The Everyday Marksman

Back in April, I launched "Project Hoplite," a 25-week program to prepare for a Spartan Race Super 10k. My "why" for this journey boils down to doing hard things for my family, my career, and my own capabilities. Now, six weeks in, I'm sharing the first update: how the gains are going, and the lessons learned from pushing the limits. See how the needle is moving!

Recently, I mentioned that I was going to run in a Spartan Race Super 10k at the end of October 25. To train for success, I've organized a 25-week training program covering all aspects of physical success for the event. This is the first part of a series of posts where I'll share how training is going, and lessons learned as a 40-something guy attacking Tactical Fitness in a way I haven't really tried before.

Let's take a look back at Q1 of the year and where I'm at with several projects for myself and the site. There's a lot of content coming, and I'm having a blast digging into pistol shooting. Let's get started.

Here at the end of the year, it's time to look back across 2024 and grade myself on how I've done (pretty mediocre, to be honest). I'm also setting the main targets for 2025, which ties back directly to what you can expect next year.

A bit of an off-the-cuff musing about the current state of the second amendment legal world. I've been in this debate for a long time, and I think we've got a lot of momentum behind us- but I also think there's some serious risk in the future. The debate is not over, not by a long shot.

At the start of October, I went to a Project Appleseed Pistol Clinic to get a refresh on my pistol skills and see what the new program was all about. I came away both satisfied with my performance and appreciating the hard work that the Appleseed folks put into developing this new curriculum. Let's dig in!

I've got a bit of a confession to make, and it's embarrassing. I'm not all that great with pistols. I'm not a bad pistol shooter, per se. But on balance, my pistol shooting lags way behind my rifle shooting. I think that's a problem, so let's talk about why I'm going to fix it.

Let's talk long term. Too many people think that success is just a few weeks or months away, when that is far from the truth. In reality, success is a culmination of long term effort often years in the making. In this piece, I take a little known two day challenge and show you how I would break it down into a series of seasons and blocks that could be repeated over and over again, always driving closer and closer to success.

I've got a little bit of a bone to pick with how a lot of the shooting culture talks about drills. Much like weight lifting and gym bro culture, it seems a lot of shooters are more interested in flexing their egos than actually using drills as a way to improve. But how, exactly, should we approach that?

There's been a question floating around the web that I wanted to take a poke at. If you were advising someone on how to start their own "serious" arsenal, what would be your suggestions? In what priority order? HEre's my answer.

My recent post on establishing a fitness hierarchy made me realize that I need to do the same thing for marksmanship training. So here we are. Today I'm discussing my breakdown for prioritizing training distances and my reasoning for them.

In the last episode, I mentioned something called the homeostasis problem. It's a way of viewing why big changes in life are so difficult to make. It was going to be a large aside in that article, so much so that I decided it was worth its own post. So here we are: the homeostasis problem.

Mindset is one of the core topics of The Everyday Marksman, and it's one of the four corners in our pyramid of performance, but I've never planted a flag in the ground about what exactly I mean by, "Mindset." So let's fix that.

In the last episode, I discussed the Martial Marksman ideal and how it relates to the various topics I talk about here. One of the challenges that anyone going down this path quickly runs into is the fact that there is a lot of “stuff” to learn and practice. It’s one thing for a professional soldier to do these things, but it’s a very different beast for Everyday Marksmen like you and I.

Every year, I tend to focus in on a "theme" to pursue. Sometimes it's personally, sometimes it's got a bit more to do with the site. For most of 2022, the key phrase was "Minimum Capable Citizen." The idea was around a set of standards and baseline targets that I think any prepared citizen should strive for. Eventually, the idea fizzled out a bit when I felt like there wasn't much more to write. I'm not interested in "minimum." I believe we should strive for excellence, and minimum doesn't cut it. In 2023, my goals turned personal, with a heavy focus on...

For a while, I've been kicking around an idea for a new type of competition. I enjoy all the various disciplines I've played in, but also think that each of them in isolation is missing something. Today, I'd like to tell you about my vision for a "complete" type of match that I think covers all of the foundations of Everyday Marksmen, and it does so in a way that lets all of us have an objective to train for. Let's talk about the Rifleman Pentathlon.

This is a philosophical one. For the last month or so, I've been obsessed with an Ancient Greek concept of excellence and how to apply it. Today's post is about presenting the core concepts and how I think it works within the construct of The Everyday Marksman. At a broader scale, this will weave throughout my work and form the bedrock what I want you to achieve.

A while back, while talking about the latest revision to his sniper marksmanship book, John Simpson let me know that he had another book on the way- this one focused on patrol rifle marksmanship. Well it recently hit the shelves and we got together again to talk more about rifle marksmanship, training philosophies, and competition. Let's dig in.

This is both my review of a new book on strength training as well as an interview with the author. Over the last year, I've built up a library of strength and conditioning books, and I think I've settled on the one to suggest to just about everyone who wants to get started. Let's dig in.

