1) Sacrifice your ego. This is a hard one for a lot of people to swallow. I box, weekly. I average 3-6 hours of boxing and/or muay Thai training per week, in addition to what I do at home, on my own. I probably don’t NEED to go to boxing training. I’ve been in a lot of scraps, and have managed to not get hospitalized or killed yet. I do it though, because if we’re not getting better, we’re stagnating, and you know what’s stagnant? Putrid, rotting flesh. So, I go to boxing. As a general rule, I’m the oldest person in the gym, by at least a decade. You know what sucks? Getting your ass kicked by a bunch of 15-25 year old Mexican kids who think they are the next Oscar De La Hoya. You know what else sucks? Getting punched in the head by some corn-fed farm kid who thinks he’s the next Great White Hope. But I do it. I have NEVER “won” a sparring round. Ever. Why? Because I’m not trying to win. I’m trying to get better, and I’m trying to help my sparring partner get better. It doesn’t matter if they’re better than me, or not. It doesn’t matter if they have fifteen pro fights under their belt, or it’s their very first time sparring. One of the ladies asked me to feed focus mitts for her recently. Over the course of twelve rounds of mitt work, she explained that she had wanted to work with me, because she got tired of the young guys smashing the shit out of the mitts, when she took her turn holding them. She had watched me enough to know that I didn’t have my ego in the way, and wouldn’t try to “show off.” That was possibly the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me, in a boxing gym. Sure, “Man, you kick like an angry mule!” or ‘Dude, that left hook is a rib breaker!” strokes the ego, but “you’ll help me get better, instead of showing off how good you are” means I’m doing good work, helping others get better. I try and do the same thing at our weekly range training, with my clan. I’m not the only dude there qualified to teach and train. I do it, most of the time though, instead of getting my personal practice in, because I want my guys to get better than me (the fact that the range is on my farm, and I can practice on my own doesn’t hurt, either). I run the more complex drills, and I demonstrate the simpler drills, but I generally don’t waste their limited weekly training time showing off how fast I am. Give up your ego. Work on helping others improve around you, even at the expense of your own development, for a little bit. Build rapport. Build frith. Build strength in your clan/tribe/group. 2) Folks who have been in a class with me will know, I had a really bad caffeine addiction. I would regularly drink 5-6 Monster Energy drinks per day. Before I jumped on the energy drink wagon, I would down a case of Coca-Cola daily, when teaching. I did the same when I was not teaching. Even when I did strict Paleo Diet, my “cheat” was Monsters. Obviously energy drinks aren’t Paleo, but I justified it, in my own mind, by pointing out that I wasn’t doing Paleo to lose weight, and if my only bad dietary habit was Monsters, I was still doing light years better than the average dude on the Standard American Diet. People would bitch at me, that I needed to stop. They’d tell me they weren’t healthy. They were going to rot my intestines out. They were going to cause neural fatigue, etc. Blah, blah, blah, blah. For the last couple months, I’ve felt kind of “bleh.” My PT was suffering. My combatives was suffering. My shooting was suffering. My farm work was suffering. My nutrition was suffering (Monsters, I am convinced, really are a gateway drug to eating like shit.) I was getting really short-tempered with my wife and kids. I was just miserable. With no idea where to start, I decided I would start by fixing my diet. I told my wife, on Sunday, two weeks ago, “Starting tomorrow, I’m done drinking sodas and Monsters.” I told several of my peers in the clan the same thing. I’m pretty sure they all thought I was full of shit. At best, I’d fall off the wagon, and drink one or two a day. So…it’s been two weeks, today. I’ve been better about getting my ass out of bed on time in the morning. I have WAY more energy to get shit done. My PT and my boxing has improved. My farm work has improved tremendously. Before, I would have to do something, and just think, “Fuck, I want to move to town…this is going to suck.” I would still get shit done, but I dreaded doing it. Now, it just gets done. I don’t even think about it. I’ve taken time to play games and go hiking in the