Range Report - Week 2

Well Saturday was a LONG day at the range. The fact it was spent at the range made it a good day, but it was still long and HOT.

The forecast was for 34C. I'm not sure how hot it got, but it was HOT. For those who don't know the range is in a disused quarry without shade.

Up until this week we've only been running one training session a day, this week we started two sessions.

The first session was "be there a 9 for a 9.30am start". We had eight people turn up, which was a couple less than we were expecting but great number with two trainers.

I had "week twoers" and the Chief Instructor had "newbies". I really enjoyed training at this time as there was no one else on the range so we could actually TALK to the trainees.

Of my four, three were women and in the Chief Instructor's group there was another female too! It's great to see more women becoming interested in shooting.

I mainly focused on reloading during a shooting string. With static reloads, walking reloads and reloads while moving left-to-right and right-to-left. We also went back over grip and stance from week one.

Everyone did really well. The guy in my group has been doing ISSF shooting for 10 years so his gun handling is very good, but the whole holster / moving topics are new for him. He was really good at encouraging the women and praising their shooting.

We finished the first session at 11.30am and then stood around and chatted to the trainees for a bit until I told them to go as we needed to have some lunch and get things organised for the 2pm start people.

Luckily a couple of our "older trainees" (week 4 plus people) turned up around 1pm so they helped set up the stages we needed.

Again in the afternoon we had considerably less people than we expected - which I'm putting down to the heat. The Chief Instructor ended up with a group of 5 trainees (all "oldies") and I had 4. My group was an interesting mix, with a 12 y.o. girl who has been training with the Chief Instructor for four weeks, a 16y.o. "week twoer", a 15y.o. "newbie" and another female newbie (of about my age). We mainly did "newbie" things (grip, stance, target acquisition, drawing, holstering, static mag changes and walking while shooting).

At the end of the session we went and watched some of the regular squad guys shoot - just to show the newbies what our style of shooting was all about - and then we joined the Chief Instructor's group shooting a stage.

We actually finished around 4.30pm (we normally finish just after 5pm) but it was REALLY nice to get off the range and out of the sun by that time!

I think I went through 3 litres of water, and a couple of cans of soft drink during the day!

Next Saturday we have the two sessions again, and I'm hoping that it will be a bit cooler!