The Trouble with J.J.

I am something of a fan of the Star Wars films* and indeed the Star Trek TV series and films; however recently there has been an ugly tendency which has vexed me somewhat. Not limited to these films, but certainly promulgated by them, is the idea that some people inexorably rise to positions of authority or demonstrate excellence merely by their innate characteristics without apparent hard work. Their talent alone, for lack of a better word.

Allow me to demonstrate.

In Star Wars: A New Hope the hero Luke Skywalker learns of the force and serves a brief apprenticeship with Obi Wan Kenobi and learns of the force. In the Empire Strikes back our hero serves his journeymanhood with the Jedi Master Yoda on the planet Degobah. Only in the fullness of time does he master the force and himself to defeat Darth Vader and the Emperor. While his journey is abbreviated by the necessities of the narrative form and the limitations of film media, it is clear that he has to work at his craft.

Let us compare this with Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens: our apparently-orphaned*** heroine Rae, who has had no training in the force, is awakened through psychic contact with the force-sensitive Kylo Ren. Despite her youth, naivete and lack of training she soon demonstrates advanced Jedi skills such as controlling the mind of a storm trooper and moving objects by force of will alone. She is shortly thereafter able to defeat an (albeit wounded) force sensitive individual (Kylo Ren again) in a lightsaber duel. Consider James Tiberius Kirk in the reboot of Star Trek. Ditto.

In short, these films represent the epitome of the new millennial Dream: not the triumph of the will so much as the triumph of the innately brilliant, and while it is possible that there may be a small number of people for whom life is like that; however the chances are that it isn't for you. It certainly isn't for me:

- Fencing: It seems apposite to talk about sword fighting, given the context of this post. I fenced at school for several years and eventually learned not to suck completely at it.

- Running: It has taken me three years to get from miserable to mediocre. On a good day. I am not noticeably lazy about training: I run four to six time each week(except recently, work has got in the way) do a good mix of training and yet it has taken that much hard work even for me to be able to run a marathon at 7 minutes fifty seconds per mile, more then 50% slower than the best runners in the world. And yet it has taken me this much work to get that far.

- Shooting: I'm actually quite good at shooting sometimes, but it has taken a lot of work to get there; 27 years and counting. I spent a lot of time on the 22 range at school but really found my metier on the fullbore range at Kibworth. I wasn't great at it, but got a bit better. I continued shooting after school and eventually cracked mediocre; however it wasn't until I went beyond practice and into training before I achieved a reasonable level of competence.

I had originally completed this post with a somewhat trite homily "At the end of the day, if you're not already at the top of the game or even if you are but want to stay there, do you want to trust to your innate brilliance or are you willing to train? Do you really have any choice?" but feel that this is not really what I want to express.

I have said those words before, but what I really want to express is how depressing a thought that this is. There are indeed some things at which you will forever suck regardless of how much you train, but what effect does this have on people who watch it? It has been said that it takes about five years to build a good shooter. Will the next generation of shooters stick at our sport or any other long enough to get to be any good?

* Please Note - Many Star Wars fans believe that there are only three or potentially four Star Wars films; they are correct in principle but wrong in practice in my humble opinion. There are precisely four point two: Episodes I, II, III, IV, V, VI and VII**.

** I understand that you're thinking at this point that Gaz cannot count; however I assure you that I can. Episodes IV,V and IV are worth full value; episodes III and VII are 50/50; and episodes I and II aren't really worth shit, but are given fractional value on the basis that they provide details which are otherwise essential to the storyline.

*** NB - If your hero or heroine is an orphan it's fantasy and not science fiction. Pop quiz time: What do The Belgariad, Star Wars, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, Star Trek and of course, the original reference work, La Morte d'Arthur have in common? Answers on a postcard please.

In sickness and in health?

I am pretty rarely ill. Aside from a couple of broken bones (right medial malleolus in a rock climbing accident and an RDI fracture of the left distal radius) and appendicitis as an eight year-old, I'm rarely out and out ill. I average one day off work every other year, give or take. As a result, I hate being ill and feel guilty about it when it does happen, particularly if I have to take time of work or training.

