's an L O ⁓ but he is not. He's a liar. ⁓ in his classification is just way behind because that dude shoots ⁓ I think he he beat Tim Heron in the overall at Alaska ⁓ a couple weeks ago, but missed by like a fraction of a point in ⁓ in Elo. So Elo has some heat, but the CO heat is stacked a little bit higher. ⁓ I think I think Lane kind of outweighs Peyton currently. ⁓ unless you ask Free State last year.
Nick: It was it was a close race last year between the two of ⁓ It was neck and neck all day long. ⁓ but what if we did something really funny and we just slowly moved everybody out of C O to LO until only Lane was in C O.
Stephen: Yeah.
Nick: Like a game of musical chairs, but with guns.
Stephen: ⁓ my gosh. That would be such a good bit, 'cause I know ⁓ Jay and them up north were trying to just they I I think they were successful for the most part, but they were like they were trying to get everybody to go into L O for consolidation and making it very obvious that if you didn't shoot C O, you were a hider. They were making it so clear to these people 'cause everybody was jumping ship and all of the high heat, I think, left. ⁓ if I remember the story correctly. So It would be fun to bully everybody over. But I think the problem is that if Lane is still in CO, you'll have a lot of people that want to stack up against Lane as like a nice basis. I don't think the LO's still not soft enough. It's just better placement, maybe like on the scoreboard, but your percent's still gonna suck.
Nick: Okay, to the people that that, you know, might apply to, I would encourage you to just sh sort the match by C O L O combined anyways. 'Cause that's what everybody good is doing. Right. ⁓
Stephen: And also you.
Nick: Yeah. Yeah. My scores have always been depressing. I don't need to like hide in a division to like that doesn't change how depressing they are. Just the slump continues.
Stephen: Ha ha ha. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Asking somebody to explain score depression to me.
Nick: Yeah. ⁓
Stephen: I don't know the numbers, but it makes me sad. God almighty. All right. So I'll st
Nick: ⁓ talking to my therapist about score depression.
Stephen: Ostensibly, this is a podcast about area five. So ⁓ going back to area five again, ⁓ we we do digress. All right, so we've already taught stages, we've already talked ⁓ our lead up into it, ⁓ as far as like the day of ⁓ coming into this portion of the season. What were you looking to bring into area five? ⁓ 'cause what was the last major you had Cornhusker, you didn't shoot ⁓ Rushmore, ⁓ you were away.
Nick: That's true. We digress.
Stephen: So was Cornhusker your last major then? And that kind of doesn't and that doesn't really count because you built stages and were like helping me with a bunch of dumb bullshit. So it was your major as much as anybody shot on staff day, worked the match, yada yada.
Nick: ⁓ yeah, Cornhosker was It counts to me, you know? It counts to me. ⁓ I mean, I d I don't think staff day is an excuse anymore. I think these match directors have just gotten so good that you know you can't hide behind being a match director anymore, you know. ⁓
Stephen: Bish. They shouldn't be allowed to shoot, honestly. Just let them direct the match and just don't make them shoot.
Nick: Kind of an unfair advantage really. ⁓ especially if you give your match director a Zermat arms while it's fine. Like it is fucked up. But ⁓ yeah, you know
Stephen: It's fucked up. And for months I was just spinning the stages in my brain, just seeing them from every angle. I knew them like the back of my hand.
Nick: Yeah, Noah, ⁓ Corn Husker ⁓ didn't go horrible for me. It wasn't great. ⁓ really rough start in the morning. You know, a lot of match nerves that ⁓ you know just sort of started to come back out of the woodworks from nowhere this season. ⁓ but ⁓ and I was just a little bit like further behind the pace than I expected myself to be. ⁓ not just in you know, timed errors or scored errors, but just generally the execution was not aggressive enough to really I don't know, tickle my pickle. You know, I just wasn't super happy with that portion of my shooting. ⁓ so I've really been, you know, leaning on the part time method, just really trying to just you know, I'm gonna make the same mistakes regardless of what speed I'm shooting. So I would rather make those mistakes as quickly as possible, whether they're scored or unscored. ⁓ So yeah, that's that's been my major focus ⁓ going or going into area five. So it's kinda you know, I just said, you know, I'm just gonna shoot more aggressively. ⁓ I'm gonna take the riskiest plans I can, and I'm just gonna see what I can get away with. I didn't get away with much.
Stephen: Trying to remember. I was just trying to think of like were there was there anything that you did at Area 5 that like leaned into the aggressive plan? Because there were opportunities for some pretty blatant aggression, but like the their risk was pretty wild. I'm trying to stage seven, the bobber activator one where you could ⁓ you could try and be really aggressive and take that wide target between The activator, ⁓ and the bobber. And I didn't see anybody do that. And the same thing with the steel on stage eight where we started. Nobody I don't think I saw anybody hit the activator and then the two steel on the right to go back left to the swinger.
Nick: So So the one with the bobber, my plan on that, you know, I watched how you shot it and I watched how the rest of the squad shot it. ⁓ so I was the last shooter on that squad or on that stage, last shooter of the the match for that that poor poor staff. ⁓ it was hot out. But ⁓ so my plan on that was, you know, everybody entered that front right corner after loading the gun and then just shot towards the direction of movement. It's like, ⁓ I you know, I might be able to gain like a couple tenths if I'm like really aggressive shooting that inside target and then backing out like really aggressively on the open paper. so I executed that well. And then, you know, the next position, you sort of enter on like a half azone target on kind of a weird angle around a wall. So it's like, okay, everybody's kind of settling there and trying to hit that. So I was like, I'm just gonna fucking pop around the wall and pop that super quick. And just like, you know, if there's a mic, there's a mic. If there's an ⁓ shoot, there's an ⁓ shoot. I'm just gonna risk it for the biscuit on that guy. So I did that all right. Got got some good hits on that one, thankfully. and then a lot of people after hitting that would run up to the front corner and kind of bang the steel for the activator on the entrance. There was like a a hardcover partial to the right of the steel, and then they would wait on the bobber to appear. and then finish on a wide transition to another partial tucked up really close on the wall. ⁓ so I kind of saw that, you know, on that position in particular, like the steel and that partial were both available very early. ⁓ so I was like, well, you know, maybe I can get away with shooting that hardcover partial on the way up and then hit the steel wide transition to the partial on the wall and then back to the bobber. And it did time out all right. For me. I did not miss the bobber activation, but I did miss everything else. I just did not I just did not have the requisite skill to execute on a plan that was risky and required some very aggressive shooting to pull off. ⁓ would I do it differently? Absolutely fucking not. It was the most fun way to zero that fucking stage, and I fucking absolutely stand by that.
Stephen: Yeah. You didn't zero it, so
Nick: I thirty per s I did zero another stage, but I thirty percent of that one. So but you d I mean that's
Stephen: That one's because that's you were helping me take care of myself, so y you missed some important takeaways about that stage and had to go first. And I don't want to talk about it. I've heard the story three hundred times.
Nick: Yeah. ⁓ I missed I was the first shooter on a strong hand only stage, missed the stage briefing, shot it freestyle. ⁓ no rules, man. No rules. ⁓ hundred and twenty points and penalties on a sixty point stage. Not good, man. Not good.
Stephen: Sorry. Yeah. If if Samat can shoot through walls, I can use both hands, dammit.
Nick: Yeah. I thought we were rewarding aggression. This was hit factor scoring.
Stephen: right. So nothing else matters. ⁓ so yeah, you so you're going in for aggression, ⁓ and just trying to carry speed forward then was the thing. And you said you I know you did the aggressive plans. Did you execute on that specific thing though? Like did you did you bring in the aggression that you're looking for? Like does the time reflect that?
Nick: ⁓ I mean there are a lot of ⁓ timed errors ⁓ on that stage. ⁓ but I think, you know, looking at the split data, yes, that had I had the skill to pull that off, it it would have put my time my time would have been sh smaller, right? I was shooting sooner, ⁓ and I would have been able to shoot ⁓ more continuously across, you know, the whole number of required shots. ⁓ of course, you know, these sort of like risk management decisions don't e exist in a vacuum. And there's probably a reason why a lot of the better shooters did not take that plan. Right? Instead they were just like Yeah, every last one of ⁓ It was a kind of a dumb plan, right? But it was theoretically the most aggressive way to shoot it. And ⁓ like I said, it was fun, no regrets.
Stephen: And when you say a lot of them, you mean every last one of them.
Nick: ⁓ if I could reshoot the stage, I would love to see if I could nail it. ⁓ I would bet I would bet I could get it on the third try. Not super useful in a match.
Stephen: Give it a couple of attempts, probably, but yeah. Here we are, guys. I matched that lets me try three times every stage. ⁓ crazy, crazy. ⁓ cool.
Nick: There was a let's let's see that that ⁓ yeah. Yeah. My least favorite person to talk about. Go ahead.
Stephen: For me fr no, we're talking about me now. We're talking about me now. Ghost. Did did you have a salient point that you wanted to make or?
Nick: I was just gonna say like ⁓ the one where you had to go to all four corners, it was kind of shaped like ⁓ sort of a fucking bow tie. Like that one I shot way more stuff on the move ⁓ than most people and I ended up with the raw time on that stage for slide ride. ⁓ scored poorly.
Stephen: Unfortunately it is a combination of speed and power and accuracy.
Nick: Unfortunately I had neither power nor accuracy. ⁓ but the pace was there. So, you know, again, meeting my training goals, ⁓ unfortunately.
Stephen: What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do? All right. So, same question to me, since you're a bad co-host and won't ask, banned from the show. ⁓ I think it's the kind of the same thing we talked about with Saul like last time. I was like, I don't have a particular problem with my speed ⁓ at the moment. I have I've already had enough issues. I think like last season and the beginning of the season, keeping up with my own speed, ⁓ like getting the Getting the execution to match how fast I was moving through the stage and actually seeing what I was trying to do while doing it. ⁓ and that's come together really well for me lately. So I just wanted to go in and like the only things I had resolved to do were like, yeah, I'm gonna move fast, but I wanted to collect as many points as I could. I actually wanted to like shoot accurately and I wanted to hit steel first try and not lose a shit ton of time on steel. ⁓ which are really, really common goals. Like that shooting points, wow, it's like It's kind of the other side of going fast, yada yada. ⁓ the steel thing on steel that required any amount of patience, I was golden. Like there are several stages where I went one for one. ⁓ or like a makeup on the the forty seven yard ⁓ second steel or whatever, the first steal. I can't remember. ⁓
Nick: Which is which is awesome for you by the way. Like you absolutely did crush steel at area five and that has been a sticking point for you. Well
Stephen: Except for except for stages that are fast. Because then I'm like, ⁓ it's close, easy steel. I can disrespect the steel today. We already know we know who gets my respect on bad steel days. But yeah, absolutely. You have paper, women, and steel. And if I'm I'm missing steel, it's a good day to be women and paper, I guess. But getting canceled on the Hit Factor Podcast.
