Our challenge for you is simple, but not easy – Gather regular performance data throughout the calendar year, alongside friends!
Folks have used playing cards as targets for a long time. So long in fact that despite some effort, I’m not able to assign attribution to a verified, original source. The practice has been re-popularized in recent years thanks to our friend and mentor Tom Givens and the Rangemaster community he built. Students in each Rangemaster Instructor Development class receive the opportunity to fire 5 rounds at a playing card, from 5 yards. If you make all your hits in 5 seconds or less, you walk away with a fun memento from your class. Gunset Instructors have multiple cards thanks to successful certifications in every Rangemaster Pistol Instructor Development course offered – Basic, Advanced, Master, and Professional Pistolcraft.
The Gunset cadre has trained together, weekly, for many years across all platforms – pistol, rifle, and shotgun. To kick off one of our sessions, we were each tossed a shiny new deck and directed to staple up a card. That day the gauntlet was officially thrown and our first Gunset 52 Week Challenge commenced!
Year 1 – 52 Week Challenge
- 5 hits
- 5 yards
- 5 seconds or less
- 52 cards in a deck – 52 weeks in a year! This means you will repeat this exercise each week.
- Cold. From concealment. It’s the very first thing we do as soon as we arrive at the range, before moving on to our scheduled training plan.
After exhausting our first deck, and our first year, we kept the momentum going by stepping right into our second Gunset 52 Week Challenge:
Year 2 – 52 Week Challenge
- 2 cards (downloadable target available here)
- 4 hits on the bottom card
- 1 hit on the top card
- 5 yards
- 5 seconds or less
- Cold. From concealment.
Adding the simple transition yielded much growth and we moved on to our third Challenge:
Year 3 – 52 Week Challenge
- Shuffle your deck
- Choose a card
- Always 5 hits
- The card dictates your distance and par time
- Numbered cards are intuitive (e.g. “6” is 5 hits at 6 yards in 6 seconds. “9” is 5 hits at 9 yards in 9 seconds, etc.)
- Aces are 5 hits at 11 yards in 11 seconds
- Face cards are 5 hits at 15 yards in 15 seconds
- Jokers are 5 hits at 20 yards in 20 seconds
- Cold. From concealment.
Be deliberate with your time. Hone your throttle control.
Honestly – the original Challenge was just a fun way to add a little accountability to make sure we all made it to the range. You didn’t want to be the dude who thought he was too busy to train and skipped his card. Quickly, we recognized the value in gathering and analyzing weekly metrics from this simple exercise. Do you know how you perform, cold, no warmups – in all seasons – winter coat – 100 degree heat – driving rain – 8” of snow? Thanks to the 52 Week Challenge… we do! Are your groups getting tighter? Are you consistently shaving time? Can you self-diagnose why you missed that fifth shot?
For fun, we started sharing a few pics of our weekly runs on social media.
Then something unexpected, and magical, happened. Folks from around the country started posting their card attempts and tagging us.
We are humbled to see that not only have hundreds of you become inspired to accept the challenge and work on your craft regularly… but many have created their own local cadre of friends and training partners!
To be successful, you need to put a lot of things together, well enough. You need a stable-ish platfom, an efficient enough presentation from the holster, controlled trigger presses, adequate recoil control, and also enough mental focus to see it through. That’s because somewhere around week 12 or so, after plugging away consistently… you will decide this is all too easy… before getting humbled by falling apart on your first sub 2 second attempt. Ask me how I know!
We’d be honored if you would join our awesome community by tagging us in your weekly attempts with #52weekchallenge and joining the Gunset 52 Week Challenge facebook group.
See you on the range!