I'm currently ill with man 'flu and I hate it. I've been ill enough to have a sore throat, headaches and general cold-like symptoms but not so ill that I feel justified in taking time off work. So I'm left wondering what to do about training.

The question really asking here is; when should you say "to hell with it all, I am going to take time off  training"?

And the answer we're really going to get is "it depends".

In my case, I've laid off the phys and the cardio for most of this week; although I've possibly taken the cardio a teensy bit far in recent months, so laying off this is no bad thing anyway, even if just to give my legs' connective tissues a rest from being beaten into the pavement for 50+ miles each week. But this is all really a sideshow, what I would like to work out is when to take time off the important thing, the real deal; when to take time off shooting.

It's always going to be a judgement call: the training you have planned, the illness, the weather conditions, the distance to the nearest bathroom (really important in some cases). Yes, all are relevant factors but that said, to my mind they are all subservient to one thing; do you feel like going shooting? I think that I've already set out to address questions motivation and how the quality of training is just as important as the volume of training, so this is fundamental. In other words, if you don't want to go train or shoot and you don't think that you'll warm to the idea as you get into it, then don't waste your time. You'll probably just end up going through the motions and not putting quality time in, which is possibly worse than not putting time in at all.

Today, I'm taking the day off with man 'flu. Despite the offer of a day's shooting at 1,000 yards in autumn sunshine out on the East coast I'm lying in bed typing this having had a wonderful lie-in and not one, but two breakfasts in bed. I don't feel guilty in the slightest.

Temet Nosce

In the film The Matrix* Keanu Reeves' character, Neo, visits The Oracle for enlightenment and is pointed to a sign above the door to her kitchen which states "Temet Nosce". She proceeds to explain that it's Latin and means "know thyself", before delivering a homily on the power of knowing what you are capable of.

If you want to achieve things in  pretty much any sphere you need to know what you are capable of. Partially in terms of raw talent, but more so in terms of a realistic assessment of how much time and effort you are willing to put into your sport / work / hobby.

Occasionally, I've heard shooters make wistful comments along the lines of "I wish I could shoot as well as X. How do they do it?" or ""What is X's secret?" or even "I'd do anything to shoot like X." I've never had the temerity to ask how much they train or what they have done to try and emulate their heroes, but I'd be interested to have heard their responses. I suspect, but could not prove, that many people might want to achieve this level of performance but haven't made the connection yet between their wants and the demands of bridging the gap.

That said, I hope that there are many people who have examined themselves in this way and have been honest enough with themselves to admit that they either do not want it enough to put in the required level of effort, or that they want other things more, and can live with enjoying their shooting at they level they compete. There is no shame in taking enjoyment in playing in a sport at which you know you will never excel.

On a personal note, I'm getting back into the swing of things and, while not entirely hitting all of my process goals in my training, I'm making progress. Those eagle-eyed amongst you who have spotted that I've put up a training plan and started to track my training online will know that the cardio is approaching fine, I'm just about shooting enough SCATT and I've got out on to the range a couple of times recently; however I'm not really getting to grips with the phys yet.

I'm making this effort on the training front because despite the fact that I live in NZ, I feel like I can still shoot at a high enough level win medals at Commonwealth Games level wherein I have unfinished business. After some fast talking with my employer, it's looking a lot like the Army Open, BCRC, Imperial and potentially the WRA Open are on the cards for me in 2016. I'm going to the lengths of putting it on my blog because having published my training plan, I'd better try and stick to it or I'm going to look like a bit of an arse. Despite what Master Yoda may have to say on the matter, fear can be a powerful motivator.

In my case, I know my motivation for training and capability for sticking to my plan; however this is something you will also need to discover about yourself. You do need to be realistic though and understand what you are willing to put in, in order to get out what you want to get out. There's no point believing you can achieve great things if you know that you're not going to put the hours in to achieve them.

* For all its being derivative (start with the anime film The Ghost in the Shell and the classic cyberpunk novel Neuromancer) it's still my seventh favourite film, sandwiched in between Start Wars: Return of the Jedi and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

On Failure

It has occured to me - in fact at least one person has actually asked me - that people might wonder why I write on my blog about the downs as well as the ups. After all sports psychology seems to indicate that talking about the bad stuff makes it more likely to happen, or even simply that it's bad marketing; after all I know for a fact that team selectors (or potential team selectors) for Wales and GB read this blog.

