This was my first Waco Tactical Fitness event. The weather turned out beautifully, doing my run/walk in the 60 degree afternoon sun.
The GOOD:
My hats off to all the folks that volunteered their time and effort to make this event happen. I'm certain it took a ton of work by some well qualified folks to pull this event off. I'm told that some of the money is going to build an Appleseed KD range in Temple. Feel great that my money is going to a good cause!
Thanks to the town of Crawford and the property owner for supporting this event! Being a city dweller, I don't normally walk around with my battle rattle outside of a military installation. It was a fun adventure getting to explore the course for the first time and rappelling into the creek bed and scrambling across the rocks down there had to be my favorite part. You can't experience God's creation sitting home watching TV. You gotta get out and experience the world and I loved the experience in Crawford.
I love to shoot pistol and rifle and combining those with an obstacle course race is a winning combination. I heard many shooters say that the what the heck Biathlon is their favorite shooting competition event of the year. Those tickets go fast and it was a great turnout at the event.
This event has a focus on fitness. Fitness is something America and Texas desperately needs more of. My hats off to the event organizers for encouraging everyone to improve their fitness. I know I exercised more in the months preceding the event and it helped me focus my exercise routines more on functional fitness. The biathlon was a glorious endeavor to test myself physically as well as testing my gear through all the challenges.
The event attracted a diverse and extremely polite group of fit people. From SF, to the Texas Aggie Marksmanship team, the TXSG to 3-gun and other competitive shooters, to Appleseed instructors and more there were young, middle-aged, and more seasoned competitors. The overall winner Saturday was sporting grey hair, proving it's never too late to succeed at this event.
Any day shooting on an unknown distance(UKD) rifle range is a great day. I thought that was worth the price of admission alone.
As far as stages go, how can you not love the Timothy Murphy stage? It's like reliving history and having fun as a kid climbing a tree at the same time. "Flip it good!" I though was a well designed stage that started out with a tire flip to get your blood going, then 2 handed pistol, and right and left hand only while holding a 30lb dumbbell in your other hand. Good stuff.
I liked obstacles like the balance beam/monkey bars. I've done balance beams and monkey bars before, but its a special challenge while carrying your equipment/firearms. Gloves were a good to have for this and other obstacles.
As far as gear goes, I was surprised more people didn't have Lancer Mags. They are amazing.
This was a competition for free-float rifle barrels. You genuinely need one to be competitive.
The Bad:
I loved "The Walk of Shame". This was considered an Obstacle, but honestly I thought it should have been scored as a stage. Carrying 2 heavy bags to three possible positions, and taking challenging pistol shots really looked like a perfect stage to me. The first position was a small head size target at something like 50 yards. In the interest of time I skipped that and went directly to the second position and got a 1 shot hit on the ~25 yard head sized target. My buddy wasn't so lucky, ran out of ammo, and had to walk the heavy bags all the way to and from the third position. Good stuff that didn't seem to matter much to anyone's score in the grand scheme of a 5+ mile course.
I lost an empty magazine along the way. Probably got forced out of the pouch during one of the many obstacles. Strong mag pouch closures are important.
I've done plenty of rope climbs, but not one where the rope freely spins and knocks me up against a CONEX while I'm carrying $3,000 worth of gear. I recover from scrapes and bruises, but I didn't really want this event to cost me $1,000+ for damaged optics. I could have made it up the rope, but decided just to drop down and go "under" the tire obstacle.
Bonus stage: Without having the benefit of even viewing the designated bolt action rifle or sling we were given 6 shots to hit 3 very small targets. There was nothing to rest the rifle on, and I couldn't figure out the sling under time pressure. Not having time to familiarize myself with the rifle I just hoped the rifle was off safety when I squeezed the trigger for the first time. The rifle had gotten a lot of use that day and had a double feed. I cleared it and got off all my shots hitting 2 of the 3 targets from a very unsteady prone position. This stage reminded me why I never in my life spent any of my hard earned money on a bolt gun. I like pistols, semi-auto rifles, select-fire rifles, subguns, machineguns, etc., but bolt guns just seem so WW1 to me. One of my great-great uncles was a machine-gunner in WW1 and was better equipped back in the day. Russia went with semi-auto sniper rifles long ago and the Barrett M82 is one of several American semi-auto distance rifles. I know bolt guns still have a niche, but just not as fun to me. Might have been better if I had more time to get comfortable with the setup.
The wall was more than 8 feet tall. And sloped towards you. Not a normal wall. Just say'in!
The Ugly:
While I'm glad I did the event, I believe that there are some changes that would enhance it.
Challenges are important. The Appleseed Rifleman challenge is a wonderful challenge. You have to perfect your skills to master your rifle and demonstrate great proficiency with it in the American Tradition.
But not all challenges are relevant. In the military some leaders may "harass" the troops to build fighting spirit or just throw out arbitrary challenges as part of creating military discipline... but in the rest of the world its important for challenges to be relevant to some end. Being the best in the world in underwater basket weaving is nice, but not relevant to anything.
I thought that there needed to more relevance to the stages. For example, you MUST train as you fight... because you fight as you train. Many great instructors like to point out that you fall to the level of your training. At the what the heck event shooters were often forced into sticking their muzzles forward of the barricade (scenarios included Tower, Re-trenched, and to some extent Mozambique Mania). This is a HUGE NO NO. That gives away your exact position and training to shoot that way is training for suicide. I was quietly appalled.
More historical stages like the actions of Sgt York or some other real world scenarios would be both fun and relevant.
I haven't seen all the specifics on Saturday's scoring yet, but with a stage time limit of 3 minutes, including obstacles, there were too many targets and shooting positions for most people on several stages. When 60+% of well-qualified shooters run out of time on a stage, I see it as more of a stage issue than a shooter issue. For others, they see DNF'ing as an opportunity for personal improvement. More power to them, but personally I'd rather see a scoresheet where everyone ranks rather than a page full of generic DNF's.
With stages like Carmageddon, some distant targets looked exactly like their hanging straps. You could waste a lot of ammo on those straps if you didn't know better.
On an unknown distance rifle range, targets MUST be life size for range estimating purposes/realism. There were so many odd size targets that some stages had a fake and unnecessarily confusing feel to them.
It's okay to shoot off your AR-15 magazine. Seriously AR-15's shoot best that way and that's what the military teaches with M4's and M16's. But the Tower was designed to keep you from doing that and shooting on top of the car was not allowed on Carmageddon.
I've done a lot of zip lining. It's usually fun. But the zip line was accelerated this event with an abrupt stop at 40mph and honestly did not look safe. I'd hate to see what the heck get sued over something inevitably going wrong with it.
Summary,
I think there should be more of these pistol/rifle/obstacle course events. There's a demand and they are well worth doing. The group that competed is a fantastic group of Texans who were great to hang out with. Wish we had a country full of 'em.
).