Nick: Women.
Stephen: ⁓ the two of the stages that had like positions that you either had to charge into were or like just aggressive movement and close steal, like minimum distance ⁓ mini ipsis, just an egregious amount of take up or makeup shots on those ⁓ in like the final position every time, or the starting position on one of them on thirteen, I think. ⁓ just bouncing between them and not actually aiming at anything, because I'm like it's close, I could never miss, and then I miss five times in a row. ⁓ and I lost like I probably lost like six seconds in the match just between those two stages alone, which is absurd. I haven't actually like gone in and looked at it because it'll make me sad. But that part is disappointing. But it I no, I'm not I'm not going to it. That's why I haven't. But I think overall, like my goal of just like trying to maintain like my current level of aggression that I bring to it movement wise and transition wise, and just keeping the gun on the paper long enough to get
Nick: That's that's torture. Don't do that.
Stephen: A decent percentage of the points out of it, like paid off. I don't know if I've shot a major match with less than two deltas. Probably ever. ⁓ and then the one mic on a stupid one.
Nick: Yeah, you you didn't have a ton of you didn't have a ton of makeups on paper really at all. ⁓ I think most of your paper makeups were on targets that were moving. Is that does that sound correct?
Stephen: And and s I mean f a lot of those I wouldn't even call makeups because I put three on the first swinger on day one and it wasn't a makeup, it was just hedging my bets. ⁓ on the second activator, ⁓ on day two, I saw light through the hardcover 'cause I put three on it ⁓ while tracking it and I saw light in the hardcover pretty deep in and just wanted another one on there, so I hit it as soon as it presented ⁓ around the wall again and then transitioned to the next target to finish the stage. So yeah.
Nick: So another another example of why putting like partialing a moving target makes it easier is 'cause now you can see daylight on the hardcover.
Stephen: And I it would have been like a like it was on the AC line. So it would have like that would have been a great hit on a regular swinger. Would have been money, but here we are. ⁓ so yeah, I've I felt pretty good about what I came in to do, despite having fairly low expectations for it. Like I didn't think I was gonna blow anything away or anything, and arguably didn't, but I I did what I wanted to do for the most part, but it's just reeling my brain back on stages that require speed, but w also will require like diligence and patience to do the really, really punishing parts. Like speed shoots I've historically like been miserable at 'cause it's the same thing. That time pressure like really gets in my head. And I feel the same thing on those kind of steel stages or like those steel arrays rather. So I don't know.
Nick: So do you think like, you know, you said you had low expectations for your performance of the match. Do you think that, you know, kinda helped a little bit with your ability to just relax and have fun? ⁓ and shoot, you know, I would say pretty near the end of your skill window, right? Like you you laid down some fucking great runs, you know.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. ⁓ I mean my my day one performance wasn't abysmal. It was probably on the lower end of my major match performances and then day two was like consistently in the top like kind of threshold of what I have in the tank. ⁓
Nick: Yeah, day two was crazy, dude. That was so cool to watch. Like you crushed.
Stephen: Right, yeah, it it came together. Thank you. That's so n you've been nothing but nice to me today. And I just give you constant shit. ⁓ reminder that Nick is the villain of this version of the podcast.
Nick: I'm a victim. Keep trying to engineer this fucking this story and it's just nobody's gonna buy it, dude. Nobody's gonna buy it.
Stephen: Whatever. They already bought it. There w there was a vote and everything. but no, yeah. So it it did feel good. The I think the the lack of expectation definitely does help. Like it's just very hard to it's not a space that I can reliably yeah, I can't I can't tell myself that it doesn't matter too much. Like the match has to like literally not matter to me for one reason or another. ⁓ I can't really bring that mindset in. ⁓ I have a hard time fooling myself about things or like hyping myself up. ⁓
Nick: Replicate that.
Stephen: It it just feels like lying to myself and if I low if I know I'm lying to myself, then it reduces my confidence in the thing I'm trying to tell myself. mental game, non existent. You gotta I can't convince myself of shit. But and do you know a guy?
Nick: You should hire you should hire a coach for that. Yeah, ⁓ send me four hundred dollars and I'll be that guy. ⁓ it's me, dude. I invented practical shooting training coaching.
Stephen: Okay. You're the guy. Okay, cool. That didn't go like a ⁓ man. Great, great. But ⁓ there's a fucked up dichotomy ⁓ that happens when like you can have low expectations and then execute well, and now you go into the next match where you're like, I don't need anything out of this match. And so you automatically are like, I don't expect anything, so I'm gonna fucking crush this match. And now you're like back in the hamster wheel and it just it doesn't it doesn't feel good.
Nick: Like well, I crushed last match, so I should be able to crush this match.
Stephen: Right. It just like you can't you really have to go in like kind of head empty experientially. Like like here's what I know I can do and it has to be free of the things you've previously done, good or bad. Like you can't I can't carry one match into another. ⁓ like maybe there's some aspect of like headspace or whatever mental bullshit you can you can bring into that. I'm not the guy for it, but it just it's a very weird thing to think about, like and it just it's like the it's cyclical. Like I just convince myself of one thing and then automatically the other. So I don't know how this is gonna work out carrying forward because I performed very well. ⁓ I was talking to Cody a couple of days ago. He asked about like where that felt like 'cause he's trying to gauge ⁓ where his competition is for the upcoming law enforcement match down at the staccato ranch. So we talked about it briefly and I was like, no, that's like kind of my top end. Like there are some things I could have cleaned up, but it wouldn't have changed a game for me. I might have like gained a couple of points ⁓ or placements, but Like ultimately, like I'm not taking that stuff away 'cause they can take their stuff away and they would have beat me by even further yada. It's you know, I'm gonna say yada yada three hundred times now. But
Nick: Nobody says it anymore. Nobody says yada yada anymore. Nobody yadas anymore.
Stephen: I ⁓ you're Nobody wants to yada anymore. Because of because of why? Whoa. ⁓
Nick: ⁓ it's 'cause of woke. Woke did this. ⁓ so you know, coming off that like really good performance, like what are your like what are you gonna do in training? ⁓ do you think like this is something like ⁓ I'm just gonna shoot like I did at area five in training? Is that like an actionable goal for you or like what what do you want to work on in training?
Stephen: ⁓ so we've we've messed around with the part-time thing. Like the the zeitgeist right now is going fast and making it work. ⁓ and that's fun. It is a ton of fun. ⁓ did it with you last week. I did it with ⁓ one of our like rising D class friends yesterday. ⁓ and it's kind of wild seeing people at
Nick: You know, he has a name. He has a name. We both know him.
Stephen: He doesn't listen to podcasts. He listens to the radio, dude. I don't want to hear it. Hi, Josh. But ⁓ so I think there is speed like still in the tank for me, and there is execution at that speed, but it is kind of a weird time to be trying to like dig that stuff up for me when I'm just tapping into this other thing of being like, here's the here's the the aggression and the speed that I can pull off reliably. Like And very consistently across matches. And the hits are finally like starting to arrive. Like I'm actually being able to collect the points at the speed that I want to go and can go comfortably. ⁓ so I just kind of don't want to change anything. And that's so stupid. It's so sad. But it's just like I don't want to coast. But but like why would I why would I try to do something? I wanna it doesn't make any sense to try and get more ground out of that if like I could just recreate that.
Nick: No, I I get that.
Stephen: and do very well for myself at any major match. Like ⁓ 90 odd percent of Heatherington, even if he was shooting from belt, like is great for me at my level right now. So I'm not gonna I'm not gonna try to add speed to the mix. I don't think I need to be more accurate per se. ⁓ I just I wanna I know the mistakes I made and I would like to stop making those mistakes and just increase the consistency that I can pull. Because that alone would have given me like a decent amount of time and whatever for the scoreboard. So
Nick: I mean, I think if you could find like a repeatable strategy for steel, ⁓ you know, maybe that would be kind of a a good fact finding mission for you. But I don't I don't really know what that looks like either. ⁓ and I certainly don't know what that would look like to you. Right? I mean it's always been kind of a a sticking point. But ⁓ you know, obviously whatever changes you have made in how you plan to shoot steel, ⁓ or You know, I think maybe that same sort of planning extends to how you've been shooting paper as well. We've seen way less drag off deltas. ⁓ so, you know, whatever that approach is, like really trying to zero in on what that is, ⁓ you know, maybe that would be a good spot to to invest some time. ⁓ I mean, you can't completely avoid steel makeups, but finding a way To where you're not transitioning off of steel that you missed. ⁓ because that's a half second, no matter how you slice it, at least. ⁓
Stephen: Yeah. And all of mine were like uncalled, like, yep, got it, and then transition to the next one, even if it was a foot away, and then just did the the dumbass dance. And I think if I can extend the thing I've done with paper recently to steel, that's not a hard thing to do. It's it's just a an active level of thought that I have to to bring into the thing that is
Nick: Yeah, and you're famously bad at that. Thoughts get out.
Stephen: I got blown up in the war, dude. Leave me alone.
Nick: ⁓
Stephen: So i if I could, yeah, I would I would like to it's just hard to I don't know juxtapose that against like the aggression that I want to bring and that I like on those fast stages my paper was good. So it it's kind of silly that the stealer rate goes to shit when it's the exact same size scoring zone for most of those given the distance. So I don't know. all right, so going forward, we shot the match, it went how it went. ⁓ you can talk about your placement and your satisfaction with it if you want to, but what are you planning on taking out of the match? ⁓ and ⁓ we we just did this, didn't we? Fuck me.
Nick: Yeah, yeah, I mean, ⁓ thank you for you know, reading word for word my same entry on the show notes. But
Stephen: You wrote you wrote good show notes, dude.
