pronematch.com

by Hap Rocketto

About a year ago, during my annual physical, my doctor had me step on the scale, something we both dreaded. I am a science teacher and I won’t go into the semantics of mass verses weight and how I tried to turn it into a joke. However Dr. Marzilli did not share my laughter when I suggested that I really wasn’t over weight because on the Moon, where the force of gravity is less, I would only weigh 40 pounds. Dr. Marzilli, a man of science himself, reminded me that, while I lived on the Earth, the readings on his scale made him think that, just maybe I lived on Jupiter. He unhappily noted on my medical record that my total gross tonnage was approaching that of the starship Enterprise. At any rate, if I wanted to live much longer he suggested that I had better drop some weight and get off of my blood pressure medicine. He opined that I should cut back on my intake of Moon Pies and RC Cola and increase my exercise.

Back home I polished off the remaining Moon Pies in the larder, washing them down with ice cold RC, as I tried to come up with a more energetic exercise program than clicking the remote and asking my kids to pick up after themselves. In a flash, much like Paul on the road to Tarsus, it hit me! I would simply decrease the quantity of position shooting in which I participated and drastically increase the amount of prone shooting on my schedule.

Now this may not seem logical on the surface but I am sure Mr. Spock would understand it in a picosecond. First of all we must face the fact that shooting is the only static sport in existence. Not only does it require you not to move, it places a great penalty upon any unsteadiness, quite the opposite of the popular concept of sport. Such is the difference between the exalted sport of rifle shooting and lesser athletic endeavors that in days gone by, when the NRA was the governing body for international shooting, undistinguished resident troglodyte-like practitioners of other sports at the Olympic Training Center, darkly hinted that the initials really meant ‘Not Really Athletes’, but I digress.

I reasoned that position shooting requires 120 record shots in three positions at 50 yards. That meant that, despite the fact that 3P requires you to lug more gear and lift a heavy rifle many times, I could get more aerobic exercise belly shooting.

“How?” I hear you ask. Simple mathematics, which we all know to be the mother of all sciences, and a casual understanding of physics, gives us our answer. In the course of a 3P regional you change targets 24 times for a total of 1200 yards of walking. (Note: for the sake of this argument all units of linear measurement will be in the English system because American prone shooting is so traditional.) This does not, of course, include strolling to the stat office to hawk the board, trips to the car for ammunition and equipment, aimless wandering to catch up on gossip, or the essential trip or two to the rest room. As I was now watching what I ate I could eliminate several sojourns to the snack bar. These extraneous perambulations are not readily quantifiable and were, therefore, eliminated from the following equation.

A quick review of your high school physics will remind you that Work=(force in pounds)(displacement in feet). Multiply that foot-pound product by a conversion factor of 0.324 calorie per foot-pound and then divide it by 1,000 calories per food calorie and you will have the number of food calories expended in hanging targets for a stout middle aged shooter. The calculation clearly shows that a position regional burns up 279.94 food calories for the target hanging Pillsbury Doughboy. It was becoming apparent that in 3P I was shooting and walking less than if I was shooting prone. I disliked the former, my doctor disliked the latter, and the calories burned, it turned out, were not as significant as the prone calculations were to reveal.

Compare a position to a prone regional in which targets are changed 32 times for a total of 2200 yards of walking. Prone shows a dramatic increase in energy consumption! If I took up serious prone shooting I could almost double my shooting and my exercise. A prone match burns up an incredible 513.22 food calories, a whopping 55% more than position match and the equivalent of scarfing down a 12 ounce RC and a Moon Pie, in walking to the targets alone. Think about the extra non-quantifiable calories that are expended in the innumerable trips to the challenge window that good prone shooting requires. The daily total might reach over 1,500 food calories during a match with a lot of close shots. However, these extraneous calories cannot be added to the equation, which is impressive enough. They simply should be viewed as a bonus. The conclusion follows that prone shooting is a veritable weight sink.

The only fly in the ointment might be the increased ammunition expense. However, this was easily offset in my case by a smaller grocery bill caused by a lowered consumption of Moon Pies and RC. In all, I was able to devise a painless method of weight loss that pleased my doctor, my wife, and myself.

