TL;DR - my pistol shooting skills went to hell and I went back to basics to unfuck myself. It worked.
As a recap, I'd taken a decade off from competition, but returned when I moved to Kansas, because there's fucking nothing else to do here. My match performance wasn't embarrassing, but my gun broke, sidelining me for the rest of the season.
2020 was a pandemic bust, but I began practicing in the Spring of 21 with the intent of returning to competition. However, I sucked worse than I've ever sucked at shooting. When I'd draw my gun, it wasn't a given that I'd hit the target and when I did, the hole was at the bottom left, almost out of the scoring area. Worse yet, I discovered I couldn't shoot any pistol well. No, the worst part was I couldn't figure out why I was sucking so badly. So, I did what anyone with grit and determination would; I quit and went rifle shooting.
This past winter, I decided to pull my shit together and unfuck my pistol shooting. You're reading this now because of the approach I took, which was to treat myself as a beginning competitive shooter and go back to basics. What I found was that my grip on the gun was way too weak, making it an unstable shooting platform. I attribute this to spending much of the past two years learning to shoot a rifle accurately. When shooting a handgun at a high rate of speed, you employ a veritable death grip whereas with a rifle that's resting on something stable (bipod, sandbags, etc.) your grip must be incredibly light as to not disturb the gun when you pull the trigger.
The other issue I discovered was that I was shooting faster than I could see. In other words, I was pulling the trigger before my sight was where it needed to be in an attempt to shoot quickly. This isn't uncommon with competitive shooters. It's been particularly difficult for me to break myself of the habit, but muscle memory works against me here. Back when I was shooting hardcore, I knew exactly how long it took between shots for the gun to settle back down for another shot. And I could see much faster because I practiced so much.* So, it's tough to not simply pull the trigger at the same cadence as I would have a decade ago.
There were a few other things I identified, but I'm confident no one wants to read about that level of minutia.
Going back to basics worked for me. My draw time (from the buzzer to first shot) is back down to 1.3 seconds and my mag changes are consistently 1.5 seconds, both within .3 seconds of my best performance. Even better, my practices have improved dramatically. I sucked so badly last year that I'd stand and hammer the basics (draw, target to target transitions), looking like Stevie Wonder on the range. My last practice moved past the basics a bit and today, I was finally confident enough to shoot on the move (and hit the target).
I've included a video of my performance in the last major match I shot (2008), where I placed in solid Master territory. It's here for those who still have no clue what sort of competition I shoot as well as to prove that I was pretty solid at one point. Keep an eye out for the mag change at 25 seconds.
* The ability to "see fast" is something that most world class athletes share. A Formula 1 driver, moving at 200 mph has to be able to process all of that information coming at him to not crash, never mind win. I read an interview with one of the great MLB hitters (whose name I've since forgotten) and he said that the entire time a fast ball was coming toward the plate, he could see every stitch and how it was moving. In both cases, most of us see nothing but a blur.
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