To my mind, there are three reasons: Firstly, if you don't recognise your failures then you're never going to address their causes except by blind luck; secondly, I don't like the image that some people try to project of flawless performance without effort, as I think that it's discouraging to less experienced and skilled shots; and finally, if you don't try something that you have a significantly probability of failing at, how are you ever going to know your limits?

I think that to get better you have to recognise your failures and learn from them. In this, I significantly disagree with many books on the psychology of shooting ("With Winning in Mind" by Lanny Bassham, for example, which is otherwise a superb book) which tend to recommend that you don't think about your failures or write them down in your diary. What you think about is what you produce, after all. In my daily work as a manager of large, complex projects post mortems are an utterly vital mechanism for improvement; where mistakes, errors of judgement, communications issues and plain old-fashioned cockups are talked through in a dispassionate, learning-driven way to reduce the likelihood of us doing the same thing again next time. By talking about my mistakes as well as successes I want to make failure "discussible", an accepted topic of conversation with a view to learning from those mistakes.

Just as importantly, I want my writing to help other people get better at shooting. I have been fortunate enough to have a great deal of support from my wife, family, friends, coaches and team managers; my contribution is to share what I have learned and how I have learned it, and a lot of those lessons have been built up from one or a series of SNAFUs, disasters, irritations and errors. Inevitably, you're going to get it wrong sometimes, be it in terms of technique, training or the wind, so you may as well learn what you can and move on. Don't imagine that any successes I've had in shooting have come without a lot of hard work. I know that there are people who appear to achieve great results without the hard work, but that ignores the hard work that they have already put in to give them the ability to perform at that level. By ignoring the effort and errors that have gone into producing success, we're

The great Lazarus Lake*, founder of the Berkley Marathons, which are often considered to be the hardest ultramarathon** in the world*** said of them "We have a lot of really educated people. Most of them are people who are very successful. They like challenges. They're used to succeeding and they are not afraid to try something that they'll probably fail." I recently ran my first ultra pretty much to find out if I could move 50 miles on foot at a stretch on a single day. I was pretty sure I could do it, but didn't know that I would do it. It was quite hard and I nearly dropped at 10 miles, but I made it through. Shooting is a little different to running, but the same kinds of ideas apply; how do you know how good you can be if you don't try and push your limits a little. Shooting under difficult conditions - high winds, rain, heat - are more likely to cause you to 'fail' for want of a better word, but if you approach it in the right frame of mind then it will make you a better shooter.

As for senior people in the world of shooting reading this blog and making judgments about me as a result. Yes, I'm sure that will happen and sometimes those judgments may be negative. On the other had, it really comes down to results and attitude: all of our competition scores are in the public domain, and I think my writing demonstrates my attitude. I still have designs on Palma Teams and the Commonwealth Games, make no mistake.

* No, I don't think that's his real name either.

** An ultramarathon is any footrace longer than the marathon distance of 26.2 miles / 42.2 kilometres. Practically, the shortest distance considered to be ultra is 50k; however single-stage races of 50k, 50m/80k, 100k and 100m are reasonably common. There are a small number of single-stage races over 100 miles, such as the Badwater Ultramarathon, which runs from the lowest point in the contiguous US (Lone Pine, Death Valley) to the highest (Mount Witney).

** The Berkley Marathons require simply that you complete 5 circuits of a 20 mile course in under 12 hours for each circuit around a hilly Tennessee backwoods. That's moving at under 2 miles per hour, which is a pretty average walking pace. Should be easy, right? Wrong. Under 1% of people who line up at the start make the finish line, with no one even completing the race in many years. It's not a race that you just rock up at the start of either, many of the guys and gals who enter the Berkley are the elite of the ultradistance world who can run 100 kilometres at a faster pace than you could keep up for 5k. Watch this video if you want a flavour of the race.

The importance of "talent" in fullbore

There is a question which has been bothering me for a while; how important is raw talent in rifle shooting? To put it another way, are rifle shooters born or are they made?