Nick: ⁓ we are just the Yeah, we're just the worst podcast hosts ⁓ hit factors probably ever seen. But we have hearts.
Stephen: I know that you, the listener, didn't ask for this, but two guys in sp in particular did ask for this, and it's for them. I'm sorry.
Nick: It is for them. It's for those two guys in particular, and maybe my mom too. ⁓ I fucking hope not. ⁓ yeah, probably. Yeah, probably. ⁓ but ⁓ no, I think you know, fourteen stages is a decently long match. ⁓ and as far as like overall time to shoot the match goes, I was the fastest person in the seventy-fifth percentile of the match.
Stephen: She's gonna listen?
Nick: Which is
Stephen: God, that's a lot of ⁓ qualifications you put on that.
Nick: Yeah, ⁓ so seventy-five percent at a major is really low for me. ⁓ I think that's exceptionally low. ⁓ I think, you know, obviously zeroing one stage didn't help. ⁓ I did eventually give in to the demons and I did what if that stage, you know, didn't happen. Right. I just kept the same hits and just removed the twelve penalties for shooting freestyle and guess what? didn't really change my placement all that much. ⁓ I still did not crest ⁓ seventy-nine percent. So not much of a difference, right? Still not, you know, shooting my classification. Not that that's particularly ⁓ a a goal, right?
Stephen: Like put you like low eighties? Okay. I also didn't shoot my classification.
Nick: Well, that's your fault for making GM. Could have stayed a rock hard ⁓
Stephen: soft GM or hard Which way, Western man?
Nick: Part ⁓ at seventy five percent, you know? ⁓ but you know, this is why pickleball doesn't have ELO or classifications, it's 'cause it's too stressful, you know.
Stephen: If you give Jay Slater a pickleball set, it will have Elo in a matter of days.
Nick: You're right, you're right. But no, I mean I'm not I'm not happy with with my results from the match. ⁓ so you know, as far as my overall time goes, you know, I shot about the same time that you did. overall time, you know. ⁓ that's not like the best metric for looking at this, but as far as like general pace across, you know, 14 stages, I think it's a good metric to look at. So it's like, okay, I can you know, move the gun at that speed. Like I, you know, I just need to find the center of the target again. I just need to, you know, try and keep myself accountable in practice to continue to move at the pace that I shot Area Five at and just find the hits, right? ⁓ if you can put two on target and it's an alpha delta, in theory you should be able to put two alpha on it in the same amount of time. So in theory, you know, in theory, in a vacuum, you should be able to do it. I mean, I I just don't think you're saving that much time by not stopping the gun, right? ⁓ which is kind of exactly the the failure that I'm seeing is like I'll either get really tense and just, you know, see nothing and you know overgrip the gun with the firing hand and undergrip it with the support hand, or you know, I'll just try and time the A zone and just buzz past what I'm trying to hit. And you know, sometimes that manifests as like an early Charlie and a late Delta. Sometimes it's ⁓ you know, ⁓ like an alpha and then, you know, a tr a late Charlie. Either way, it's points down. And ⁓ you know, I think the part time method is really good for holding myself accountable to the speed I wanna shoot at. So maybe I'll experiment with like a little bit more like longer target orders. ⁓ Maybe with a little bit less complexity and just a little bit shorter part time standard. You know, instead of twenty percent, maybe take, you know, five or ten percent off. Yeah. ⁓ play play with that number a little bit.
Stephen: Fifteen. Yeah. No, I I think that would be wise. I think it would be wise because it gets you to it's not a huge reduction in speed, like going from like the cold all all al or cold all alphas run to ninety percent of that ⁓ time with equitable hits or competitive hits at that speed. And just being able to do that reliably would be a market improvement. So
Nick: Yeah. Yeah. ⁓
Stephen: That's my prescription. Nobody asked, but that's what I would advise.
Nick: That ⁓ it's probably the only advice about shooting you've ever given me, so thank you. The student becomes the master.
Stephen: ⁓ I've said don't. I've said don't fucking shoot a lot. Have you considered quitting? Hey, maybe skip this one, buddy. Think about your mental health. You have a wife who loves you. I'm gonna introduce your wife to practice score competitor. They're like, ⁓ you can just search his name and you can see what he's doing today. Offer him little words of encouragement before he shoots this big stage.
Nick: Yeah. Every day, buddy. Every day. Well, that makes one of us, right? Getting a message from my wife in mid mid match at area five. I wish you had mistresses.
Stephen: Mm-hmm.
Nick: ⁓ pretty low bar to be better at that, you know.
Stephen: ⁓ my God. ⁓ Do you have any other thoughts about area five?
Nick: ⁓ shout out squad three ⁓ eight and ⁓ to the match director. I just want you to know I would go back.
Stephen: Absolutely. ⁓ Manny recognizing us from across the across the range because of our stupid slurpy hats. And he shouted out something about ⁓ I guess my alleged drinking habits, ⁓ to get my attention. And it worked, apparently. So yeah. And there's yeah, there's no audible proof of ⁓ that. I wouldn't call it a habit. But yeah, no, the the squad was great, ⁓ the match was great, had a ton of fun. It was hot, but ⁓
Nick: Unconfirmed unconfirmed drinking habits.
Stephen: The match ran like so smooth as far as getting us in and out. We started kind of early, but like we were off the range well in advance from what I expected every time. ⁓ and got to got to hang out.
Nick: Yeah. I and I can't believe like that was that club's first time hosting an area match. ⁓ it went, you know, like super smooth. That's a lot of people to have on the range at one time. And for how quickly the stages moved, I think it was well balanced. ⁓ I mean I think there were some growing pains that you're gonna see with running a match that size for the first time. And I think that the the staff There is probably interested in doing a better job next year and I hope they give them the chance to do so. So
Stephen: Mm, no, it was it was cool. Fun match. Absolutely. Would go back. ⁓ cool. I don't think I have any further points to make about it. So, ⁓ if you're good calling it there.
Nick: Stop. Unload, show clear.
Nick: Doing all right. I'm doing all right.
Stephen: Are you just as surprised as I am that Jay and Saul opted to give us access to the feed?
Nick: ⁓ yeah, yeah, I am surprised. ⁓ you know, I would think two people as well developed and well rounded as shooters would have better judgment. But I guess being good at shooting and being make like making good life choices just don't go hand in hand. ⁓
Stephen: I don't know. I have it on good authority that Jay enjoyed the last episode with us, but I don't know what he sees in either of us. But we're back, much to everyone's chagrin. So we're gonna do this thing.
Nick: There's twos of us. Twos of us.
Stephen: Indeed. ⁓ so we are here today because both of us shot area five last weekend and ⁓ we wanted to get some ⁓ thoughts leading up to it, thoughts about the match and how we shot and kind of takeaways from the match ⁓ for everybody to hear. ⁓ there are a few hitbacker listeners that were out there. We ran into Mike Dublin ⁓ Hannah Malley. but Nick, you want to talk about why we ended up going to Area Five?
Nick: So ⁓ we ended up meeting some lovely gentlemen, ⁓ Skylar Davis, the preeminent stage designer of our time, and Harrison Marcot, the absolute degenerate scum of the shooting sports. ⁓ we met them at yep, we met them at our area match last year, Area Three. and, you know, squatted with them and had a great time, just great squat energy. ⁓ so
Stephen: He knows it.
Nick: you know, talking to the boys after Area Three, it was like, Hey, if you come shoot our major, we'll go shoot your major. ⁓ so ⁓ they came down and shot Cornhusker with us and ⁓ again squatted together, same great squat energy. ⁓ maybe even too great of squat energy.
Stephen: It was a good squad. I don't care what anybody says. It's a shame that between the two of them they only got to shoot like 62% of the match. But but it was an absolute treat having them. Good boys. It was fun. ⁓ yeah. So ⁓ Area Five this year was out at Oak Hill Gun Club in what town was that? ⁓ Portland.
Nick: Yeah, sorry Harrison. you can come to my place in N D anytime.
Stephen: Michigan or like Lions, Michigan. ⁓ out in Michigan. So, ⁓ which is quite a ways away from us. It is a ten and a half hour drive, and we made the bad choice of going there ⁓ in one stint. Just really went for it. Left here at like seven in the morning on a fresh belly of Taco Bell breakfast quesadillas. ⁓ or crunch wraps, crunch wraps, right? Yeah. Anyway, ten and a half hour drive plus stops. ⁓ and that led us to some
Nick: Yeah. Portland Lions, Michigan.
Stephen: kind of weird choices because we knew we weren't gonna make it there on time to walk the match at all. We got there after the range was closed and basically just got to town, got dinner and went to the hotel, right? ⁓ so while we were driving, we made some choices. ⁓ the big one being if we can't walk the stages, to commit to the bit and just not walk any of the stages at all, aside from our four minute walkthrough during the match, but we didn't get there early and preview any stages.
Nick: Honestly, ⁓ like I kind of fucked with that. ⁓ it really did not like I slept the best the night before a major I have ever slept. So like I have this habit, like I'll walk the stages and then I try and walk ⁓ kind of in a reverse order to where like the last ones I walk or the first couple that I'll shoot the next day. So then you know, going to bed, you're just like, Okay, stage one of the day tomorrow. you know, I'm gonna, you know, go left, I'm gonna shoot this, this, and this. You sort of like get in that loop until eventually you drift off to sort of a hate like a fugue state, you know, that's kind of sleep and kind of not, and really bad for performance, right? To, you know, hype yourself up that much. ⁓ but man, you know, going to bed with no expectations or idea of what I was gonna shoot the next day was fucking freeing. I I enjoyed it.
Stephen: I think ⁓ I I enjoyed it and it was the wiser choice to just get there late, hang out with friends, have a drink, get dinner, and then go to bed ⁓ presenting. I had the ⁓ kind of the opposite reaction to you. I do the same thing if I like walk the match beforehand, I can hyperfixate on like certain parts of it, and I'll just lay in bed and just like replay the same like sequences or whatever that not even something I'm worried about. Like my brain just like locks onto some entry or something or some target sequence, whatever. ⁓ but having not seen them live, my brain just went straight to Instagram. Like I took like two of the stages that I saw from Vleager and just locked into those. Had no idea what they would actually like present like, just saw like third person camera of him running ⁓ And ⁓ there was a in the morning when we woke up, like before my alarm went off, I was just like, Yeah, I'm gonna get to shoot this stage. Maybe. I don't know. I don't know where it's at.
