By Mads Villadsen, SDKSkyt, Ballerup
Being part of POMW III has truly been an adventure, it has been a long, hard, exciting, interesting, emotional, journey that has been worth it all and my experience is that it is exactly like our motto: "We meet people where they are and take them on a journey" 😊.
This is probably the most accurate sentence I can come up with that can best describe this entire course.
All as one, we have been met exactly where we had, our individual starting point for this journey and have been taken by the hand and helped in the best possible way, with the most optimal conditions to be able to achieve our full potential.
The POMW III course was set to run over 3 days, 3 full Sundays of 13.5 hours each in a row, to intensify the pressure and process for all participants, thereby maximizing their chance for a higher development process.
After the POMW II course, I was quite broken, and I was frankly about to go down with the flag. I had been controlled so much by my emotions that it had almost destroyed everything at times.
But that changed on the three POMW III days, when all participants had their very special experiences when we were out shooting.
First Sunday, September 15. POMW lla.
Before we had actually started POMW III we had been given a homework assignment. The task was that we had to create a special device for our shooting, which had to fit our respective heights when we sat down on a chair and shot. Kimu Sensei told us that the hunting corps shooting instructor had told him that good shooters must be able to shoot anywhere, anytime and with anything. Actually a really fun task and I built three different shooting devices that I had lying around in the shed and chose to include the one I thought was the best.
Kimu Sensei said that this team would be the last team to complete POMW III. Being lucky enough to be allowed and given the opportunity to attend this course has truly been a fantastic opportunity for me, for which I am extremely grateful. Therefore, it was now even more important to have the humility to learn everything I could from this course.
But no training with Kimu Sensei starts without him having to challenge us a little, he did that by telling us that shooting is designed to make it as simple as possible - so that anyone can learn it 😊 so it's about how much you trust yourself even.
So it's not difficult to do, you just have to trust the trigger and hit the black target - it's that simple. But anyone who has tried shooting knows that it is not ''just'' that simple and when it is said that way you are challenged and it brings up a lot of emotions in you.
Then we spent some time making individual setups which consisted of some white plastic boxes and some flamingo pieces of different thicknesses. Then everything was in place and then it really got going, we shot 50 shots with caliber .22, all shots were with support. The last 30 shots were valid and we had to give a bid on what we had each scored, a so-called shot-calling.
It shouldn't just be a random guess, but it should be based on how it felt. I guessed 180 myself, but it was actually 206 – it was better than I expected. But I wasn't satisfied because on day 1 I focused a lot on the target and I compared myself a lot to many of the others - who got much higher points for their shooting.
Throughout that day's practice, I had MAJOR problems with the trigger. I got so frustrated that I couldn't figure out how to shoot correctly. I was so controlled by my emotions that in my notes for that day I wrote: REMEMBER NOW FOR HELL, Press and Squeeze.
During that whole day, I could feel that I was not in balance, because I was both up and completely down. Which is what I have been working on ever since I started the first part of the course. And it was as if nothing had happened or that I had gone back to the beginning. It was also reflected in my results because it didn't go so well, I got 206, 241, <200 in three rounds.
In and of itself, shooting 241 wasn't such a bad shot, but I was in no way good on myself the way I did it. Because I was by no means constant, I was either all the way up or all the way down.
Kimu Sensei can only address what is in the way, but it is my job to change that.
My gun made a lot of mistakes, which just didn't make anything better. It was wildly frustrating, which was part of what made it difficult for me to stay focused. I therefore blamed everything but myself, to avoid realizing the truth 😊.
I was becoming my own worst enemy - and that's something you should never allow yourself to do. I wish everyone in the world could hear this because there are already enough people who want to belittle you. So don't be the one to do it to yourself.
The following week I was lucky enough to have Jens Hanshi-dai practice with me with his laser gun at a local training, where he gave me some good feedback/points to remember which I really appreciated. These were some of the ''basic things'' but at least as important as all other things.
An ever important part of this course is dry training at home, this is where you can really geek out with the process and not be distracted by anything or anyone else. It is surprisingly also where I have made some of my biggest discoveries about my mistakes and my improvements.
Second Sunday. POMW IIIb. September 22.
We started with 30 rounds of .22 just to warm up. We're going to shoot a lot of shots today, Kimu Sensei said, so you have to get used to the recoil of a 9 mm. We started with 4 rounds from the start of the day.
- Guess (235) shot 229
- Guess (200) shot <200 with 8 in black.
- Guess (240) shot <200 with 13 in black
- Guess (230) shot 218. The process actually felt really good. Although it was not reflected in the result.
It was nice to be comfortable with the gun in a way, but I still wasn't friends with the recoil and so I bend off either up or down in my attempt to try to control it.
It was 160 shots with 9 mm in total and all seated with support. So it was no lie that we had to shoot a lot that day.
At some point towards the end of the day's training, Kimu Sensei took me aside and gave me some personal feedback.
The feedback was that I still had big problems with the trigger. He said: “That's what you struggle with, because you know how to shoot. But you must remember the Press and Squeeze part of your flue. Because when you just pull the trigger, your shots are very scattered. You must not drive yourself down either physically or mentally. REMEMBER every shot counts”.
Kimu Sensei also told me that I could easily shoot between 30-50 points better that day if I just listened and I was quite happy about that 😊.
Last Sunday, September 29. POMW IIIc.
We went straight on and hard from the start – Not so much talk.
First with support.
- Guess (210) shot 245
- Guess (225) shot 246
And then without support, i.e. standing.
- Guess (215) shot 221
It was almost unfathomable and I had to rub my eyes and look twice at the board when I saw the results for this time's shooting.
Kimu Sensei's feedback was that I was a real pleasure to work with on the day and that he just had to give a small correction and I corrected it immediately, because as soon as I could remember it and then I corrected it. It was still the trigger with the "Press and Squeeze" part I had to work with, but it had gotten much better.
Then it was the instructors' time to shoot with 9mm and here Magnus and William who are two of my good training buddies and I were selected to load magazines for Kimu Sensei while he was shooting with the instructor team. It was a really good and fun experience, Kimu Sensei shot faster than we three chargers could charge for him 😊.
My whole process went much better than ever, both with caliber 0.22 and 9mm. Kimu Sensei once said that it is not the one with the most talent who will always be the best, but the one who is most constant in his development process, the one who is most persistent.
I have really learned a lot about myself through the POMW course. I have never been the best at anything in my circle of friends. I have never been the smartest, fastest, strongest, happiest, or most composed person. But what I have always had to do instead is fight for it, because I have always been in a situation where it just never came naturally to me. I have had to work for all the things I wanted to be able to do.
Anyone can come and say that it's nothing special and there are perhaps even more who didn't think it was nothing special - but it is for me!
That's why it was a huge feeling of success to finish and Kimu Sensei told me that all of a sudden today you cracked the code. It sounds really strange and flat-headed but something clicked and suddenly it/the process just got easier.
It's the coolest feeling in the world, yes you get really high from it and it makes you want more.
Etc. Mads.
