I started with a simple idea: choose one drill and shoot it cold at the beginning of every live-fire training session to measure predictable performance. There would be no warm-up, no extra draws, and no “let me get settled first.” I would step to the line, shoot the drill, record the results, and live with whatever the target and timer gave me.
The original plan was 25 repetitions, which seemed like enough to reveal a pattern. Then 25 became 50. By the time I reached 50, I knew there was more to learn, so 50 became 100. When I started writing this, I was six runs short of completing the experiment. By the time this is posted, I will have finished all 100 cold runs of the same course of fire—100 opportunities to separate what was real from what was merely a good day.
The drill I chose was the Federal Air Marshal Tactical Pistol Course. For those unfamiliar with it, the qualification is a 30-round course of fire shot at seven yards. It includes drawing from concealment, multiple-shot strings, multiple targets, reloads, ready positions, turns, kneeling, and demanding time standards. In my opinion, it remains one of the best 30-round courses of fire for people who carry concealed. It is not perfect, and I have my complaints. Some portions feel dated, and not every stage reflects what the average armed citizen is likely to encounter. Like every qualification, it is still an artificial test conducted on a square range.
But it is solid.
Why I Chose This Course
What I appreciate most about the Federal Air Marshal course is that it tests the same general skills more than once—twice, to be exact. That matters because a single good performance may not tell you much. One clean draw, one fast reload, or one accurate target can be luck. When the same skills appear repeatedly, however, luck begins to run out. The course starts revealing what is actually there: what holds up, what breaks down, and what can be reproduced on demand.
That is what got me thinking. The more I ran the course, the more I considered how much of the shooting industry may be chasing the wrong objective. Too many shooters focus almost entirely on peak performance—the fastest run, the cleanest target, the personal record, or the one video where everything came together. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Peak performance has value because it shows what is possible and identifies the upper limit of your current ability. But it is still only a snapshot. It says, “I did this once.” For me, that is not enough.
Peak Performance Versus Predictable Performance
I care more about predictable performance. I want to know what I can do on demand—not after warming up, not after three practice attempts, and not after finding the rhythm of the day. I want to know what I can do when I step to the line cold. That is a different standard. Peak performance asks, “What is the best I can do?” That is an important question, but I do not believe it is the most important question in defensive shooting. Predictable performance asks, “What can I reliably do when it matters?” That is the better question.
I recently saw a clip of my good friend Larry Vickers on the Shawn Ryan Show discussing performance under combat conditions (fast forward to 1:39 for the specific conversation). I am paraphrasing, so watch the full conversation for yourself, but Larry spoke about the degradation of technical skill under stress and referenced a possible 50 percent decline. I completely agree with him. My own observations have reflected that conclusion for decades, and it is one reason we use an eight-inch vital target zone in our training. During peacetime practice, I want to guarantee an eight-inch group at any reasonable distance with any weapon. That standard is not arbitrary. It accounts for the reality that performance changes when bullets are coming back.
Under stress, the question is not whether you can shoot a neat group under comfortable conditions. The better question is whether your technique can survive the speed of the encounter. Going fast once does not prove your technique is sound. It may only prove that you got away with it once. Fear, movement, uncertainty, pain, noise, and confusion all have a vote. The draw feels different, the sights arrive later, the trigger press becomes rougher, and the reload loses its precision. Everything that appeared sharp on the range begins showing cracks when the pace increases and genuine pressure arrives.
That is why I care less about the occasional fast run and more about whether the same technique holds up repeatedly. Speed exposes weakness. It reveals whether your grip is properly built, whether your visual process is disciplined, whether your trigger control is consistent, and whether your body can keep pace with what your mind is demanding. A single fast run proves very little. Repeatable speed does. When you can deliver acceptable hits within the standard across multiple cold runs, you are beginning to build something useful. Anything less may simply be luck wearing a shot timer. That is the world I care about training for.
What Holds Up Cold
The important question is not what you accomplished once when everything went right. The important question is what you can do when you have to perform for real. That is why cold performance carries so much weight. A cold run tells a different truth. It reveals where your skill actually lives before you dress it up with warm-up shots and extra attempts, establishing an honest baseline.
That baseline may not flatter you. Mine did not always flatter me. Some runs felt good but scored poorly, while others felt rough yet remained within the standard. Some days the gun moved well. On other days, the sights arrived late. Sometimes the reload was clean. Other times, I had to fight both the gun and the clock. That is why the data is so difficult to ignore. Feelings lie. The target does not.