Nick: Yeah. ⁓ yeah, I mean it definitely didn't help that like the matchbook was maybe intentionally vague too. Like you didn't really know what stage number was what, ⁓ as far as how it was gonna lay out at the match. ⁓ and then like the app that they used to design the stages doesn't do a great job of displaying depth, I don't think, compared to like practice in. ⁓
Stephen: It made everything look huge. Well, like it made the bays look huge. And they do have big bays, but like I guess practice and kinda does the same thing where the perspective is a little bit fucky, so things will look farther than they are, and then you get it laid down and it's like way more compact stage. But it made those far stages on ⁓ the left side as we enter the range, the bigger bays, look massive.
Nick: Yeah. Yeah, I mean ⁓ like especially any sort of hat cam footage of the s like the stage everybody talked about with the forty seven yard mini popper, thousand yard mini popper, I forget how far it was. I think it was like fifteen hundred meters or so. ⁓ about six football fields away were the mini poppers. ⁓ four hundred and ninety-eight cheeseburgers.
Stephen: probably kick this football clear over that mountain range.
Nick: Yeah, he has, you know, nine hundred cheeseburgers away. But ⁓ no I mean, the fisheye lens of like a insta three sixty hat cam made those poppers seem like they were a fucking truly impossible distance away. And then you get out there and it's like, you know, that's just a big popper at twenty five yards. The the presentation looked a lot better to the naked eye. ⁓
Stephen: And it ⁓ it was a mini at forty seven was the the number I kept hearing. So give or take, somewhere between forty five, fifty. We didn't walk it, we didn't have to reset it. So that was nice.
Nick: Yeah. That was great. Manny, thank you for that. I appreciate that. You're the man.
Stephen: Yep. But so yeah, we ⁓ we made this stupid choice while driving ⁓ basically a twelve hour day ⁓ to ⁓ that area of Michigan and just decided we weren't gonna walk it and we're gonna show up the next day and hit the stages and just do them as presented. ⁓ didn't quite stick to that because we did check out the 40 yard popper bay, but it wasn't a complicated stage at all. I think we just wanted to see it and it was because it was behind our starting bay. It's not like the plan changed or anything. We didn't discover anything ⁓ that we weren't gonna see anywhere else.
Nick: Yeah. We didn't really air gun it either. We just kinda looked at it and we were like, ⁓ you know hold the gun still.
Stephen: It's far. What are we gonna do? so yeah, that was ⁓ kind of like the big decision on the way up there. We talked a little bit about just the match vibe in general. There was some stuff leading up to the match. ⁓ what were your thoughts on the stages prior to it? 'Cause I remember like kind of the the thing that stood out was just like open paper, kind of everywhere.
Nick: Yeah, yeah, there were a lot of open targets in the matchbook and you know I shot you know, we both shot Race Gun Nationals last year, which was also like a lot of open paper at that match. And still somehow people managed I mean, it's unbelievable, right? People managed to get mics without hardcover on every single target. ⁓ And people still manage to get no shoots when there are only a handful of no shoots at the match. So you know, I've got a lot more respect for just the the penalties that are baked into the target itself after shooting that particular match in general, where it's like, you know, you can't separate on shooting a clean match. You just have to separate on speed and execution. ⁓ so you know, I was kind of looking forward to a match along that same
Stephen: Mm-hmm.
Nick: sort of vein where it's like, you know, we're just going to commit to the whole hit factor bit and just have a race. You know, just see who can do it. Yeah, it's a great bit. I like that bit. I think that's a good bit to stick to. ⁓ and, you know, I I'm I don't want to be critical, right? I've, you know, we run a match. ⁓ we know, you know, when you're proofing the stages, you know, decisions get made that, you know, you think you're going to make the match better.
Stephen: It's good bit.
Nick: But we get to the match and everything is absolutely partialed up. Right. And I mean I'm not talking just like, ⁓ they just put a no shoot on there for flavor. Like I mean it's like two inches of it of lower A zone, you know, super tight partials. ⁓ which you know made the shooting not you know, a lot of those partials were really close, so it didn't necessarily make the shooting ⁓ harder. It just really kind of ⁓
Stephen: Mm-hmm.
Nick: How do I say it? ⁓ didn't reward taking risk as much as I would like to see at a major. Because there were a lot of like really obvious entry targets that they just like, you know, partialed them up. So, okay, I gotta slow down a little bit on the entry. I have to settle here, which is fine. ⁓ but there was just a lot of that. And then there were targets that could have been like really, really good blending targets that just the positioning of the target in relation to. you know, other areas of the of the stage that you had to get to, ⁓ that target would have been, you know, so good to use as a blending target. You know, there was going to be some risk baked in, maybe a delta, maybe a mic, definitely Charlie's. ⁓ but instead of allowing that that risk to be managed and that separation to be gained there, ⁓ instead we saw like really tight partialing. ⁓ so if you did want to, you know, do some aggressive blending on stages. It was very risky. ⁓ and that definitely yeah, on on several of ⁓ And again, I'm not I'm not trying to be critical. Like these are choices that are made. and it gave the match like a flavor and a unique set of shooting challenges. And it's what, our job to figure them out and not suck at them.
Stephen: Several of them. No. Sorry dude, you're being too critical. And this is the only podcast you're ever gonna be on again. Manny is gonna have you blacklisted from the podcast ⁓ realm, I guess. Never gonna have you on. Casual shooter, not you.
Nick: But most importantly most importantly, the match was really fun. I all of the stages were really like super fun. They were enjoyable to shoot. ⁓ I don't I don't care if I
Stephen: Okay, okay, let's take a step back. Let's take a step back. Nobody cares about your fun. Don't care. Right. So the right, so the open target versus the hardcover thing, because it's been kind of a discussion. I know Saul's talked about it. Jay's talked about ⁓ it ⁓ because it comes up a lot with the fixed time discussion they were having a couple weeks ago, all that sort of stuff. ⁓ there's a question in the hit factor discord right now. I think Mike ⁓ asked about proper use of hardcover. So there's a discussion in there if you want to go into the hit factor discord.
Nick: I don't care if I hit something. I don't care if I hit a hardcover, you know. I don't I don't care about that.
Stephen: And read through the ⁓ replies to that. But like you said, some of the like the close partials, like I don't mind a partial that is ⁓ placed intentionally to kind of trip you up, slow you down, make you rethink something, or take like that extra tenth on an entry ⁓ or have to wait for it on the entry kind of thing. But some of them, ⁓ the activators specifically, were like just grossly frustrating because we rolled up to the match, we like checked out the scores like ahead of time, and we were like, there is You have to go like thirty places down to find the first shooter that didn't have a penalty from staff day, ⁓ which included all of the staff and ⁓ what the Friday, Saturday shooters. ⁓ right. So we checked on like Friday afternoon and we saw half of their stuff and it was just misses forever. ⁓ misses and no shoots. And the ⁓ yeah.
Nick: Lotta lot of heat on staff day too. Like it wasn't, you know, just local heat shooting staff day running their own match. Like there was like ⁓ Vleager shot staff day, I think Joey shot staff day, Lane Grease shot staff day, like well, Friday, Saturday, yeah, sorry.
Stephen: Or Friday, Saturday ⁓ schedule, I think. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it was just ⁓ it was kind of weird going from what we saw in the matchbook, seeing the scores and not seeing the stages, and then seeing a whole bunch of misses, and then getting to the match and seeing more hardcover in weird places that we didn't expect it. ⁓ especially with those activators, because one of them, what do we have? There was we started on stage eight and there was a was it USPSA targets, and that one was partialed up to like above the A, like upper third of the torso A zone.
Nick: Yeah. It was
Stephen: And everything else below that was just hard covered out. And then we had the yeah. ⁓ and then the other activator was the ⁓ twenty ish yard swinger Ipsyc. ⁓ partial to fuck too. Just it was
Nick: It was tight, yeah. It was That one was even tighter. Yeah, that was a even tighter. Activator and then the bobber with the tucks on it.
Stephen: And those yeah. Yeah. ⁓ so it was ⁓ it was certainly a choice, surprisingly. ⁓ I think we both came away clean on those.
Nick: ⁓ the so the only one that like I liked the tucks on the bobber because I think bobbers like as a as a moving target are like kind of easy to disrespect. And the way they set that bobber up was was pretty clever. They had a really high ⁓ hardcover steal to where the bobber had a whole bunch of dead time. So like if you didn't get it on the first pass or you didn't time the second pass correctly.
Stephen: On the activators.
Nick: Like you're gonna be waiting for, you know, three quarters of a second to see it again. ⁓ and then on top of that, it was a tux on the bobber. So it was like a bobber you actually had to respect a little bit, which
Stephen: And because the the front steal was set so high, ⁓ off if you miss it off the first pass, you lost like target. Like you weren't gonna see the whole A zone in the second pass. You didn't see it on the first pass, so
Nick: It was Yeah, you got maybe three quarters of the A zone on the first pass, if not a little bit less, you know. ⁓ I'm sure we could play some crazy fractions games with it, but it was you know, you never got a full A zone off of it. And, you know, a lot of times those like when you see a bobber at a match, like everybody above a certain skill bracket is gonna have two alphabets on it. ⁓ it's just kind of a gimme target. ⁓ you know, I know at Cornhusker, like the bobber we had on
Stephen: Mm-hmm.
Nick: our little suitcase stage like there was not a ton of drop yeah, fucking gimmicks. There's not a ton of drop points on that. I mean one it I mean it was super close, but also, you know, at our club matches when we run a bobber, it's just not a place you typically see a lot of drop points. And it's more of a a test of timing, right? A way to pace out the the sequence. But no, I thought that that one was was probably the the most tasteful partial on an activator. ⁓ and that is the only one that burned me.
Stephen: Fucking gimmicks. Gimmicks. Mm-hmm.
Nick: ⁓ I had a partial hit on the hardcover steel and it fucking went into the shoulder. ⁓ I took a really aggressive plan on that and it fucking absolutely backfired on me. But ⁓ that
Stephen: Stage 14, everybody, check practice score.
Nick: ⁓ yeah, yeah, you'll have to scroll pretty far down. I think it's like
Stephen: No, that was stage seven. That was stage seven. Sorry. Yeah, it was stage seven.
