My First Run and Gun
Kahles K16i with Strelok DOPE printed on Rite-in-the-Rain paper.
I am not a competitive shooter, but I like to shoot competitions. Often times you tell someone you shoot competitions and automatically they assume you must be Max Michel. The skill prerequisite for entering a shooting competition is three-fold. Being able to locate the event and arrive on time, finding/earning the money to pay the entry fee and finally, having the ability to sign the paperwork. That’s it. This is a good thing though, too often I hear “I want to get better so I can start shooting competitions.” It doesn’t work that way and you don’t need to get better first. Drop your ego, show up, and learn. If you wait to get better, I can assure you, you will never show up.
To date I have shot a fair amount of pistol comps (IDPA), a US Arms match with my PCC (MPX) and now, my very first 5k Run and Gun. When I first heard of these types of comps I was intrigued for several reasons. First of all, it involves two guns, not three, and I couldn’t care any less about a shotgun for anything other than shooting small game. Secondly, there was a fitness aspect. After a near 5 year hiatus from anything physical, I started Crossfit roughly 2.5 years ago. Long ago in a time far, far way, I was a pretty good runner too, with several 10k’s and a couple half-marathons under my belt. Though I haven’t run any farther than about 1.5 miles in nearly 10 years, how hard could it be?
If you aren’t familiar with a Run and Gun competition it is basically a centerfire biathlon. The runs are usually somewhere between 5k and 10k, sometimes more, and you must run with both your rifle and your pistol, along with all the mags/ammo/water etc that you will want/need for the entire race. The only thing you can leave behind is empty brass. There are shooting stages along the way and often times some type of physical challenges as well. The premise is basically an end-of-times scenario and you are just surviving with what you are able carry with you. What’s not to like?
Sig P365 with P365XL Frame in Safariland ALS.
I signed up for the River Bend Gun Club Run & Gun in Dawsonville Georgia with roughly 3 months to prepare. My most immediate need was a carbine that would fit the bill, and I detailed that rifle in depth here: https://www.twobluescrews.com/blog/joseph While that rifle build might seem a bit contrary to my next statement, my pistol choice was my trusty P365 with XL frame as I am absolutely not into “gaming” competitions. I shoot competitions for one reason only, to increase my chance of surviving in the real world. Because of this, I carry what I shoot. Of course this puts me at a disadvantage when it comes to placement in comps, but I think it gives me a huge advantage in a real world scenario over someone who is just gaming the system.
Soft silicone water bottle, no sloshing and flexes to go wherever you need it.
To prepare for the run, I weighed all my equipment that I would need to carry and it resulted in nearly 19 lbs of gear. I ordered a 20lb weight vest from Amazon, divided 3.1 miles out by the total number of weeks until the event and started ramping up my weekly runs accordingly with the vest on. I can’t overstate how important it is to run weighted in preparation for these things. 20 lbs might not seem like much, but running distance with that type of weight is a shock to the system if you are not prepared for it. Considering my current state of fitness after a couple years of Crossfit, I was shocked how difficult the weight runs were.
Esstac pouches on Blue Alpha Gear belt.
For gear, I did everything I could to keep my weight to a minimum and run as slick as possible. I did not wear any type of chest rig and kept everything on my belt and in my pockets. I chose a Blue Alpha Gear Inner/Outer belt combo, Esstac 2+1 mag pouch, and Spritius Systems GP Pouch. My P365 was holstered in a Safariland ALS holster and my water bottle was a soft silicone Salomon bottle (no sloshing!) I wore Kuhl Silencer pants as they had great stretch, ripstop, were super light, shed water like a duck and most importantly had two identical side pockets with no flaps. I would need these for quick access to my mags. My shirt was a Vuori Surf T that was super light and breathable and for footwear I wore the Saucony Guide ISO TR’s shoes combined with Injinji toe socks.
Garmin Instinct. First real HR/ABC watch in years, highly recommend.
To manage my wait time at stages (required) I wore my Garmin Instinct watch which would also be there to track any HR/Pace/Distance data I would want to go through after the race. I wore custom molded ear plugs for the entire event as I don’t like anything heavy on my head or over my ears. For eyepro, I chose the Smith Carbonic Elite because I thought they looked good and had just enough tint to block the sun but not enough to hinder me if I got into some lowlight/shady areas.
I made sure to start hydrating a couple days before the event and knowing I had a launch time of around 12:30pm, I decided to eat a good early breakfast and just snack lightly up until time to go. I perform best a little hungry in almost everything I do and I certainly didn’t want a full stomach for this event. I snacked on some homemade protein balls throughout the early morning and one hour before the run I ate a Honey Stinger Waffle.
Toe socks are worth any embarrassment you may have to endure prior to getting your shoes on.
Competitors are launched out separately in 5-7 minute intervals to prevent bunching up at the shooting stages. They want you to come into the stage from a run, heart rate elevated, and get to shooting as quickly as possible. We were ahead of schedule on launch day and my name was called about 15 minutes prior to my assigned launch time. I rushed to put on my belt and equipment and got to the start line with about 30 seconds to spare. Upon the signal “Go” I started off running down the hill toward stage 1.
Stage 1 was roughly 100 yards from the start line and I arrived there with no one in front of me to wait on. The stage was deceptively simple. Two targets were down range 30 yards away and 20 yards from each other. The first target was a reduced IPSC steel target and the second target was a full paper IPSC. There was a box directly in line with each target at the 30 yard mark. You were to stand in the box and engage the reduced steel target with your pistol until you got 1 hit, holster, and then sprint to the next box where you would engage the paper target with your rifle, firing one shot. You would then run back to the pistol target and repeat this until you have hit the pistol target 10 times, and fired 10 shots total on the rifle target . There was a 3 minute time limit and only A/B zone hits on the paper target counted.
