I recently had a friend ask me how to set up the CR Speed holster he'd bought for his Sig X-Five. We were going to try to go over it while I was last in California, but we ran out of time. So... out came the video camera, and away I went. To save on bandwidth, I popped them onto YouTube and left them unprotected, so that everyone can see them - and they seem to be useful for folks.

So, here's the vids... Yeah, plural. The whole thing was about 17 minutes long! However, this pretty much covers the bases on the Hows and Whys on setting up a holster - CR Speed in particular, but the reasons for the adjustments apply to every holster out there. Some will be more or less adjustable than others, but the principles are the same.

Enjoy!

I've shot the Double Tap Championship 4 times now, and the match has never failed to be a fun and challenging experience. It didn't hurt that I had one of the best performances of my career, too. The theme this year was "Indiana Jones", and was a 13 stage, 348 round contest that was mostly more straight up than most matches. Sure, there were the usual Robert Porter embellishments, based on the match theme - but the majority of the stages had very little in the way of "carnival factor" to them this year.

The biggest individual challenge this year? The weather! More on that in a bit... First, here's the match video...

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Looking back, I think I could've at least partially predicted my 2008 season. Coming out of a pretty good 2007 season, I achieved a life long goal... making Grand Master in USPSA's Open division. It was the culmination of a lot of investment (hard work, money, mental energy, you name it). Achieving that goal comes pretty easily to some folks, less easily to others. My improvement was gradual, but actually hitting that milestone felt pretty big to me. And... I didn't have a strong sense of what came next. I knew that put me in a position to be a little stagnant - I was OK with that, and gave myself permission to simply enjoy the achievement, without too much pressure to go beat the world in the next season.

So, I went out into the 2008 season with a goal to attend more major matches, and to really learn what it was going to take for me to win at the upper levels of this sport. The lessons - some big, some subtle - were many. I had a few failures along the way, but countered with a few successes. The matches - and the season as a whole - were something of a roller coaster. So... here are some thoughts, and a little video to go with it.

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Phoenix in November is a beautiful thing, no doubt about it. The Area 2 Championship (aka, the Rio Salado Desert Classic) has a strong reputation for being a quality match with a superb prize table. This was my first year attending the match, and I can tell you that, for the most part, it lived up to the hype. First, the vid - then more after the break:

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