Nick: Yeah, I think I'm like sub forty percent on that. It went really bad. ⁓
Stephen: It was a it was a good time. What a way to finish the match. And also thank you for the phrase. What was it? Tasteful partials. That's that's going into the lexicon for sure. All right. So ⁓ yeah, thoughts on ⁓ the hardcover stuff. Yeah, the activators, that one was the easiest one. ⁓ the other ones, I think we just we took I know I took some extra shots on them. and they were fairly easy to track versus trap. I think trapping kind of like would screw you up because you'd try to speed, you'd try to like
Nick: Tasteful partials. ⁓
Stephen: drop a quick double on them. ⁓ but they were available for so long that they were easy to track but risky. So I put three on one of them and they were all on brown and put four on the other and it had like a pretty deep ⁓ hardcover hit on it. But just yeah, like you said, it's it's not going to catch everybody out. And a lot of the other hardcover stuff isn't there to catch out Jacob Hetherington and Joey. It's there to catch out like your your B's and A's, ⁓ people that are kind of pushing probably and haven't quite gotten everything together as far as like the speed and execution aspect of it. ⁓ because who would miss a who would miss a right side hardcover at three yards on an entry? Who would do that?
Nick: Yeah. And you know, part of that Nobody good, that's for sure. ⁓ but ⁓ another thing too, like when you ⁓ partial up a moving target, you make it easier visually to pick out the scoring zone, right? You reduce the amount of wrong spots to put the eyes. ⁓ and this is something we kind of figured out ⁓ what was it like two years ago in practice, we set up like a tux on a swinger. We both had like a rough match on a swinger. Like, ⁓ we're gonna make it so hard. We're gonna put tucks on a swinger and we're gonna shoot designated target with it. It's gonna be so hard. Like, kind of by the end of it, like, you know, when you tux a target, the only thing really to look at is the center of the A zone. There's really nothing else to aim at. You you know, if you're looking at the hardcover, you know, most people at this point have figured out that bullets are generally gonna track where you're looking, right? Most people beyond a certain level are not going to be looking at a black target or a white target. They're just going to be looking at the center of the available scoring zone. So, you know, hardcover on a on a moving target, like it's very easy to track where you want the bullets to go with your eyes. And I think that's probably got something to do with why most of the people at the top of the scoreboard were able to to skate away unscathed. I mean, also being better at shooting helps. But ⁓
Stephen: I mean a lot of them didn't come out unscathed. They just they they moved quick enough. Like there's a there's a kind of a time gap difference for ⁓ for a lot of the stuff at the top. But ⁓ all right. So hardcover stuff aside, the stages were great. ⁓ I think most of them, like our second day was populated with a lot of more open stages. There was one that was even called cursed hardcover and it barely had any threatening hardcover. I guess it was just fast. So I guess somebody could throw it, but for the most part, our second day was a lot more ⁓
Nick: This is true.
Stephen: freeing. ⁓ it was just a little played into a little bit of that leans into like the hit factor type stuff. Like lets you punish yourself by shooting Charlies and deltas collect the penalties that are on the paper. So as far as the ⁓ not walking stuff showing up we started on stage eight ⁓ zone two. ⁓ the that was the first stage in zone two when we shot it left to right, ⁓ eight to fourteen. ⁓ so we rolled in warning of checked out our stage and we're like cool this is manageable, right? And then we briefly checked out one for the next day and then came back and we started shooting. ⁓ and we played that plan out the whole day. We didn't walk a single stage ahead of time, just our four minutes with the squad and everything was cool. How do you feel ⁓ the plan worked out as far as that match and the stages that we shot?
Nick: ⁓ honestly pretty good. stage planning or like stage memory has never really been a strong suit for me. So I feel like I'm maybe a good bellwether for whether we should have like walked the stages ahead of time. I didn't really find anything to be like so complex that it's like, man, I wish I had an extra day to mull this over. And I think that's good, right? I I don't think that adding like so much complexity to a stage that like only really good competitors can remember the target order. I don't think that's like a fun mechanic. ⁓ considering like the match is generally subsidized by people that are not M's and GMs. ⁓ does that make sense?
Stephen: Yeah. ⁓ it's it's one of the things that like I kind of liked ⁓ doing that. And we don't get a lot of that here. Like usually a lot of the stages in our region in Area Three are a little bit more ⁓ dependent on your ability to memorize like cursed target orders, as it were. Like you have to do the certain thing. ⁓ and your opportunities to blend might be limited by that, or you have to do some weird choices. But ⁓ this one kind of had like an ipsy light type flavor where it was like you can You can see that stage in four minutes and like you'll see everything. There were very few surprises. ⁓ a couple like a couple targets had like a or a couple of rays had a target inside the wall that you had to do like a pretty aggressive wide lean ⁓ before exiting on, ⁓ or a target tucked away behind a barrel stack or something. But nothing nothing that was like intentionally trying to catch you out to forget, right? So I think it kind of lent itself to us going in and be like, This is the one we're not gonna do walkthroughs on. And it's like, congratulations, boys. This is the one you don't need to walk, because they were very not very straightforward, but they were just the the skill that they were testing was your ability to shoot a stage. Like it was to do the points in time thing versus memorize some complicated bullshit, right?
Nick: That's I think that's a pretty novel concept. like what if we just measured our ability to shoot fast and accurately at a match? ⁓ that'd be neat. But ⁓ go ahead.
Stephen: Yeah. And I think No, I was just saying I think it was it was largely successful in that it's like it largely did the thing we looked for it to do. ⁓ there were just th those weird choices we talked about a little bit. So again, I just
Nick: Do you do do you think ⁓ it altered your performance in any way? Do you think the match that you shot is the match that you shot? ⁓ whether you walked the stages ahead of time, do you think you would have done worse had you walked ⁓ ahead of time?
Stephen: ⁓ yeah. ⁓ hard to know ⁓ because I don't know when I'm gonna do good or bad. You know, it's just you show up and you see what happens when you're done, right? softest GM in the Midwest. I'm too too simple to have a mode, dude. Finding a hundred? Never, I'll find ninety-two and be happy with it. ⁓ sorry, Mason. No, I don't think 90.5, sir, 90.5. Spoilers. ⁓
Nick: Modeless freaks. Modeless freaks. Yeah. You'll find ninety and be happy with it. I'll find seventy something and be happy with it, I guess.
Stephen: You're making me sad.
Nick: ⁓ well, you know, can't win ⁓ all, man.
Stephen: But I I don't think ⁓ I don't think I perform better because of the nature of the stages. I don't think ⁓ if I have a a strength, I think mine is probably in execution of stage plans, more so than an ability to shoot accurately or particularly fast. but I'm gonna get through the stage ⁓ n ninety percent of the time the way I intend to get through the stage. ⁓ because My wife brought me a beer. She's trying to be sneaky, but she did a nice thing. Thank you, Taco. ⁓ she can't hear you. But I don't ⁓
Nick: You're the best. ⁓ bummer.
Stephen: Yeah, I don't think it would have changed anything for me. For better or worse, I think if we had shown up to the range on Friday, like after driving for that long and being tired, ⁓ I would have just been like, ⁓ cool, like the stages look good, but we wouldn't have had to dedicate a lot of time to it. We would have walked through all the stages like forty five minutes, got back in the car and have been like, Well, that was forty five minutes. So I don't know. I don't think it changed my performance though.
Nick: Yeah, and I I think that yeah, I you know, I didn't shoot particularly well. ⁓ I did meet some of my like training objectives, you know, with what I've been working on in training, like I did see a lot of that come out in the match, but unfortunately that did not score particularly well. so since it didn't score well, I have to find the silver lining, right? because, you know, it's pickleball, right? You get you gotta find a win somewhere.
Stephen: really really really locked into you hear a phrase one time at a match it's pickleball for ⁓ for gun owners.
Nick: That shit just put me on my ass. Like ⁓ we were spotted with a a a pretty decent open shooter bow ⁓ Veneri, right? Ven yeah. And ⁓ you know, he heard about somebody, you know, having a bad stage and like, you know, throwing a magazine or something. I don't remember the specifics of it, but you know, somebody got upset about their performance on a stage. And he was just like,
Stephen: Ven Neri, yeah.
Nick: Man, what are you getting so worked up for, dude? It's just pickleball for weird adults. And it just fucking killed me. ⁓ yeah, I d I can't stop rotating that ⁓ exchange over in my mind. And No, I mean
Stephen: It's nothing's ever been truer. Absolutely perfect. Sorry, we've we've we've ⁓ we've left visualization. Now we're rotating phrases in our brain. I'm sorry, Saul, can you do this one?
Nick: I'm rotating a phrase in braille in my mind. I'm feeling it, I'm seeing it, hearing it. ⁓
Stephen: ⁓ crazy. Alright, so God almighty do you have another point with that? 'Cause I was gonna try and get to the next
Nick: I just
Stephen: We've got bullet points, people. We have a plan. We're professionals.
Nick: I I think I probably would have shot worse ⁓ had I spent a bunch of time like trying to visualize a rush walkthrough of stages the night before. ⁓ you know, I have a tendency to like kind of really get in my own head. So just showing up and shooting it like a local was was dope. It was good. I was gonna shoot the best I could shoot and that was just it.
Stephen: It did feel like uniquely local in that kind of way, I guess. Like, because where we didn't have to like stress it and we weren't doing any of the work for it. So like it was it was like showing up when you're like new to the sport and you're not engaged with the club. And so you're like, yeah, I showed up and you guys set these things up for me, and I just blast and leave. This is crazy. It was ⁓ it was nice, it was refreshing. ⁓ so as as far as that plan, we talked a little bit in the car on the way back. Back after the match, ⁓ and I think after day one, about how well that kind of worked ⁓ for these stages in particular. But like knowing that, is that a thing that you want to carry forward? Like, is that something you want to try at other matches, or do you think it's match dependent on like basically the qualities of the match? ⁓ like is that something you would do at Cornhusker 2026? ⁓ is that something you'll do at Free State in a week and a half ⁓ from date of recording? Are you gonna show up to nationals this year and be like, nope? I'll see you guys at the hotel. I'll show up tomorrow and shoot my six to seven stages and then fuck off.
