Athena Lee Shooting

March 11-13, 2011

My brand new, obnoxiously red, inov-8 mudclaws were making their debut at the Texas Open Championship. I stumbled upon these shoes as I was looking up inov-8 for a potentially new pair of running shoes. inov-8 is a shoe company based in the UK specializing in all sorts of different running shoes. They are very popular in CrossFit and I already own a pair that I use for running. I love them because they are lightweight and have more padding on the forefoot rather than the heel. As I was going browsing through their different pairs of shoes, I saw this and immediately fell in love. I ordered them online (Zappos has free shipping both ways!!) and tried them and they were FANTASTIC. My feet didn’t hurt at the end of the day. It was so comfortable and just so grippy! Even when we shot a stage with a plywood ramp, it held on and I was able to shoot on the move and stop with no problem at all!

My new shoes!!

Again, I digress…Back to the match. I was feeling PUMPED! I had a promising practice session a weekend before the match where I found out that the C-More on my main gun was not functioning like it should. I could not group at 15 yards to save my life! Luckily, I had my back-up gun and shot it and eliminated the possibility that it was operator error. I switched out the C-More and was happy to see that I started grouping with the gun. I was sighted in! I had a gun that grouped and brand new shoes for Texas Open. It was SHOWTIME!

(Insert the sound of loud screeching tires here)

I threw a miss on our first stage. It hit the barrel prop beside the target. I saw it and I didn’t re-engage. Kay saw that I knew this and scolded me on why I didn’t shoot at it again. I knew I had a problem with wanting to go faster and that just reinforced it. And there went my goal of not having a miss at this match.

Rockin’ my new shoes at the TX Open -Thanks Roy Steadman for the pic!

The next couple of stages went ok. I shot decently and by the time we shot the stage before our lunch break, my gun stove-piped twice. NOOOO!!!! I thought it may be just dirty so I figured I’d clean it right after lunch. But no, the shooting gods had a more dastardly plan for me.

I took the top end apart and started to clean it and when I put it back, it felt weird racking the slide. Lo and behold, I had a gigantic crack on the left side of my slide by the ejection port. NOOOOOOO!!!!!! Jerry Miculek told me in his wise, Jerry-like way that if I continued to shoot it, it could potentially fall apart and projectile hit me in the face. Um, no thanks. Unfortunately, I had sent my back-up gun to Johnny a few weeks ago to have him re-do the top end so I had no back-up. Kay was nice enough to lend me her gun so I could finish the match but unfortunately, with her barrel being so brand new, some of my range brass refused to eject thereby making me zero a stage. On the upside, at least my disastrous equipment failure happened when the match was 30 minutes away from my house instead of halfway across the country!