Certainly in other sports, such as sprinting and distance running, 'talent' is indisputably a major factor. In running distances from 5,000 metres up to the marathon the most critical capabilities are: to be able to develop a high VO2max, that being the degree to which an individual is able to take up and utilise oxygen from the air to produce energy in the muscles; have a high proportion of slow twitch muscle fibres; and to have slender, tapered arms and legs*. These are traits which to a very large degree are driven by genetics, a.k.a. Talent. In the case of vO2max, there is good scientific evidence to support the degree to which it will improve given a stimulus**. If you don't have the right combination of genes you are not going to be challenging Mo Farah in the 10,000 metres any time soon ever. To put this in context, the USA with a population of 250m has in its entire history produced precisely 10 men capable of running 26.2 miles in under 2 hours and 10 minutes. The Kalenjin tribe of Kenya and surrounding countries, who number about 4.9m people all told, produced 32 individuals who did it in the month of October 2011 alone.

Returning to shooting, I'm pretty sure that if I asked random British shooters to name the greatest TR shooters of our era then the likes of DCL, PMP, DCC and GCDB would come up pretty regularly. (If you're not from the UK, the please feel free to substitute NT, MG, SG or KR from the US, AH from the RSA, JC from Aussie, MC or RG from NZ etc... etc...) Many of these shooters showed a great deal of promise from a relatively early age, which tends to suggest that some form of talent may be important.

By way of contrast, in fullbore rifle shooting it is clearly noticeable that the products of certain schools such as Gresham's, Uppingham and some dump in Surrey that shall remain nameless, as well as former members of specific ATC and ACF units, tend to predominate when it comes to major competition wins and GB representation. This is most easily explained by skilled and enthusiastic cadet SSIs, officers and shooting instructors inspiring young cadets to take up shooting, and then training them to do the right thing the right way.



Uppingham Veterans RC Team. All World Champions trained by the great SJP.

I would conjecture that unlike, say, running which can be reduced to a relatively small number of variables, there seem to be many traits which would make you a good rifle shooter each of which would contribute in a relatively minor way, so it is correspondingly less likely that any one person would have a sufficient preponderance of all of those traits to have an overwhelming advantage. To illustrate this point, when people hear that I shoot they tend to ask if I have particularly steady hands or paricularly good eyesight. I don't think I have either of these: the jacket and sling do the work for me, and I am both shortsighted and astigmatic. When considering quality of eyesight, a certain winner of HM Queen's Prize has the idiosyncratic nickname "Blind Pew".

Harvey "Blind" Pew GM

I can certainly think of a number of additional arguments and counter-arguments in this debate, and a definitive answer is not going to be forthcoming; however if I were to have to venture an opinion, then I would probably state my beliefs thus: A degree of talent probably does help in shooting but not so much that a sufficiently determined individual cannot achieve great things through hard work alone.

* Yes, really. It's to do with the ability to move them quickly owing to lower mass per unit length and the efficiency with which they dissipate heat.

** Bouchard C, Sarzynski MA, Rice TK, Kraus WE, Church TS, et al. (2011) Genomic predictors of the maximal O₂ uptake response to standardized exercise training programs. J Appl Physiol 110: 1160–1170; and Skinner JS, Jaskolski A, Jaskolska A, Krasnoff J, Gagnon J, et al. (2001) HERITAGE Family Study. Age, sex, race, initial fitness, and response to training: the HERITAGE Family Study. J Appl Physiol 90: 1770–1776

The art of the checklist

If you have never read The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande, you should take the time to do so. Not only is it a superb and entertaining read it is also gives a brilliant account of how the intelligent and thoughtful use of a simple tool can significant improve process repeatability and outcome quality. Incredibly useful at work, but also with value for anyone who wants to do better at pretty much anything.

While process can be a dirty word in many organisations - a certain portion of the NHS I once worked with regarded any notion of consistent process as an affront to the professionalism of healthcare workers of all types - the fact is that organisations with well designed and implemented processes produce better and more consistent results than those which don't. Checklists are a simple and versatile tool which enable organisations to implement consistent processes. By contrast with the medical organisation I formerly worked with, a number of  professions regards checklists as being completely integral to their work and complementary to their professional skillset; pilots spring inevitably to mind, as do more enlightened portions of the medical profession, submariners and astronauts also feature. The key lesson is that consistent processes and checklists allow you to get the easy things right first time and free up time and mental space to think about the difficult stuff.