Nick: I don't know. I mean I think I I could definitely see myself doing it for free state. ⁓ I will say though that those guys do like to make some complex stages and there were some stages last year that like I walked ahead of time and I wish I had showed up a day earlier even to try and get some of those stages into my thick, thick skull. But ⁓ you know, I'm not going to majors to win them because I can't. I just don't have that in the tool belt, right? It's like I'm not in contention to win anything. So I might as well go to these
Stephen: I'm trying so hard to not sh I'm just trying so hard, dude. All of my basest desires to shit on you in public.
Nick: I mean it's You've been nothing but nice to me today. I'm waiting for the other I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. But ⁓ no, I mean, I'm not in contention to win ⁓ so it's like I might as well, you go and and and really try and test the skills that I'm there to have pressure tested because I I can't, you know, divorce my expectation for performance from, you know, my planning for the match, right? Like it's inseparable. I'm
Stephen: Yeah, today's b today and only today.
Nick: I'm so committed to training and shooting that I wanna do well. And there's no amount of like mental management that's gonna change that. ⁓ so maybe
Stephen: Have you tried? Have you read the books?
Nick: I I have read the books actually and I think they made me dumber.
Stephen: I don't know the title, so I can't riff with you and salt like last week.
Nick: Trust me, making me dumber is a feat, dude.
Stephen: I'm doing everything I can. ⁓ yes, Freestate in particular, like you said, they have a flavor. ⁓ I think I probably got like ⁓ some of my like stage design inspiration just from like kind of the vibe that they put out. It's a lot of maybe like available from several places kind of thing with ⁓ big movements, weird ⁓ transitions from side to side as you try to blend. ⁓ not necessarily to fuck you up, but just harder to do efficiently if you lose your footing somewhere or like you're just out of You if you miss the pocket that you have to take a target. ⁓ so I don't I'd like to try it again and I'd like to try it at a ⁓ another major that's like nearby. Like doing it for an area match that wasn't our area. ⁓ like sure, whatever. We went out there, we were there to just like shoot with the boys, have fun, have some drinks and whatnot, and like see some cool people. And we did that. ⁓ so I don't think I had a lot of stress or anxiety going into it performance wise for this one anyway. It's like pretty low expectation. ⁓ and I think I have a harder time doing that at like our regional ⁓ matches. Like going into Great Plains, I had like a ton of anxiety because I was just like, ⁓ I gotta earn my factory gun slot for next year, even though it's probably gonna be in the worst place on earth for some reason, right? ⁓ but I just had that pressure because it's our section match. But area five, that's somebody else's area match, who cares?
Nick: I mean, yeah, nationals is really just somebody else's section match, right? 'Cause you know, we're in the flyover states. Nobody it's not our nationals, right? It's
Stephen: Ha ha ha. It's it's just it's just another Utah local, right? With with all the heat shows up. ⁓ so I think it
Nick: Yeah. Yeah. But no, I think ⁓ you know, maybe maybe not Free State, but area three. ⁓ I'd be down to do that. ⁓
Stephen: Our our area match. We're gonna return the favor to Arya. Okay. Okay.
Nick: I mean I just you know, ⁓ I just don't think the stages at area three will be as complex as they will be at Free State. ⁓ I just I mean, the amount of stage designers they've got at I mean, I guess it's the same group of stage designers. Maybe not watching walking the stages ahead of time is just a fool's errand. You know, maybe maybe that's
Stephen: ⁓ yeah. Cause yeah, Milk Milk Creek is the yeah. Milk Creek is the sponsoring club for Area Three this year 'cause ⁓ the Keith is out of there and ⁓ Jeff Pikman is I think the primary match director for that match. So good crowd. All right, so we're resolved to try this again. Do we at least want to look at the match book like see what the vibe is before we make this choice?
Nick: ⁓ what kind of fool would read a match book?
Stephen: Hm. I I've already seen the freeze date one, so I hope you make some choices. That's just me.
Nick: ⁓ speaking of Free State, what division are we shooting for Free State?
Stephen: ⁓ boy. ⁓ man. ⁓ I'm in CO.
Nick: You're in CO. No thoughts of
Stephen: Yeah. I contemplated changing.
Nick: For if we
Stephen: I did consider it. I d no that so I did consider it. I've already gone through this, like myself, 'cause what do we have? So heat wise, there's more numbers in ⁓ there's more GMs in CO. I think the only GM in LO is Peyton Garcia, ⁓ 'cause he just moved back to the area. I think he just separated the Marines ⁓ and is back in the Kansas City area. ⁓ Jace is shooting L O. He's an L O ⁓ but he is not. He's a liar. ⁓ in his classification is just way behind because that dude shoots ⁓ I think he he beat Tim Heron in the overall at Alaska ⁓ a couple weeks ago, but missed by like a fraction of a point in ⁓ in Elo. So Elo has some heat, but the CO heat is stacked a little bit higher. ⁓ I think I think Lane kind of outweighs Peyton currently. ⁓ unless you ask Free State last year.
Nick: It was it was a close race last year between the two of ⁓ It was neck and neck all day long. ⁓ but what if we did something really funny and we just slowly moved everybody out of C O to LO until only Lane was in C O.
Stephen: Yeah.
Nick: Like a game of musical chairs, but with guns.
Stephen: ⁓ my gosh. That would be such a good bit, 'cause I know ⁓ Jay and them up north were trying to just they I I think they were successful for the most part, but they were like they were trying to get everybody to go into L O for consolidation and making it very obvious that if you didn't shoot C O, you were a hider. They were making it so clear to these people 'cause everybody was jumping ship and all of the high heat, I think, left. ⁓ if I remember the story correctly. So It would be fun to bully everybody over. But I think the problem is that if Lane is still in CO, you'll have a lot of people that want to stack up against Lane as like a nice basis. I don't think the LO's still not soft enough. It's just better placement, maybe like on the scoreboard, but your percent's still gonna suck.
Nick: Okay, to the people that that, you know, might apply to, I would encourage you to just sh sort the match by C O L O combined anyways. 'Cause that's what everybody good is doing. Right. ⁓
Stephen: And also you.
Nick: Yeah. Yeah. My scores have always been depressing. I don't need to like hide in a division to like that doesn't change how depressing they are. Just the slump continues.
Stephen: Ha ha ha. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Asking somebody to explain score depression to me.
Nick: Yeah. ⁓
Stephen: I don't know the numbers, but it makes me sad. God almighty. All right. So I'll st
Nick: ⁓ talking to my therapist about score depression.
Stephen: Ostensibly, this is a podcast about area five. So ⁓ going back to area five again, ⁓ we we do digress. All right, so we've already taught stages, we've already talked ⁓ our lead up into it, ⁓ as far as like the day of ⁓ coming into this portion of the season. What were you looking to bring into area five? ⁓ 'cause what was the last major you had Cornhusker, you didn't shoot ⁓ Rushmore, ⁓ you were away.
Nick: That's true. We digress.
Stephen: So was Cornhusker your last major then? And that kind of doesn't and that doesn't really count because you built stages and were like helping me with a bunch of dumb bullshit. So it was your major as much as anybody shot on staff day, worked the match, yada yada.
Nick: ⁓ yeah, Cornhosker was It counts to me, you know? It counts to me. ⁓ I mean, I d I don't think staff day is an excuse anymore. I think these match directors have just gotten so good that you know you can't hide behind being a match director anymore, you know. ⁓
Stephen: Bish. They shouldn't be allowed to shoot, honestly. Just let them direct the match and just don't make them shoot.
Nick: Kind of an unfair advantage really. ⁓ especially if you give your match director a Zermat arms while it's fine. Like it is fucked up. But ⁓ yeah, you know
Stephen: It's fucked up. And for months I was just spinning the stages in my brain, just seeing them from every angle. I knew them like the back of my hand.
Nick: Yeah, Noah, ⁓ Corn Husker ⁓ didn't go horrible for me. It wasn't great. ⁓ really rough start in the morning. You know, a lot of match nerves that ⁓ you know just sort of started to come back out of the woodworks from nowhere this season. ⁓ but ⁓ and I was just a little bit like further behind the pace than I expected myself to be. ⁓ not just in you know, timed errors or scored errors, but just generally the execution was not aggressive enough to really I don't know, tickle my pickle. You know, I just wasn't super happy with that portion of my shooting. ⁓ so I've really been, you know, leaning on the part time method, just really trying to just you know, I'm gonna make the same mistakes regardless of what speed I'm shooting. So I would rather make those mistakes as quickly as possible, whether they're scored or unscored. ⁓ So yeah, that's that's been my major focus ⁓ going or going into area five. So it's kinda you know, I just said, you know, I'm just gonna shoot more aggressively. ⁓ I'm gonna take the riskiest plans I can, and I'm just gonna see what I can get away with. I didn't get away with much.
Stephen: Trying to remember. I was just trying to think of like were there was there anything that you did at Area 5 that like leaned into the aggressive plan? Because there were opportunities for some pretty blatant aggression, but like the their risk was pretty wild. I'm trying to stage seven, the bobber activator one where you could ⁓ you could try and be really aggressive and take that wide target between The activator, ⁓ and the bobber. And I didn't see anybody do that. And the same thing with the steel on stage eight where we started. Nobody I don't think I saw anybody hit the activator and then the two steel on the right to go back left to the swinger.
Nick: So So the one with the bobber, my plan on that, you know, I watched how you shot it and I watched how the rest of the squad shot it. ⁓ so I was the last shooter on that squad or on that stage, last shooter of the the match for that that poor poor staff. ⁓ it was hot out. But ⁓ so my plan on that was, you know, everybody entered that front right corner after loading the gun and then just shot towards the direction of movement. It's like, ⁓ I you know, I might be able to gain like a couple tenths if I'm like really aggressive shooting that inside target and then backing out like really aggressively on the open paper. so I executed that well. And then, you know, the next position, you sort of enter on like a half azone target on kind of a weird angle around a wall. So it's like, okay, everybody's kind of settling there and trying to hit that. So I was like, I'm just gonna fucking pop around the wall and pop that super quick. And just like, you know, if there's a mic, there's a mic. If there's an ⁓ shoot, there's an ⁓ shoot. I'm just gonna risk it for the biscuit on that guy. So I did that all right. Got got some good hits on that one, thankfully. and then a lot of people after hitting that would run up to the front corner and kind of bang the steel for the activator on the entrance. There was like a a hardcover partial to the right of the steel, and then they would wait on the bobber to appear. and then finish on a wide transition to another partial tucked up really close on the wall. ⁓ so I kind of saw that, you know, on that position in particular, like the steel and that partial were both available very early. ⁓ so I was like, well, you know, maybe I can get away with shooting that hardcover partial on the way up and then hit the steel wide transition to the partial on the wall and then back to the bobber. And it did time out all right. For me. I did not miss the bobber activation, but I did miss everything else. I just did not I just did not have the requisite skill to execute on a plan that was risky and required some very aggressive shooting to pull off. ⁓ would I do it differently? Absolutely fucking not. It was the most fun way to zero that fucking stage, and I fucking absolutely stand by that.
