Lehigh Valley Clinic and Travels

We’re just getting back from Pennsylvania where we were teaching at Lehigh Valley Sporting Clays. We had a full class for two days with all new students. They were so happy to have us come up and be closer to them, so we had a lot of “a-has.”

The biggest takeaway was that the targets were going a lot slower than before. The hardest thing to get the group to do is to get their head off the stock and look back toward the trap to pick up the target. I don’t know why that is so hard for students to do, but it seems like we spend a lot of time getting those heads off the gun so they can pick up the target sooner.

When they would do that, their response was, “the target looked like it was so slow, and I had a lot of time to hit it.”  Well, duh! It would be nice if all your targets were slow.

The other surprise was that they didn’t have to look down the gun. Knowing the plan of what side of the barrel the target should be on and matching the speed at the end was a total revelation.

Who knew you could hit a target just by looking at it?

We came in with a terrible thunderstorm and had to stay on the plane for two hours waiting for the airport to reopen. Our plane got in late last night and so the crew needed more time to rest. So we were an hour and 45 minutes late leaving, and it started raining. We missed our flight out of Washington so we were sitting in the United Club for the next five hours before we could leave and come home.

Our plan to go to the bay is off until Monday. But sometimes things are meant to go differently for a reason, so no worries. There’s no reason to complain. It is what it is.

Plan your shot then execute your plan, and all that goes to the long-term memory to be used when you need to. If you just shoot the target with no plan, that goes into short-term memory and it’s called “short-term” for a reason; you forget it 30 seconds after you have shot it.