Have you ever driven to the range and not been able to shoot because you have forgotten a critical piece of equipment?

Checklist.

Have you ever been in a team match where an experienced shooter on the firing point has been called on to fire a sighter out of turn as a pilot shot only for it to plough into the ground in front of the target because their sights settings weren't verified?

Checklist.

Have you ever... I think you probably get the idea by now.

Where this is relevant to me is that I'm now preparing to attend the NZ Nationals down at Trentham; I've nearly finished loading my ammunition, and I'm continuing to keep up with my SCATT, but I'm going to need to start packing up in a few days for the long trip down to Upper Hutt. As this is a full day's drive from where I live in Waitakere (West Auckland if you insist) I'm quite keen not to forget anything! Here's my checklist:

Rifle Bag

• Rifle
• Foresight
• Rearsight
• Bolt
• Bolt sleeve
• Mirage band
• Black electrical tape
• Breech flag
• Bedding bolt allen key
• Cheekpiece allen key
• Cheekpiece spacers
• Bipod
• Bipod bolt allen key
• Cleaning Rod
• Rod Guide
• Jag

I don't shoot with the SCATT optical sensor. I just forgot to take it off before I took the photo.

Equipment Bag

• Scope
• Scope stand
• Scope stand extension pole
• Underlayer
• Hoodie
• Ear defenders
• Ear plugs
• Spare ear plugs
• Pens & pencils
• Scorecards
• Headband
• Shooting hat
• Shooting glasses
• Beer towels x 3
• Glove
• Dry tissues
• Sight settings notebook
• Small weather writer
• Toolkit (spare allen keys, screwdrivers, small spirit level etc...)
• 20 round ammo boxes x 2
• Snapcap
• Eye spray
• Timer
• Hand extractor

Spot the deliberate mistake.

Other

• Jacket
• Sling (attached to jacket)
• Matt
• Ammunition
• Cleaning Kit (breech stick, 4 x 2, cleaning fluid, q-tips etc..)
• Tripod stool

 

 

 

There's always an "other" bucket in any MECE categorisation

Probably the most interesting part of pulling this together is that I was unable to remember every item without actually looking in my shooting bag by way of reminder, which to my mind is a pretty good demonstration of the need for an aide-memoire.

Goal Setting Part 5 - Alternatives for Artists, The Talented and Jump Starters

Group work was a key part of studying for my MBA at Judge Business School in Cambridge. Teams were selected to provide groups with highly varied backgrounds, and tasks were often tailored so that there was either too little time or too many people in order to provoke a particular set of experiences while completing the work.  In one of the early projects I worked within a team which consisted of three other team members who also had a professional services* background, and a fourth who had much more of a liberal arts background. Our colleague found our highly structured approach inflexible, unreactive and almost impossible to work with not because she wasn't smart (she is) or hardworking (she was) but because she simply thought in a completely different way to the rest of us.

In a similar vein, my very highly-structured approach is simply not going to work for all of you, so what are the alternatives?

Artists
Rather like my friend above, some people just don't think and plan in the highly-structured way that people like me ("Analysts") do. You don't automatically break things down into classical hierarchies, causes and effects; rather your thinking proceeds along entirely different lines. I'd describe the way that your thinking proceeds if I could, but unfortunately I don't, because I can't think the way you do!

In your case, maybe consider the things you're less good at and write yourself a promise on a piece of paper where you'll see it every day. It will act as a visual cue to do some training and direct you to the part of your shooting that needs it most; however recognise that failing to analyse your performance adequately may result in you training on the wrong things. Our perceptions of our weaknesses can be quite wrong.

The Talented
Some people just seem to get shooting and don't apparently need to train to get the results. Do whatever you feel like, but be aware that you might get even better results if you did follow a structured training plan.

Jump Starters
Some of you will be entirely motivated to train and work hard on your shooting without any of this detailed planning malarkey. It's obvious to you what your strengths and weaknesses are, and you know what to do about it. Actually you've probably lost patience with me several times during this sequence of posts on goal-based planning and may not have made it to the end of the other posts.