Stephen: Yeah. You didn't zero it, so
Nick: I thirty per s I did zero another stage, but I thirty percent of that one. So but you d I mean that's
Stephen: That one's because that's you were helping me take care of myself, so y you missed some important takeaways about that stage and had to go first. And I don't want to talk about it. I've heard the story three hundred times.
Nick: Yeah. ⁓ I missed I was the first shooter on a strong hand only stage, missed the stage briefing, shot it freestyle. ⁓ no rules, man. No rules. ⁓ hundred and twenty points and penalties on a sixty point stage. Not good, man. Not good.
Stephen: Sorry. Yeah. If if Samat can shoot through walls, I can use both hands, dammit.
Nick: Yeah. I thought we were rewarding aggression. This was hit factor scoring.
Stephen: right. So nothing else matters. ⁓ so yeah, you so you're going in for aggression, ⁓ and just trying to carry speed forward then was the thing. And you said you I know you did the aggressive plans. Did you execute on that specific thing though? Like did you did you bring in the aggression that you're looking for? Like does the time reflect that?
Nick: ⁓ I mean there are a lot of ⁓ timed errors ⁓ on that stage. ⁓ but I think, you know, looking at the split data, yes, that had I had the skill to pull that off, it it would have put my time my time would have been sh smaller, right? I was shooting sooner, ⁓ and I would have been able to shoot ⁓ more continuously across, you know, the whole number of required shots. ⁓ of course, you know, these sort of like risk management decisions don't e exist in a vacuum. And there's probably a reason why a lot of the better shooters did not take that plan. Right? Instead they were just like Yeah, every last one of ⁓ It was a kind of a dumb plan, right? But it was theoretically the most aggressive way to shoot it. And ⁓ like I said, it was fun, no regrets.
Stephen: And when you say a lot of them, you mean every last one of them.
Nick: ⁓ if I could reshoot the stage, I would love to see if I could nail it. ⁓ I would bet I would bet I could get it on the third try. Not super useful in a match.
Stephen: Give it a couple of attempts, probably, but yeah. Here we are, guys. I matched that lets me try three times every stage. ⁓ crazy, crazy. ⁓ cool.
Nick: There was a let's let's see that that ⁓ yeah. Yeah. My least favorite person to talk about. Go ahead.
Stephen: For me fr no, we're talking about me now. We're talking about me now. Ghost. Did did you have a salient point that you wanted to make or?
Nick: I was just gonna say like ⁓ the one where you had to go to all four corners, it was kind of shaped like ⁓ sort of a fucking bow tie. Like that one I shot way more stuff on the move ⁓ than most people and I ended up with the raw time on that stage for slide ride. ⁓ scored poorly.
Stephen: Unfortunately it is a combination of speed and power and accuracy.
Nick: Unfortunately I had neither power nor accuracy. ⁓ but the pace was there. So, you know, again, meeting my training goals, ⁓ unfortunately.
Stephen: What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do? All right. So, same question to me, since you're a bad co-host and won't ask, banned from the show. ⁓ I think it's the kind of the same thing we talked about with Saul like last time. I was like, I don't have a particular problem with my speed ⁓ at the moment. I have I've already had enough issues. I think like last season and the beginning of the season, keeping up with my own speed, ⁓ like getting the Getting the execution to match how fast I was moving through the stage and actually seeing what I was trying to do while doing it. ⁓ and that's come together really well for me lately. So I just wanted to go in and like the only things I had resolved to do were like, yeah, I'm gonna move fast, but I wanted to collect as many points as I could. I actually wanted to like shoot accurately and I wanted to hit steel first try and not lose a shit ton of time on steel. ⁓ which are really, really common goals. Like that shooting points, wow, it's like It's kind of the other side of going fast, yada yada. ⁓ the steel thing on steel that required any amount of patience, I was golden. Like there are several stages where I went one for one. ⁓ or like a makeup on the the forty seven yard ⁓ second steel or whatever, the first steal. I can't remember. ⁓
Nick: Which is which is awesome for you by the way. Like you absolutely did crush steel at area five and that has been a sticking point for you. Well
Stephen: Except for except for stages that are fast. Because then I'm like, ⁓ it's close, easy steel. I can disrespect the steel today. We already know we know who gets my respect on bad steel days. But yeah, absolutely. You have paper, women, and steel. And if I'm I'm missing steel, it's a good day to be women and paper, I guess. But getting canceled on the Hit Factor Podcast.
Nick: Women.
Stephen: ⁓ the two of the stages that had like positions that you either had to charge into were or like just aggressive movement and close steal, like minimum distance ⁓ mini ipsis, just an egregious amount of take up or makeup shots on those ⁓ in like the final position every time, or the starting position on one of them on thirteen, I think. ⁓ just bouncing between them and not actually aiming at anything, because I'm like it's close, I could never miss, and then I miss five times in a row. ⁓ and I lost like I probably lost like six seconds in the match just between those two stages alone, which is absurd. I haven't actually like gone in and looked at it because it'll make me sad. But that part is disappointing. But it I no, I'm not I'm not going to it. That's why I haven't. But I think overall, like my goal of just like trying to maintain like my current level of aggression that I bring to it movement wise and transition wise, and just keeping the gun on the paper long enough to get
Nick: That's that's torture. Don't do that.
Stephen: A decent percentage of the points out of it, like paid off. I don't know if I've shot a major match with less than two deltas. Probably ever. ⁓ and then the one mic on a stupid one.
Nick: Yeah, you you didn't have a ton of you didn't have a ton of makeups on paper really at all. ⁓ I think most of your paper makeups were on targets that were moving. Is that does that sound correct?
Stephen: And and s I mean f a lot of those I wouldn't even call makeups because I put three on the first swinger on day one and it wasn't a makeup, it was just hedging my bets. ⁓ on the second activator, ⁓ on day two, I saw light through the hardcover 'cause I put three on it ⁓ while tracking it and I saw light in the hardcover pretty deep in and just wanted another one on there, so I hit it as soon as it presented ⁓ around the wall again and then transitioned to the next target to finish the stage. So yeah.
Nick: So another another example of why putting like partialing a moving target makes it easier is 'cause now you can see daylight on the hardcover.
Stephen: And I it would have been like a like it was on the AC line. So it would have like that would have been a great hit on a regular swinger. Would have been money, but here we are. ⁓ so yeah, I've I felt pretty good about what I came in to do, despite having fairly low expectations for it. Like I didn't think I was gonna blow anything away or anything, and arguably didn't, but I I did what I wanted to do for the most part, but it's just reeling my brain back on stages that require speed, but w also will require like diligence and patience to do the really, really punishing parts. Like speed shoots I've historically like been miserable at 'cause it's the same thing. That time pressure like really gets in my head. And I feel the same thing on those kind of steel stages or like those steel arrays rather. So I don't know.
Nick: So do you think like, you know, you said you had low expectations for your performance of the match. Do you think that, you know, kinda helped a little bit with your ability to just relax and have fun? ⁓ and shoot, you know, I would say pretty near the end of your skill window, right? Like you you laid down some fucking great runs, you know.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. ⁓ I mean my my day one performance wasn't abysmal. It was probably on the lower end of my major match performances and then day two was like consistently in the top like kind of threshold of what I have in the tank. ⁓
Nick: Yeah, day two was crazy, dude. That was so cool to watch. Like you crushed.
Stephen: Right, yeah, it it came together. Thank you. That's so n you've been nothing but nice to me today. And I just give you constant shit. ⁓ reminder that Nick is the villain of this version of the podcast.
Nick: I'm a victim. Keep trying to engineer this fucking this story and it's just nobody's gonna buy it, dude. Nobody's gonna buy it.
Stephen: Whatever. They already bought it. There w there was a vote and everything. but no, yeah. So it it did feel good. The I think the the lack of expectation definitely does help. Like it's just very hard to it's not a space that I can reliably yeah, I can't I can't tell myself that it doesn't matter too much. Like the match has to like literally not matter to me for one reason or another. ⁓ I can't really bring that mindset in. ⁓ I have a hard time fooling myself about things or like hyping myself up. ⁓
Nick: Replicate that.
Stephen: It it just feels like lying to myself and if I low if I know I'm lying to myself, then it reduces my confidence in the thing I'm trying to tell myself. mental game, non existent. You gotta I can't convince myself of shit. But and do you know a guy?
Nick: You should hire you should hire a coach for that. Yeah, ⁓ send me four hundred dollars and I'll be that guy. ⁓ it's me, dude. I invented practical shooting training coaching.
Stephen: Okay. You're the guy. Okay, cool. That didn't go like a ⁓ man. Great, great. But ⁓ there's a fucked up dichotomy ⁓ that happens when like you can have low expectations and then execute well, and now you go into the next match where you're like, I don't need anything out of this match. And so you automatically are like, I don't expect anything, so I'm gonna fucking crush this match. And now you're like back in the hamster wheel and it just it doesn't it doesn't feel good.
Nick: Like well, I crushed last match, so I should be able to crush this match.
Stephen: Right. It just like you can't you really have to go in like kind of head empty experientially. Like like here's what I know I can do and it has to be free of the things you've previously done, good or bad. Like you can't I can't carry one match into another. ⁓ like maybe there's some aspect of like headspace or whatever mental bullshit you can you can bring into that. I'm not the guy for it, but it just it's a very weird thing to think about, like and it just it's like the it's cyclical. Like I just convince myself of one thing and then automatically the other. So I don't know how this is gonna work out carrying forward because I performed very well. ⁓ I was talking to Cody a couple of days ago. He asked about like where that felt like 'cause he's trying to gauge ⁓ where his competition is for the upcoming law enforcement match down at the staccato ranch. So we talked about it briefly and I was like, no, that's like kind of my top end. Like there are some things I could have cleaned up, but it wouldn't have changed a game for me. I might have like gained a couple of points ⁓ or placements, but Like ultimately, like I'm not taking that stuff away 'cause they can take their stuff away and they would have beat me by even further yada. It's you know, I'm gonna say yada yada three hundred times now. But
Nick: Nobody says it anymore. Nobody says yada yada anymore. Nobody yadas anymore.
