Shooting Steel Nationals last month was a lot of fun and has given me things to think about and work on. Col. Cooper coined a phrase many years ago, preoccupation with incremental increments, or PII. It refers to people who obsess about tiny differences in accuracy or time, as it relates to shooting. The Col. felt that hitting the vital zone, as an example, was good enough and that spending extra time or effort to get a center hit within the vital zone, was not useful. This assumes an adversary or an animal I suppose, as a stationary animal might give you time to perfect your shot, or it might not. Another example is your speed. If you have a good fast draw (whatever that means), then worrying about shaving another .1 or less off of it is a waste of time.
There is no doubt that many of us are afflicted with PII, and in many cases, happily so. If your goal is to continue to get better at shooting, for the sake of getting better, then I don’t see anything wrong with that. If your goal is to reach a level of competency in defending yourself, and then move on to other things, PII is not a good thing to have. I fall into both camps, though I am much more in the first than the second. Having spent my career teaching professionals who were in the second camp though, I also tend to skew things in that direction for those so interested.
In one of the divisions that I shot at nationals, the winner of that division beat me by less than 5 seconds. That is a lot of time when it comes to shooting, but that isn’t the only way to look at it. There are 7 stages, with 5 strings of fire and 1 stage with 4 strings of fire. On each stage, the worst time is thrown out. That means that there are 31 separate strings of fire, shot over 8 stages. If you average it out, the winner only beat me by about .15 of a second, per string.
Now in reality, some strings may have been less than that and some may have been more, but it is interesting to think about. All races are won by relatively small amounts under most circumstances. An absolute blow out is rare, and “winning by a nose” is more common. Nonetheless, the actual shooting difference between the winner and even someone as far back as 25th or more, is actually a very small increment. It only appears big when you multiply it over many strings.
This is in no way intended to minimize the winners of competitions in general, nor of this competition in particular. Better shooting is better, and it doesn’t matter exactly what the difference is. Another interesting way to look at it is the times of the other 4 people who beat me in that division. They were all less than .15 per string. That is tiny divided over 4 people!
Multiplying it over many strings also allows you to factor in some level of consistency – on demand performance – if you will, preventing a lower level shooter from just getting lucky and winning it all in one string. While winning overall is still the most desireable, it would be interesting to see an award given for the fastest of the discarded strings, or perhaps the most consistent of all the strings with none discarded. My understanding is that current practiscore settings don’t allow us to see those things, but I imagine it could be made to do so.
For my own training and benefit, another way to look at it is this: The winners of Steel Nationals are dedicated competition shooters, often specializing in steel shooting almost exclusively, or at least for a while leading up to the nationals. I have only shot a few steel matches in my life, and did not train any more than usual before nationals. I did shoot a couple of local matches that had 6 stages each, and I did work on a couple stages at home for a couple of training sessions. If I wanted to do better than I did, let alone win, how much more would I have to specialize and train? Maybe not that much, but maybe quite a bit for those last .15 seconds. Is that worth it for me and my goals? I doubt it.
I believe that for a shooter to consider themselves to be a high level shooter, they have to be able to do anything asked of them at a pretty high level. Not just USPSA, but Bullseye as well. Not just Steel, but Action Pistol too. Hunting, self defense, IDPA, GSSF, all offer different challenges. Don’t forget rifle and shotgun shooting as well, in all their forms. If you are an amazingly fast shooter, but fail miserably when the accuracy requirements go up, then you have more work to do. And vice versa, of course. My next competition is a big bore rifle shoot. I’m using my 458WM Blaser, which is a hoot to shoot.
At any rate, though I have no real wisdom to share from these observations, the next time you find yourself “losing by a nose”, consider what it really means. In all likelihood, just about anyone at that competition is good enough for almost any use of a gun they might have. Everyone else is just PII. And that is fine as long as you understand how it all fits together for you.
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