You probably already train enough but may hide the amount of effort you put in to appear as one of "The Talented". You probably struggle with admitting that you're not good at anything (but know it to be the case in your heart) so remember to think about where it is that you really need to train and focus your efforts there.

Good luck to all rifle shooters in their training. Up in the Northern Hemisphere it's time to clean everything and pack your kit away and take maybe a month off before starting training again in preparation for the 2016 season. Down here you should have already been training over the winter months in preparation for the opening shoots of the season. Good shooting to you all!

* Accounting, IT and Management Consulting roughly speaking.

Goal Setting Part 4 - You've planned the work, now work the plan

Project management is based around five key questions*, the last of which is "How do you know you're making progress?" It can be a surprisingly difficult question to answer at times as it relies on objective measures of progress. In shooting it is reasonably straightforward to measure your performance; although it can take a long time to be sure (see my previous post on SCATT & statistics.) You work hard and with a bit of good luck** you will hit your outcome goals.

The problem here is that you may only have one outcome goal per year, or potentially even an outcome goal that will take several years to reach. How do you know you're making progress towards it?

This is where all that faff with process and performance goals comes into its own.

Keep a training diary
If you intend to be serious about your shooting in any meaningful way, keep a diary of what training you have planned versus what you have actually done. It doesn't necessarily need to be fancy, long or incredibly detailed; a simple list of dates, types, volumes of training and scores is perfectly adequate.
I keep mine in a spreadsheet which sits on the desktop of my laptop. I also keep my calendar of events in the same spreadsheet*** so I open it every day and am constantly reminded of the need to train. You might want to keep your plan and diary in a form that you will be forced to see every day; e.g. print it out and stick it on the fridge, or on the wall next to the bathroom mirror.

Analyse your performance
Approximately every month, go back and review what you actually did against the training you had planned. Look at the groups you're getting in livefire and SCATT, and the scores you're getting on paper. Answer as honestly as you can the question "are they improving rapidly enough to hit my outcome goal on time?****"

If you're not making the planned progress, you're over-training, under-training or doing the wrong kind of training. In running over-training is very common, but I suspect that under-training is going to be more common in shooters, given the general lack of serious attention training gets. I also suspect that doing the wrong kind of training, or mechanistically training without appropriate thought I suspect is also going to be relatively common.

At this point, I should probably note that in my experience improvement has come in fits and starts, with the larger gains driven by a positive change in my technique which I have then driven home with a large volume of repetition. Don't expect a linear progression towards your goal!

In pretty much all of the above circumstances, you're going to need to...

Modify the plan
In the short term, most modifications of planning will be tweaking what you're already doing: increasing the volume of some aspects of your training, reducing others. Some of the will need to be intuition-based but you should be able to run some experiments to see what works for you and enables you to maintain a high standard of performance, and/or drives improvement.

In the longer term, you're going to need to shock the system and introduce new elements to avoid getting stale. Doing the same exercises again and again is likely to get boring and will lead to stagnation in performance, so mix it up a little and try something different.

Good luck and enjoy your training!

* The five questions are: 1) Where are we going? 2) How will we get there? 3) Do we have enough money, time and other resources to get there? 4) What's going to get in our way? And 5) How do we know we're making progress?
** You don't have full control over your outcome goals, remember? But Arnold Palmer allegedly said that the more he practiced the luckier he got. You might want to think about that.
*** Yes, really. I have a very complex and busy life. Without my spreadsheet I would be lost.
**** All goals should be time-based, remember?

Goal Setting Part 3 - Habits you need to make

General Dwight D. Eisenhower the allied World War II commander noted that plans were useless, but the process of planning was indispensable. So it is with pretty much any training plan; the value for the rifle shooter is as much in thinking about what one wants to achieve and what you're prepared to do in order to achieve it, as much as it is in creating a sequential list of activities to follow.
To date, I have set out some outcome goals that I wanted to achieve in 2013 together with the performance goals which identify the level of performance I'll need to achieve; however to this point I have not really set out what it is that I'm going to do.

I want to...