Some twelve months later I am reaping the harvest of my plan. At my last weigh-in I tipped the scales at a mere 33 Moon pounds, now that I am off Moon Pies. Since I am presently more fit I find that I fit on my mat, and in my shooting coat, with comfort and ease. The wife is happy that she doesn’t have to drag the heavy bottles of RC into the house and worry about the ants attracted by the super sugary Moon Pies. And, best of all, my doctor smiles now that my blood pressure is 115 over 75. Well, it usually is that low except when I’m shooting nines prone. However, I am shooting a lot more prone…

by Hap Rocketto 

Over the past several months I have been engaged in writing a history of the Black Hawk Rifle Club, a 75 year old shooting organization of which I am a member. One of the recurrent themes was the number of national titles the club has accumulated in its competitive career.

The club has used various names to delineate one team from another when entered in the same match such at the National Smallbore Rifle Championships. The club, being named after one of the great Indian chiefs, tends to use names easily associated with the great war chief of the Sauk tribe of central Illinois. The best team is usually named Chiefs, and then there are the Arrows, on occasion there was an all female team called Squaws and a junior team with Papoose as its handle. There is also a long string of teams simply named Black Hawk.

Paul Nordquist, one of the club members working with me on the project, had an interesting question in regard to teams. He asked, “The number of teams that have swept a championship; that is they won both the metallic and anysight team matches in a single phase, raises an interesting philosophical question. For example, if the Army Blue Team wins both matches in a phase, but switches a shooter to do so, is it the same team because the name has remained the same or is it a different team because it has a different composition?”

All I wanted to do was to write an interesting and informative history of the club and here I was, sidetracked by philosophical dialog. It reminded me of a time when I was in the pits at Fort Benning and engaged in a similar philosophical discussion with my teammate Roger McQuiggan. We were debating back and forth about some esoteric point of existence and Roger had taken the Teleological argument which states that anything complex must be designed by a great designer. I, on the other hand, elected to argue from the more controversial Ontological point of view which states that if it can be imagined it can exist.

We yammered back in forth for sometime as the Pit NCO looked on very quietly with a bemused expression on his face. At last Roger turned to him and said, Sarge, we aren’t getting any where here. What do you think?” The old timer looked at Roger and then at me, shifted his Copenhagen, spit into the dust at his feet, and looked up to say, “I guess it all depends on if you are on the outside looking in or on the inside looking out.” And that pretty much sums up the state of this argument which has been going on for at least two millennia.

To get back to the problem at hand I thought about it a bit and came up on the horns of a dilemma. Yes, I thought, they must be the same team because the name is the same. I also thought no, because each team had different constituent parts so it can’t be the same. A third thought which crossed my mind is that nothing easy for the shooting historian.

My brother Steve, also a Black Hawk, was, given a copy of the draft so that he might offer constructive criticism. When he reached the appendix on team victories he casually commented, “I wonder how many of these teams that doubled in the same year were the same?”

My jaw dropped for Steve has both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Philosophy and I feared the worst. Reluctantly I told him about the exchange that I had had with Nordquist over the same question. The faraway look in his eyes told me that Steve was mentally shuffling his notes and preparing to launch into an elegant and exquisitely detailed discourse on the subject. Sighing I dropped my head into my hands and braced myself for this would be a bone which he would gnaw upon for some time. This turn of event would mean only two things, my store of knowledge would increase and the completion of the project would be delayed.

His opening salvo was, “Have you not read Plutarch’s Life of Theseus?” Knowing that he had, and probably in the original Latin, I replied that I had not.

“Well then,” he went on quoting verbatim, in English thank my lucky stars, from the work, “The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place.” Steve continued his Phil 101 lecture by telling me that Plutarch then asked if the ship is the same ship if, over time, it were entirely replaced, piece by piece. To make things more confusing Thomas Hobbs came along centuries later and asked if the original pieces were saved and reassembled which ship would be the genuine Ship of Theseus? It is a classic paradox problem.

Desperate to move on I interrupted his exposition and for that he looked at me sternly, as if I should have been taking notes or something. I told him that Nordquist and I solved the problem to our satisfaction. For better or worse we agreed that, for our purpose, we would only consider a team the same if all of the members of both teams were the same. “Pragmatic, to be sure, but not good philosophy” Steve opined with a dismissive shake of his head.

He quickly brightened and bubbled out. “Do you know,” he said with a gleeful conspiratorial wink, “that the same paradox under different guises is also called ‘Heraclitus’ River’, or ‘Plato’s Carriage’, or ‘Locke’s Socks’, or ‘George Washington’s Axe’? Maybe I can get into the journals with a paper on the subject entitled ‘Rocketto’s Rifle Teams’?”