Shooters aiming for a higher level

Home shooting venue for the duo is the Custer Sportsmen's Club, an IPSC-member range that holds IPSC-USPSA sanctioned matches throughout the year. Hughes also trains on a range he built at his rural residence.

All shooting sports have at least one, sometimes two, factors in their equations: the delivery of a projectile over a distance to a target center and occasionally doing this against the clock.

For both men the two-dimensional nature of such target shooting is simply not enough of a challenge.

"Static shooting [from one position] is boring," said Romaszka, whose background includes training and experience in intense tactical shooting scenarios.

The sport of practical shooting adds a third important variable to the problem for them. It puts the shooter in motion through a course of objects (usually walls, barricades or autos) firing, moving, reloading, visually acquiring the next target, stopping at a station, setting in a firing stance and shooting another precise number of rounds.

Practical shooting scores are determined by dividing the target points accumulated by the time it took to shoot the prescribed number of rounds.

A SINGULAR FOCUS

If they let it happen, the head of practical shooters could be filled with a dizzying array of distractions.

Things such as how other competitors did, the ticking of the clock, the steadiness of their hand, the quickness with which they acquire a sight-picture, trip hazards on the course, the fluidness and rapidity of their trigger squeeze and many more all can threaten concentration.

Were it not for the amount of training these championship-class shooters impose on themselves, the dual tasks of competing against the clock as well as besting their fellow shooter's performance would be daunting.

Practical shooters inching toward the zenith of their game strive to leave nothing to chance.

Hughes combines a daily morning regimen of cardio-exercise in his home gym with a follow-up sequence of dry-fire (no live ammunition) drills with his handgun, rehearsing precise movements until they are locked in his muscle memory.

Romaszka says that for every two hours he spends on the range live-firing at targets, he is in his garage for another two to three hours repeatedly going through specific motions such as his draw (unholstering the pistol), reloading (ejecting empty clips, pulling other off his belt) or simply 'picking up' his pistol's front sight with his eye as he raises it. He'll shoot 400-500 live rounds during every range practice.

TWO WAYS TO PERFECTION

In a sport where results hinge on speed and accuracy, practice is critical and pausing to 'think' yields a less-than-stellar performance.

These shooters go into a 'zone' or a state of concentration that Romaszka calls shooting in the 'now.'

"The tenth of a second ago is gone, the tenth of a second from now hasn't happened yet and therefore is not in our consciousness," Romaszka said, describing the Zen-like mental state practical shooters must enter to attain excellence.

In the immediate aftermath of a stage, Romaszka said he can quickly assess his performance by his memory of it.

"If I can't remember anything from the moment the timer beeps until the Range Officer commands 'if you are finished, unload and show clear' then I have accomplished perfection [in the execution]," said Romaszka.

Conversely, if his mind's eye can see odd snippets of things from the course of fire such as his foot, a target or an ammo clip, he believes his conscious, thinking mind pulled up the blindfold a bit to peek at reality and thus he likely was a touch slower and maybe one or more of his shots were off the mark.

Borne out of his engineering background, Hughes uses an empirical approach to gain insights for his training. He devotes a portion of his time to evaluating aspects of his performance that he has recorded, converted to numbers and put down on Excel spreadsheets.

In the figures he looks for measured moments in the evolution of a stage where he can trim a 10th of second off some movement by changing the position of his foot or rotating his head slightly so his eyes can pick up the next target sooner.

In a 20-second long stage or course of fire only 5-6 seconds are taken up actually shooting, the rest of that time is moving and positioning, said Hughes. He also thinks physical conditioning gives him an edge in controlling his body's movements.

In his pursuit of perfection, Hughes also regularly studies videos of his competitions as a means to see where he needs to improve.

He calls them his 'ugly mirrors' because they invariably expose the little things such as frivolous motions, less-than-efficient postures, or mere hesitations that eroded his score.

SAFETY IS ALSO IN MOTION

The motto of the cadre of practical shooters is accuracy, speed and power.

To that, both Hughes and Romaszka agree you can add safety.

Proper and secure handling of the powerful handguns used in this sport are constantly and vigorously re-enforced through training competition rules and match choreography.

In practice on formally managed ranges, practical shooters and any others can be ordered off the premises for unsafe or improper handling of firearms. During matches, range officers observe each shooter at close quarters and may warn or remove them from competition if their focus lapses and they violate any of more than 20 rules governing conduct, even if those acts are not deliberate.

For instance, the sport's safe shooting dictates require that fingers be outside the trigger guard at all times except when a target is actually being engaged. If a practical shooter in competition is observed with their finger on the trigger even for a moment outside the act of shooting, they can be disqualified.

Romaszka, in his role as a certified law enforcement firearms trainer, has long been an advocate of participation in competitive shooting sports because of their disciplined mandate that firearms safety be elevated to a sub-conscious behavior.

The safety record of the sport of practical shooting is impeccable, rivaling the overall low injury rate of such recreational activities as bowling, said Romaszka.

While pursuit of perfection is their ideal, the objectives for both men at the 2008 nationals are down to earth. They'll focus on and apply their skills to improve, not, per se, to win.

With his return to the sport from a business and personal hiatus, Romaszka says he also wants to boost his practical shooting proficiency to move up to grand master class in the limited division. He is just two percentage points away.

Both already have their eye on repeating in the nationals in 2009 and then vying for a berth in the IPSC world championships in the next few years.