1. Win the CWG Trials
2. Come in the top 25 in all 3 Bisley majors

To do this, I will need to...

a. Average 49.5 or better at short range
b. Average 47.5 or better at long range
c. Make sure my kit is in top condition
d. Improve my cardiovascular fitness
e. Improve my injury-resistance

I need to take my performance goals and work out what level of training and other actions I'm going to need to complete in order to fulfil them. This is very much where the art of planning comes in, rather than the pure science. How much practice does one need to do in order to average 49.5 at short range? Damn good question; and the answer is going to be very different depending on your previous level performance, flaws in technique and level of talent, for lack of a better word. Just as working up to running 100+ miles per week isn't going to turn you into an Olympic marathoner overnight, Mo Farah isn't going to have to break much of a sweat in training to beat me in the marathon no matter how hard I train over the next 12 months. These things are what we in the trade call path dependent, they take time and the outcome depends very much on the route you've taken to get there.

Put simply, the route out of the planning quandary is to take a wild-ass guess at how much training you're going to need to do. To set out my process goals I did some reading, spoke to an awesome physio (she knows who she is) and looked at how much training I had done in the past to achieve similar levels of performance. I created the following process goals...

I will...

I. Train on a SCATT for at least 20 shots at least 3 times every week
ii. Train livefire at least twice every calendar month from March - September
iii. Monitor my performance by writing in my training diary after every practice
iv. Practise visualisation for at least 10 shots four times per week
v. Check my kit after every training session and put it away carefully
vi. Get my rifle checked by my armourer at the start of the season
vii. Jog at least twice per week, covering at least 5 miles in total*
viii. Warm up and warm down before and after every training session and match

Dear reader, I know what you're thinking at this point "Woah, hold your horses a moment Gaz! Didn't you just admit back there that the process goals you have created are little more than a guess." In my case, there's a bit more analysis to it than that because I've been doing this for a while, but if this is the first time you've created yourself a training plan using my approach, then yes, this is essentially correct.

At this point I ask you to consider two things: Firstly, what alternatives do you have? And secondly, I refer you back to the future US president's comments at the start of the post. You've got a plan that you know is going to change as you try to implement it and learn more about yourself and your shooting. This gives you a framework to start to measure and understand what you're going to need to do to hit your mark; and that, ladies and gentlemen, is the value of the planning process.

We've planned the work, but I'll talk a little bit more about working the plan next week.

*I slightly over-performed on this one. The running got a little out of hand and I now run about 50 miles per week, have done three half marathons, one full marathon, am training for my second marathon and have entered my first 50 mile trail ultramarathon.

Goal Setting Part 1 - What do you want to achieve this year?

In the chronically underrated work of genius that is Michael Lehmann's film Hudson Hawk, starring Bruce Willis, Andie Macdowall and most importantly Richard E. Grant, the insane billionaire Darwin Mayflower declares unashamedly...

"...happiness comes from the achievement of goals..."

While I'm not sure that I entirely agree with the sentiment, there is an element of truth to it; and more pertinent to the matter in hand, if you're like me then having a goal will motivate you, and achieving that goal will bring both a deep sense of satisfaction and a yearning for something possibly a bit more stretching.

It is generally a couple of months before the start of the season that I generally start to think about my goals for the year. In my current circumstances, this has become considerably more complicated  as the result of work, running, Commonwealth Games trials. Those factors together with the fact that I now live about as physically far from Bisley as it is possible to get without leaving the surface of the planet.

The classical way of thinking about goals is the SMART model, wherein goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely:

Specific - The goal sets out in unambiguous and objective terms what you hope to achieve and how you will know if you've achieved it.

Measurable - It is possible to make some kind of measurement or observation to let you know whether or not you have made progress towards achieving your goal or have actually achieved it.

Achievable - You are capable of reaching the goal that you have set yourself; although it should not be so easily reachable that it is a foregone conclusion. Sometimes it can be difficult to calibrate.

Relevant - If the goal is part of a bigger plan then it needs to be relevant to achieving the wider goal, and any activities undertaken to try and reach that goal need to be relevant to it.

Timely - The goal should either set a deadline for achieving the goal or describe how often / much you will do a particular action.

