Jay Meets Brownian Motion

by Hap Rocketto

Jay Sonneborn has an impressive resume in the art and science of the hard hold and easy squeeze. He has been three times a member of the US Dewar Team, including a stint as captain. As fitting one who has been so recognized by being an official on the most prestigious of international prone postal matches he is Distinguished with the smallbore rifle in the prone discipline. Jay is also a member of the 1600 club and the only Connecticut shooter to have ever carded a 3200.

Paradoxically enough, as good a prone shooter as he is, his greatest national success in shooting has come in the more athletic, well everything is relative in shooting, endeavor of position competition. He has won the Rheinische-Westfalischen-Sprengstoff Trophy awarded to the National Intermediate Senior National 3-Position National Champion as well as the Meisterschüetzen Trophy, emblematic of the National Senior Metallic Sights Champion at the NRA 3-Position Outdoor National Championships as well as the senior title which, in his day, had no named trophy.

While Jay is a bit older and wiser than me we have a symbiotic shooting relationship as each of has what the other wants. Jay is trying to pick my brain, very lean pickings indeed, for the secret to earning Distinguished with the service rifle. I, on the other hand, am plumbing the depths of his considerable knowledge about prone shooting in my quest for the elusive Perry leg I need for Distinguished with the prone smallbore rifle.

In one of our recent exchanges on the subject Jay sought my advice on improving his performance in the standing position, something at which I have had some success. I am the guy they talk about when the say that you lose matches prone and win them standing. Although in my case there is a lot more of the former than the latter.

Jay wrote, “One of the things to look forward to as you age is movement, in all positions, but very noticeable in standing. The rifle rarely stops moving contrasted with earlier times when there was always a two or three second stop in the rifle’s movement. So, here’s my question, can you think of any slight change in foot position to reduce some of the movement?”

That reminded me of a snippet of writing by Robert Collier, a popular author of self help books in the 1930s and 40s. Collier wrote about some things that are in the forefront of most successful shooters minds: desire, visualization, confidence in action, and becoming one’s best. Collier, not a shooter to my knowledge, wrote one of the great truths about shooting standing when he penned the lines, “All motion is cyclic. It circulates to the limits of its possibilities and then returns to its starting point.”

While I think it is a valuable shooting point, it became apparent that Collier showed ignorance of Jan Ingenhousz, a late 1700s Dutch scientist best known for discovering photosynthesis who also observed the random motion of coal dust in alcohol. That is another thing of which I have some knowledge, but it is an olive or maraschino cherry, not coal dust, aimlessly drifting about in my alcohol.

A few years later Scottish botanist Robert Brown made his name as an innovator in the use of the microscope through which he observed grains of pollen floating in water. The grains moved about in a seemingly random pattern. He thought that it might be because they were organic but repeating the experiment with inorganic material resulted in the same random motion, ruling out the possibility that the motion was because the organic material was living. While Brown never discovered the why of his observation, the pollen moved because it was being struck by fast moving molecules in the water in which it was suspended, the phenomenon is now known as Brownian motion.

Now, Brownian Motion may not be the cause of the steadily deteriorating hold that Jay was referencing but it is what my hold now looks like most days. Oddly enough the fact that with age one’s hold opens up was what might have given me the edge on winning the 2012 NRA 3-Position Geezer’s Championship.

I dimly remember those far off days’ when having a ten ring hold was normal for me. However, I have found that now my standing hold, even on a quiet day, has a great deal of movement. I sometimes find my shots poking holes into rings that, until recently, I never even knew they printed on the target.

The first day of the championship was calm but at the end of the day I was in third place in the race for the senior crown, a whole bunch of points down from the leader. On the second day of the championship the wind blew so hard that even Great Lakes bulk ore carriers lay huddled and cowering at anchor from the Port of Toledo to Buffalo. None cared to share the fate of the ill-fated SS Edmund Fitzgerald. When Coast Guard Station Marblehead broke out two triangular red pennants to signal gale force winds all vessels within sight virtuously sought out the nearest shelter, but for the competitors on the firing line at Camp Perry no such luxury existed. Wind or no wind, shoot we must.

For me the wind was my saving grace. Most of the shooters had steady holds and were unhinged by the vicious winds that blew them from target frame to target frame with hardly a pause on their own target. Conditions mean nothing to me as my hold has become so erratic that it looks exactly the same on a windy day as it does on a calm one.

And that brings us back to Collier’s observation and the answer to Jay’s question and it is not in the feet. “All motion is cyclic. It circulates to the limits of its possibilities and then returns to its starting point.” The trick to shooting standing successfully is to break the shot when you get back to your starting point, not at the limit of the motion’s possibilities.