Gear Doesn’t Make You a Marksman

For the past few years, I’ve been competing in long-range shooting tournaments, primarily NRL Hunter, and I was fortunate enough this year to win the NRL Hunter Grand Slam in Factory Division. I spent nearly a decade prior to this championship obsessing over chassis vs. stocks, 6.5mm vs 6mm, shooting off a tripod vs. an MDT Ckyepod, velcroing timers on my gun, whether to go first or last in my squad…the list goes on.

However, even though I’d dialed in every piece of gear, I couldn’t help but notice that the dudes winning matches seemed to always win matches. Whether they were running factory, open light, open heavy, or using a Red Ryder BB Gun, they’d likely beat me and everyone else.

I seemed to lose a ton of ground to these top shooters on the second day of every competition. Just ask folks like Bennie Cooley, who relied several times on me dropping a few terrible stages the second day of a match. My equipment was the same, my ballistics and environment were the same, but I seemed to drop the ball time and time again.

We’ve all seen this play out during hunts as well. A few days into the trip the wheels fall off. All the preparation to get into the right spot is squandered by mental errors and lackluster execution when it really matters. It sucks. We get rattled, everything seems to speed up to a point of losing control, and critical thinking goes out the window (aka buck fever).

This happened to me so often that I had to take a step back this year and figure out what the hell was going on. I thought I was doing as much as I could to prepare for matches, but clearly, the drills, timing, and mini-competitions weren’t stacking the odds in my favor. So, I took a step back, paid attention to some of the winners, and started asking questions about what they do to prepare for a match.

Lucky for me, my current employment puts me in contact with some pretty badass hunters and shooters, one of whom is Daniel Horner. If you don’t know who Daniel is, he’s won pretty much every title a person in the 3-gun world can win, and he’s done it year after year—using a lot of the same gear everyone else is. He doesn’t have a product advantage: he has a mental advantage.

After explaining my problems to Daniel, he let me in on a new program he was developing called Altimas–a mental preparation course for a lot of things in life, but geared toward shooting sports and hunting scenarios.

One aspect, which Daniel calls the “Balloon Theory,” goes like this.

Picture your life as a series of rooms, each filled with balloons representing different skills. The higher a balloon floats, the more refined that skill is. But here’s the catch: You only have so much time and energy to keep those balloons in the air. When you focus on raising one, others will inevitably sink.

Leveraging the balloon theory to prepare for the NRL Hunter Grand Slam, I paid attention to real gaps in my shooting abilities—for me, it was wind. I set up practice stages on days when the wind was above 10 mph instead of waiting for the nicer, calm days like I used to. I relied less on a wind meter to give me exact data and only confirmed it after shooting a stage. After a few weeks, I began to rely on seeing wind in my scope more than what it felt like on my face. First-round impacts came easier, and a major void had at least been partially filled.

Visualization also became incredibly important for me prior to the actual stages during a match. I didn’t just think about making the shot—I felt the trigger break, saw the impact in my mind’s eye, and prepared myself for any curveballs that might come my way. It completely changed the game for me, and my second day of competition was even stronger than the first. More importantly, when something did go wrong, I didn’t let it spiral the entire day.

We’ve all done this to some level out hunting—we picture a bedded mule deer in just the right spot, a perfect rest, and ultimately success. But I had never refined it to a more detailed level. Now, my visualization process breaks down every small but important action: deploying the bipod, using the pack as a rear rest, dialing the scope, adjusting parallax, rolling the bolt, making sure the bubble is level, pulling the first stage out of the trigger, pausing at the bottom of my breath, and feeling the trigger brake.

Whether you decide to take a course like Altimas or not, and I highly recommend that you do, spend some time thinking through the mental preparation for your next hunt or match. In all likelihood, the mental preparation for what you are about to face in the mountains or at the range is going to drastically change the outcome relative to the next best shooting bag.