Months of prep time, new gear configurations, and a lot of articles. I finally ran the West Virginia Gun Run this past Saturday. Here's some notes on how it went and what I'd do differently in the future.

Today I'm discussing a concept that's been brewing in the the back of my brain. While working on the book, I've needed a way to illustrate how different things we do relate to improving the whole and take use to new levels of performance. I think I've figured it out, and this is my first go at explaining it.

People often think old weapons are automatically obsolete, and don't have much place in your safe as anything other than a collectors item. In today's episode, which is admittedly a little bit of a rant, I'm going to make the case why "obsolete" weapons might still have a real world role to play.

Too many people are looking for the easy out, as if finding the one perfect piece of gear, or just the right training technique, will take them to the next level of capability. But that's not true. Success and failure are lagging indicators of our choice to make deposits or take withdrawals from our internal investment account.

I sat down with a few of our community members who recently competed in events put on by Waco Tactical Fitness. I'll be doing a similar tactical biathlon event later next month, and I was curious about equipment, training, and lessons learned from the events.

While reading through some of Coach Dan John's work, I came across a philosophy for breaking your annual training cycles. It's impossible to do everything well all of the time- something must give. Instead, we should think of our training, all of our training, from two perspectives: the bus bench, and the park bench.

Like many enthusiast topics, we've got a problem with flex culture. What is that? Today we're talking about it, how it manifests, why its a problem, and what you can do to combat it.

Everyone loves talking about optimization. Entire industries spend huge amounts of money convincing you that their new whiz bang gadget or service will take you to the next level with no additional skill required. Today I'm putting a stake in the ground to tell you that optimum is a myth, and our constant pursuit of it only detracts us from focusing on what's actually important for our success.

To start of 2023, I wanted to take a moment to look over where we've been over the last eight years, some of the impactful decisions I've made along the way, and how that's affecting where were going next in 2023 and beyond. Thanks for being a part of it!

In this episode, I once again talk to my very first guest: John Simpson. We dig deeper into the fundamentals of learning good marksmanship, past Army programs, the importance of learning the right lessons in training, and more.

The first handgun purchase is usually a daunting decision, because there's a lot of technicality mixed in with personal preferences of the individual giving the advice. This is my attempt to simplify it down a bit and focus on the most important things.

This week I sat down again with Ilya, the Dark Lord of Optics, to answer some lingering questions I've got about prism optics. I wanted to understand how they work relative to traditional rifle scopes, and some of the tradeoffs required when designing them. During the conversation, we also wandered over how rifle scopes work in general, reticle color selection, durability, engineering tradeoffs, and more. I'm also posting the audio-only version of this as well.

Today we're defining the Everyday Marksman minimum rifle standards. This is a two-part test of both speed and marksmanship fundamentals. I want to outline the test itself, why I defined this requirements, but also what I left out.

In this episode, we build on the concept of the minimum capable citizen caught in Scenario X by talking about medical. Both what you need to know, and what you should always expect to carry. I also discuss some of my favorite first aid kit pouches for good measure.

A series of recent events reminded me of the importance of actually checking your gear for fit, function, and purpose. It doesn't have to take long, and it pays dividends when you actually have to use your stuff for competition, personal defense, or worse. Unfortunately, many people just don't know where to start, so they begin and end with mounting pouches on their kit, snapping a few photos, and saying "Good enough!"

Today we continue on our Scenario-X series by touching on fitness. It's a core pillar of The Everyday Marksman philosophy, and in this episode I'm giving three domains where it really makes a difference. Only one of them actually has to do with accomplishing the mission at hand.

Gear articles are among the most popular on the site, so it shouldn't surprise you that I get a lot of questions about what chest rig to buy, how to set up belts, or whether or not someone really needs a set of plates and night vision. When just starting out, an aspiring prepared citizen is easily overwhelmed by the myriad of choices out there, not to mention the cost of actually acquiring it all. To many, the simple answer is defaulting to how the military does it. That means dividing up your equipment into first line, second line, third...

When we start talking about bad situations and what we think we're going to do, most people in the shooting world immediately think of firefights and raids. But that's not reality. There are far more mundane concerns that we're going to spend our time worrying about. Int his post, I'm proposing a system for quickly communicating defensive posture to yourself and the world.

I've been having a lot of conversations lately about the right mixture of skills, equipment, communications, and other elements of a theoretical emergency situation. With that, it's time to revisit Scenario-X, our fictional disaster first introduced in the load carriage series. In this post, I want to build out my thoughts a bit more and discuss some of the nuances and reasoning behind it. Why? Well, because it's going underpin a lot of things coming up soon.

I dislike the whole New Year's resolution ritual, but that doesn't mean I don't do some self evaluation and pick some new things to focus on. In this episode, Allison and I discuss my primary focus areas for 2022, how they will affect the site, and why you should probably consider focusing on these things too.

The Tactical Games are part of a growing trend with combining physical fitness with marksmanship in competition. I've seen them talked about quite a bit over time, and I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Mike Green and his wife Pascale to talk about how the games started and what to look out four while you prepare.