woods with the kids. Guys, seriously…if you’re drinking that shit, take it from a dude who managed to function, despite drinking a half-dozen or more every day…STOP. You will do more, while having more energy, without drinking that shit. 3) We did a little bit of patrol formation training, a couple weeks ago, for our weekly training event. At one point, I was at the end of the formation, but I wanted to get ahead of it, so I could make sure everyone was using shadows and concealment properly, as they were moving. So, I moved out to the side, and ran around to the front, about 100 meters in front of the formation (eight man diamond). Leaves hadn’t started sprouting at our elevation yet, so the formation was spread pretty far out, despite being in the timber, and I went out far enough that none of the guys saw me moving around. It wasn’t until each buddy team moved past me that they noticed I had gotten ahead of them. One of our guys looked at me, and said, “Holy shit. Did you break the land speed record getting around there!?” I had moved fast. Through the woods. With full fighting load on. I had run about 400 meters, in a little under a minute. That’s not particularly impressive, until you realize, I did it, through the trees and underbrush, wearing 25# of gear, and carrying a rifle, and by the time they got to me, I was not even breathing hard. Guys, I’m not a fucking 20 year old Ranger anymore. I’m in my mid-40s. What I do, in order to still be able to pull shit like that off, are “Terrain Run Intervals.” I measured off 200, 400, 500, and 600 meter distances, in my wood lot. I run 200 or 400 meter intervals, one day a week. One other day of the week, I run 600, 800, or 1000 meter intervals….through the woods…with a 40# weight vest on. My goal, on the short interval days, is to cover a total of 2000-2500 meters. On the long days, I aim for running a total of 5000meters, or 5 kilometers (that’s just over 3 miles). I rest, in between intervals, twice as long as it took me to run the last interval. I highly recommend the exercise. It’s far more rewarding than running intervals on the track or on your street. Occasionally, I’ll jump a deer, or some small furbearer, so I get an added bit of excitement. You can’t possibly run it as fast as you can on the street or track, so it’s actually easier on your knees and ankles and hips (at least, I’ve found it to be). If you’re a fat fuck, and can’t run 20 feet? Then start by walking. Next week, walk faster. The week after, jog a couple of the intervals, and walk the rest. When you’re jogging all the intervals, start running the first couple. Continue, ad nauseum. I promise, you run a couple miles a week, in the woods, with gear on, and you won’t be a fat fuck for long. 4) The new book, The Guerrilla Gunfighter, Volume 2: Combat Rifle and Carbine is up for pre-sale, on the Warhammer Six Press site. I anticipate being done by 15MAY, or 1JUN at the latest. I am giving myself leeway though, and putting the expected shipping date as 15JUN, because it seems like something always pops up, and I end up looking like an asshole. That’s not to say I won’t fuck up again, and be an asshole, but I’m trying to hedge my bets. Guys, I’m not just covering AR15s in this book, or AR15s and AK47s. I’ve got information on using lever-action rifles as a fighting weapon, and pump-actions (to be precise, I don’t own a pump-action rifle. I do however, keep my 870 loaded solely with slugs, and run it as a big-bore carbine, out to 100 meters plus). I’ve even done a section on using stripper-clip fed bolt-actions, like the M1903 Springfield (that one required some range time to learn the TTPs…if all you have is a bolt-gun, okay, but I feel bad for you, because it’s a bitch. There’s a section on field firing, and on individual movement techniques in the field. I didn’t just cover known distance marksmanship, and I didn’t cover just CQB distance, “shooting rifles at pistol distances.” It’s a rifle/carbine book. Like Volume One of The Guerrilla Gunfighter, it includes a LOT of training and practice drills, and a rifle POI. The current draft is in the vicinity of 450 pages. It’s going to be a doozy. 5) I’m still trying to figure out how to approach the Patreon idea, if at all. I’m not going to stop doing the blog, so the Patreon needs to be a value-added measure for subscribers. What would you guys want to see? An extra article each week? Photos in articles, where possible? (No videos, still. Sorry). I’m open to suggestions. Continue reading...