The timer does not care how prepared you felt. The target does not care whether you were tired, distracted, stiff, or cold. The course does not care that you had a long day. It gives you a result, and that result belongs to you. That is one reason I continued beyond 25 runs and then beyond 50. The more data I collected, the harder it became to hide from the truth. A single run can be explained away. A dozen runs can still be excused. One hundred runs are much harder to argue with.
The Value of Consistency
My training is built around principles, not predicted events. I cannot know what lies ahead—the time, location, distance, lighting, terrain, or exact nature of the problem. If I knew all of that in advance, I probably should not be there in the first place. Because the event is unknowable, training must produce something that travels well, and that something is consistency.
Consistency gets a bad reputation because it sounds boring. It is not the word that sells videos, and it does not generate the same excitement as speed, a personal record, or a hero run. But consistency is the secret sauce. A consistent shooter may not always look flashy or produce the fastest run of the day, but he tends to remain inside the lines. His bad runs are not disasters, his misses are limited, and his performance does not swing wildly from one attempt to the next. That matters when you carry a gun for serious purposes.
What the Numbers Began to Show
When you collect data across 100 repetitions, patterns begin to rise to the surface and predictable performance becomes easier to identify. You see which stages consistently cost time, where points disappear, and which skills remain stable versus those that depend too heavily on how you feel that day. For the statistical geeks, this is where standard deviation becomes more interesting than your best run. For everyone else, think of standard deviation as the size of your performance swings. Are your runs grouped closely together or scattered all over the place? Are your bad runs only slightly worse than your good runs, or does your performance collapse when something goes wrong?
That became one of the most important lessons of the experiment. I am less interested in the occasional peak and more interested in the overall spread. Anyone concerned with defensive gun use should be interested in that as well. Effective training often reduces performance variance before it produces dramatic improvements in average speed or score. Read that sentence again and burn it into your memory.
Your first sign of progress may not be a major personal record. It may appear as fewer misses, fewer failed runs, or fewer catastrophic mistakes. It may show up as the bottom end of your performance moving upward. That is real progress.
Improving the Worst Acceptable Day
Most shooters want to improve their best day, and I understand why. We all enjoy setting a personal record, shaving time from a drill, and proving that we can push harder. But I believe the more valuable objective is improving your worst acceptable day. That is where the real work lives.
When training is effective, misses become less frequent, bad runs become less common, and the wheels come off less often. Your results begin to stay within a narrower and more dependable range across changing conditions. That is predictable performance. A predictable shooter rarely produces catastrophic misses. He stays close to his established baseline, reproduces acceptable results on demand, and maintains those results under pressure.
He may still have exceptional runs, and he should continue pursuing improvement, but he does not depend on luck to meet the standard. That is what I want.
Stage 1: Establishing the Cold-Draw Baseline
Stage 1 of the Tactical Pistol Course is a single round fired from concealment. During this experiment it produced 188 measured draws across 94 cold attempts, with an average time of 1.41 seconds against a 1.65-second standard. Of those 188 draws, 184 were completed within the time limit, producing a 97.9% individual time-success rate. I recorded 165 hits and 23 misses, producing an overall accuracy rate of 87.8%. Only two of the 23 misses occurred on overtime repetitions; the remaining 21 misses were fired within the par time. Altogether, 163 of the 188 repetitions were both hits and completed within the par time, producing a combined success rate of 86.7%. Both repetitions were completed within the standard on 91 of the 94 attempts, or 96.8% of the time. The median draw was 1.44 seconds, while 90% of all draws were completed in 1.51 seconds or less. That number is important because it shows that my predictable performance was inside the standard, but the slower end of my performance still had very little margin for error. There was no meaningful difference between the first and second repetitions, suggesting the second draw did not benefit significantly from the first. My average speed also remained nearly unchanged from the first half of the experiment to the second, so the repetitions did not simply make me faster. What did improve was consistency, with fewer extreme results and no overtime draws during the final 32 attempts. Stage 1 reinforced one of the experiment’s central lessons: meaningful improvement may first appear as fewer failures and tighter performance rather than a faster personal record.
The Lesson From 100 Runs
Shooting the Federal Air Marshal Tactical Pistol Course 100 times cold taught me more than one exceptional run ever could. It showed me where my baseline actually lives, revealed what holds up without a warm-up, identified where time leaks away and points disappear, and exposed the difference between feeling good and performing well.
More than anything, it reminded me that the standard does not care about excuses. The course does not care that I was tired because the vast majority were performed right after a hard workout at the gym. The target does not care that I felt slow. The timer does not care that I wanted another attempt. That is the value of a cold test: it gives you an honest answer.
Peak performance answers, “What is the best I can do?” Predictable performance answers, “What can I do when it matters?” After 100 cold runs, I know which question matters more.