Stephen: I ⁓ you're Nobody wants to yada anymore. Because of because of why? Whoa. ⁓
Nick: ⁓ it's 'cause of woke. Woke did this. ⁓ so you know, coming off that like really good performance, like what are your like what are you gonna do in training? ⁓ do you think like this is something like ⁓ I'm just gonna shoot like I did at area five in training? Is that like an actionable goal for you or like what what do you want to work on in training?
Stephen: ⁓ so we've we've messed around with the part-time thing. Like the the zeitgeist right now is going fast and making it work. ⁓ and that's fun. It is a ton of fun. ⁓ did it with you last week. I did it with ⁓ one of our like rising D class friends yesterday. ⁓ and it's kind of wild seeing people at
Nick: You know, he has a name. He has a name. We both know him.
Stephen: He doesn't listen to podcasts. He listens to the radio, dude. I don't want to hear it. Hi, Josh. But ⁓ so I think there is speed like still in the tank for me, and there is execution at that speed, but it is kind of a weird time to be trying to like dig that stuff up for me when I'm just tapping into this other thing of being like, here's the here's the the aggression and the speed that I can pull off reliably. Like And very consistently across matches. And the hits are finally like starting to arrive. Like I'm actually being able to collect the points at the speed that I want to go and can go comfortably. ⁓ so I just kind of don't want to change anything. And that's so stupid. It's so sad. But it's just like I don't want to coast. But but like why would I why would I try to do something? I wanna it doesn't make any sense to try and get more ground out of that if like I could just recreate that.
Nick: No, I I get that.
Stephen: and do very well for myself at any major match. Like ⁓ 90 odd percent of Heatherington, even if he was shooting from belt, like is great for me at my level right now. So I'm not gonna I'm not gonna try to add speed to the mix. I don't think I need to be more accurate per se. ⁓ I just I wanna I know the mistakes I made and I would like to stop making those mistakes and just increase the consistency that I can pull. Because that alone would have given me like a decent amount of time and whatever for the scoreboard. So
Nick: I mean, I think if you could find like a repeatable strategy for steel, ⁓ you know, maybe that would be kind of a a good fact finding mission for you. But I don't I don't really know what that looks like either. ⁓ and I certainly don't know what that would look like to you. Right? I mean it's always been kind of a a sticking point. But ⁓ you know, obviously whatever changes you have made in how you plan to shoot steel, ⁓ or You know, I think maybe that same sort of planning extends to how you've been shooting paper as well. We've seen way less drag off deltas. ⁓ so, you know, whatever that approach is, like really trying to zero in on what that is, ⁓ you know, maybe that would be a good spot to to invest some time. ⁓ I mean, you can't completely avoid steel makeups, but finding a way To where you're not transitioning off of steel that you missed. ⁓ because that's a half second, no matter how you slice it, at least. ⁓
Stephen: Yeah. And all of mine were like uncalled, like, yep, got it, and then transition to the next one, even if it was a foot away, and then just did the the dumbass dance. And I think if I can extend the thing I've done with paper recently to steel, that's not a hard thing to do. It's it's just a an active level of thought that I have to to bring into the thing that is
Nick: Yeah, and you're famously bad at that. Thoughts get out.
Stephen: I got blown up in the war, dude. Leave me alone.
Nick: ⁓
Stephen: So i if I could, yeah, I would I would like to it's just hard to I don't know juxtapose that against like the aggression that I want to bring and that I like on those fast stages my paper was good. So it it's kind of silly that the stealer rate goes to shit when it's the exact same size scoring zone for most of those given the distance. So I don't know. all right, so going forward, we shot the match, it went how it went. ⁓ you can talk about your placement and your satisfaction with it if you want to, but what are you planning on taking out of the match? ⁓ and ⁓ we we just did this, didn't we? Fuck me.
Nick: Yeah, yeah, I mean, ⁓ thank you for you know, reading word for word my same entry on the show notes. But
Stephen: You wrote you wrote good show notes, dude.
Nick: ⁓ we are just the Yeah, we're just the worst podcast hosts ⁓ hit factors probably ever seen. But we have hearts.
Stephen: I know that you, the listener, didn't ask for this, but two guys in sp in particular did ask for this, and it's for them. I'm sorry.
Nick: It is for them. It's for those two guys in particular, and maybe my mom too. ⁓ I fucking hope not. ⁓ yeah, probably. Yeah, probably. ⁓ but ⁓ no, I think you know, fourteen stages is a decently long match. ⁓ and as far as like overall time to shoot the match goes, I was the fastest person in the seventy-fifth percentile of the match.
Stephen: She's gonna listen?
Nick: Which is
Stephen: God, that's a lot of ⁓ qualifications you put on that.
Nick: Yeah, ⁓ so seventy-five percent at a major is really low for me. ⁓ I think that's exceptionally low. ⁓ I think, you know, obviously zeroing one stage didn't help. ⁓ I did eventually give in to the demons and I did what if that stage, you know, didn't happen. Right. I just kept the same hits and just removed the twelve penalties for shooting freestyle and guess what? didn't really change my placement all that much. ⁓ I still did not crest ⁓ seventy-nine percent. So not much of a difference, right? Still not, you know, shooting my classification. Not that that's particularly ⁓ a a goal, right?
Stephen: Like put you like low eighties? Okay. I also didn't shoot my classification.
Nick: Well, that's your fault for making GM. Could have stayed a rock hard ⁓
Stephen: soft GM or hard Which way, Western man?
Nick: Part ⁓ at seventy five percent, you know? ⁓ but you know, this is why pickleball doesn't have ELO or classifications, it's 'cause it's too stressful, you know.
Stephen: If you give Jay Slater a pickleball set, it will have Elo in a matter of days.
Nick: You're right, you're right. But no, I mean I'm not I'm not happy with with my results from the match. ⁓ so you know, as far as my overall time goes, you know, I shot about the same time that you did. overall time, you know. ⁓ that's not like the best metric for looking at this, but as far as like general pace across, you know, 14 stages, I think it's a good metric to look at. So it's like, okay, I can you know, move the gun at that speed. Like I, you know, I just need to find the center of the target again. I just need to, you know, try and keep myself accountable in practice to continue to move at the pace that I shot Area Five at and just find the hits, right? ⁓ if you can put two on target and it's an alpha delta, in theory you should be able to put two alpha on it in the same amount of time. So in theory, you know, in theory, in a vacuum, you should be able to do it. I mean, I I just don't think you're saving that much time by not stopping the gun, right? ⁓ which is kind of exactly the the failure that I'm seeing is like I'll either get really tense and just, you know, see nothing and you know overgrip the gun with the firing hand and undergrip it with the support hand, or you know, I'll just try and time the A zone and just buzz past what I'm trying to hit. And you know, sometimes that manifests as like an early Charlie and a late Delta. Sometimes it's ⁓ you know, ⁓ like an alpha and then, you know, a tr a late Charlie. Either way, it's points down. And ⁓ you know, I think the part time method is really good for holding myself accountable to the speed I wanna shoot at. So maybe I'll experiment with like a little bit more like longer target orders. ⁓ Maybe with a little bit less complexity and just a little bit shorter part time standard. You know, instead of twenty percent, maybe take, you know, five or ten percent off. Yeah. ⁓ play play with that number a little bit.
Stephen: Fifteen. Yeah. No, I I think that would be wise. I think it would be wise because it gets you to it's not a huge reduction in speed, like going from like the cold all all al or cold all alphas run to ninety percent of that ⁓ time with equitable hits or competitive hits at that speed. And just being able to do that reliably would be a market improvement. So
Nick: Yeah. Yeah. ⁓
Stephen: That's my prescription. Nobody asked, but that's what I would advise.
Nick: That ⁓ it's probably the only advice about shooting you've ever given me, so thank you. The student becomes the master.
Stephen: ⁓ I've said don't. I've said don't fucking shoot a lot. Have you considered quitting? Hey, maybe skip this one, buddy. Think about your mental health. You have a wife who loves you. I'm gonna introduce your wife to practice score competitor. They're like, ⁓ you can just search his name and you can see what he's doing today. Offer him little words of encouragement before he shoots this big stage.
Nick: Yeah. Every day, buddy. Every day. Well, that makes one of us, right? Getting a message from my wife in mid mid match at area five. I wish you had mistresses.
Stephen: Mm-hmm.
Nick: ⁓ pretty low bar to be better at that, you know.
Stephen: ⁓ my God. ⁓ Do you have any other thoughts about area five?
Nick: ⁓ shout out squad three ⁓ eight and ⁓ to the match director. I just want you to know I would go back.
Stephen: Absolutely. ⁓ Manny recognizing us from across the across the range because of our stupid slurpy hats. And he shouted out something about ⁓ I guess my alleged drinking habits, ⁓ to get my attention. And it worked, apparently. So yeah. And there's yeah, there's no audible proof of ⁓ that. I wouldn't call it a habit. But yeah, no, the the squad was great, ⁓ the match was great, had a ton of fun. It was hot, but ⁓
Nick: Unconfirmed unconfirmed drinking habits.
Stephen: The match ran like so smooth as far as getting us in and out. We started kind of early, but like we were off the range well in advance from what I expected every time. ⁓ and got to got to hang out.
Nick: Yeah. I and I can't believe like that was that club's first time hosting an area match. ⁓ it went, you know, like super smooth. That's a lot of people to have on the range at one time. And for how quickly the stages moved, I think it was well balanced. ⁓ I mean I think there were some growing pains that you're gonna see with running a match that size for the first time. And I think that the the staff There is probably interested in doing a better job next year and I hope they give them the chance to do so. So
Stephen: Mm, no, it was it was cool. Fun match. Absolutely. Would go back. ⁓ cool. I don't think I have any further points to make about it. So, ⁓ if you're good calling it there.
Nick: Stop. Unload, show clear.