As a framework to get you started, it's not too bad but I do think that it has some flaws: firstly, it appears to be predicated on the idea of reasonableness of goals and the individual control that you have over them. I've previously commented that wanting to win a Commonwealth Games medal or a World Championship is a wholly unreasonable goal and one over which you have limited control. I argue that doesn't necessarily make it a bad goal, provided that you do break it down into more detailed, controllable goals which relate what you're going to do to achieve it. That said, you need to have an element of realism to your goals; if you've been shooting fullbore for only a couple of years, haven't every shot a possible and have never made it into the top 200, setting a goal to win the 2016 Grand Agg is probably a little overly ambitious.

Secondly, it doesn't really distinguish different levels of goals within any kind of hierarchy: you're going to have some strategic "outcome" type goals (the two unreasonable goals listed above, being good examples). At the other end of the spectrum, you're going to have some very specific and discrete goals; and finally there are going to be some in the middle, which we'll call "performance" goals. A valid approach should probably take these into account also.

The process of goal setting I advocate begins with setting out the highest-level objectives that you with to achieve, and the breaking them down from there. Here's my list of outcome goals in 2013 by way of example.

I will...

1) Win the Welsh Commonwealth Games trials; and
2) Come in the top 25 in all 3 Bisley Majors: Grand Agg, St. George's and HM Queen's Prize*.

I think that gets right to the point; however it has a number of flaws as a training plan. I don't outright control any of these goals; other competitors could shoot better than me, for example. It also doesn't really do anything for me. I could just as easily have written "Win HM Queen's Prize" and I'd be none the wiser about what to actually do about it. These goals need to be broken down further into something a bit more relevant. I'll talk more about that next week.

In the meantime, have a think about what you want to achieve in your shooting in the next shooting season.

* NB - In the SMART framework, these goals are very specific, perfectly measureable, entirely relevant, achievable (for me) and time-bound; however they are not controllable and so would often not be considered good goals. I disagree, for reasons which I hope will become clear over the next few posts.

A Tale of Shooting and Obsession

In his utterly compelling book Feet in the Clouds* the author and fellrunner Richard Askwith puts down in words the love of his sport and obsession with completing the 24 hour Bob Graham Round**. Driven beyond all reason and sane counsel to run approximately 66 miles up and down 42 peaks, with over 8100 metres of ascent and descent in the Lake District over some of the most rugged terrain in the UK, the books relates the utterly ludicrous lengths to which this otherwise unremarkable man went to achieve his goal.

In parallel with his multiple attempts at completing the challenge, the author relates an abridged history of the sport through which it is possible to chart the evolution of modern training techniques. Early exponents of the sport did not train and their knowledge of performance nutrition was somewhat flawed; however more recent athletes, such as the great Kenny Stewart, applied more scientific principles to their efforts.

Much like fellrunning, even as our sport is in decline the sophistication of training techniques has increased. Aside from time spent on the range shooting live rounds, the concept of training for shooting does not seem to have even existed before the 1980s; shooter training systems came on the scene in the early 1990s; similarly, the idea of even the highest level teams training together before competing is a recent concept.

Much like the author, unless you are supremely talented you are going to need to be somewhat obsessed with training to achieve your goals. Just as he "trained like an Olympian for six unbroken months, seven days a week, often twice a day" you're going to need to put some effort into your shooting if you want to achieve an unreasonable goal; and make no mistake here, wanting to win the Grand Aggregate or a Commonwealth Games medal is an unreasonable goal.

Much like some of the fellrunners described in the book, I'm trying to work out how to use the body of research in sports science and other tools to improve my performance in my sport.

* Subtitled A Tale of Fellrunning and Obsession, hence the title of this post. Available at http://www.amazon.co.uk/Feet-Clouds-Tale-Fell-Running-Obsession/dp/1781310564/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1435951214&sr=8-1&keywords=feet+in+the+clouds It really is a compelling read, I promise you.

** The Bob Graham Round involves traversing 42 peaks in the Lake District within 24 hours, starting and finishing at Keswick's Moot Hall in the marketplace. Anyone who completes the round within the time limit under supervision is eligible to join the Bob Graham 24 Hour Club. People who have failed to complete the round include the late Olympic athlete Chris Brasher and renowned explorer Ranulph Fiennes Vid. http://www.bobgrahamclub.org.uk/index.php?page=intro