Having never shot both rifle and pistol in a competition it quickly became apparent I was going to have to pay extra attention to breaking 180 degrees with my slung rifle. With my rifle slung across my chest and muzzle angled just outside of my left foot, every time I turned to my left to run from the rifle box to the pistol box the RO was yelling “Muzzle!” in my ear. While I was in zero danger of discharging anywhere else but about 8-12” into the ground next to my left foot, a rule is a rule and you cannot break the 180. After getting that under control by basically running sideways with my rifle shoved across my body, I started off quickly hitting my pistol and trying to run as fast as possible to the rifle box as to not time out. As I made hit after hit with my pistol I got a bit overconfident somewhere around hit number 7 or 8 and missed 3 or 4 in a row until I slowed myself back down. I ended up hitting my 10th pistol target at slide lock, my 15th round, and sprinted to fire my 10th rifle round at exactly the 3 minute mark. Not a single second to spare. I ended up with 2 rifle hits on paper outside of the A/B zone and therefore had 2 penalties on that stage.
After clearing both weapons I took off running toward stage two which seemed to be about 1 mile away from stage one. After arriving at stage 2, you were instructed to choose one of any available shotguns in the rack and load it. For some reason, I chose a double barrel even though I have never owned one. Why I didn’t pick up one of the pump shotguns I will never know. After loading the gun it was to be staged near the shooting area. You then were to perform 15 burpees in all of your gear and attempt to hit 2 rolling and 3 pop up clays. The burpees were easy for me as I do them 3-4 times a week. Actually shooting a double barrel proved to be much more difficult, mostly, I hope, due to exertion. I don’t know if I didn’t understand if the safety was on or off (I think it was backwards) or if I was switched to the proper barrel, but I had two clicky-no-bangs, two misses and 1 hit. Luckily, this stage was not scored as a shooting stage but each hit on the clay removed 5 minutes from your run time. The stage time was counted against your total run time, so running through the burpees fairly quickly was good for me.
I immediately headed toward stage 3 which first required clearing a roughly 6 ft wall. I dispatched of that fairly quickly and then made my way to a mock roof top. The roof top had no shingles, a fairly steep angle and was slippery. There were two targets, a reduced IPSC steel at 100 yards and a full IPSC at 600 yards. You had 3 minutes to hit each target 5 times, alternating from one to the other. The hardest part was finding a stable way to remain on the roof. Right, wrong or indifferent, I ended up settling on a very uncomfortable position where I held myself, well, more like hung myself, by putting my left hand on top of the rooftop and just using my right hand to shoot. I hit the 100 yard target and immediately had problems at 600 even thought I had made this in practice on a much smaller target many times. I thought I just wasn’t stable enough so I continued to send rounds downrange with the same hold. Once I realized that I was supposed to be holding at the bottom of the target for 600 yards as my DOPE card indicated, I made the adjustment and got the hit. I then proceeded to alternate back and forth fairly quickly and cleared the round with 3 seconds remaining.
I had a difficult time finding stage 4 and ran around quite a bit like a chicken with my head cut off, but finally located it at the top of a hill. Stage 4 started with a low wire crawl across sand and then engaging a single steel target at 100 yards with the rifle through a “box.” The box was actually a cube approximately 2.5 ft wide on all sides and sat maybe 4 feet off the ground to center. Only the front panel was removed from the cube. There were elongated ports located on the top, bottom and both sides of the back panel. The ports on the right side and top side are designed to stovepipe your weapon (if you are right-handed), the other two are just a pain to shoot from. You must make 3 shots only from each of the 4 ports. Any misses would have to be made up at 50 yards with your pistol. I got extremely lucky on this stage and was able to angle my gun just right to avoid any malfunctions. I remember shooting the top portion with my middle finger on the trigger, but it worked. I ended up shooting this stage clean only with the rifle and fast enough to place 2nd overall for the stage.
There was a very long run, likely over 1 mile back to stage 5 where you had to stage your rifle 30 yards away and lay down behind a barricade. You drew your pistol and engaged 5 targets and then drug a rope with weights to your staged rifle. From there you would pick up your rifle and engage all remaining targets. There were a fair amount of hostage targets on this stage so I shot it somewhat slow with my pistol and had one failure to neutralize on the rifle, which was stupid since you could shoot as many rounds as you like. Adrenaline makes you do truly stupid things.
The final stage was located close to round 5 and required attempting to throw either hatches or knives into two wooden boards which would have resulted in some run time reduction had you stuck them. I didn’t. The remaining targets were all pistol targets and I ran through it quickly but carefully. I did have my first ever malfunction on my P365 with a failure to feed. I cleared the malfunction quite quickly and got back on track. I shot the stage clean and then sprinted to the finish line.
Maverick and Goose, after photo.
In the end, I ended up 11th out of 54 overall for my first time trying one of these events. My shooting score was 12th and my raw run time, somewhere between 8th and 3rd. I will never truly know because any run time reductions for sticking the knives/hatchets on stage 5 were not broken out in the scoring. Given all the things that I could see possibly going wrong, I think I did fairly well. I came home an immediately signed up for another R&G event in November, this one a 10k. It’s safe to say while time and prep extensive, these events are the most fun I have had in competition shooting and I am hoping to be able to get in a 3-4 per year.
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