Does A Trainer Have To Be A Thing?

On August 4th, Pieter Malan, of Impact Media out of South Africa, released a video entitled, "Training Rigs Are Dead". The inference was that PRS shooters/competitors are no longer building carbon copies of their competition rifles. Or replicas of them in other calibers, anymore.

I've met many competitors with "spare" rifles, and heard of others with practice rifles in calibers whose use enhances various parts of the game. Shoot a harder recoiling rifle to better handle the Dasher in competition. Shoot a .223 to play in the wind, etc., but Pieter's point seemed to be that the more you use the rifle you compete with, the better your skills are with that rifle.

As to shooting a different round in practice, you still have to deal with the competition round in competition, so the better you know it, the better you have a chance to get better with it. Those were a couple of points I got from the early parts of the video.

Another point was the cost of a duplicate rifle. BIG BUCKS! Two times the dies, maybe different powder, more different bullets and maybe primers, too. I'm not making friends with some suppliers here, BUT: Just shoot your comp rifle more. (Talking to myself here.)

Spend the second rifle's build money on more bullets and barrels. A couple of years ago even Francis Colon, when asked about expensive glass for newbies, said you should get glass that tracks and buy more bullets and powder so you could shoot more.

As humans we can't help but rate the possibilities of a prospective shooter when they come to the line to start a stage. When I would RO I tried to tamp down that tendency because it tends to cloud your actual vision through expectation. A good lesson was learned when a man walked up and all I saw was a filthy rifle with a scratched up scope. The timer went off and I was only half into the result of what he was doing - until the 7th or 8th impact. He cleaned the stage.

The man with the dirtiest rifle - with an authentically distressed finish - was one of the best shooters out of almost 200 shooters at that match. Les'on Learned. Shoot the rifle you're going to compete with. Shoot it a lot, on your way to excellence. Then shoot it a bit to maintain the excellence it helped you to achieve.