SAC Steve Boyes - Training Diary 26 September 2011

Back into training after a good weekend at Oktoberfest in Munich which is the worlds biggest beer festival. After the festival we picked up Carl and Danny from the Airport as they had just returned from a biathlon shooting instructor course they had both successfully passed.

We had a hard skating session in the morning on the Seigsdorf loop, three reps of the three biggest hills on the loop. It didn't start too well for Carl, he stepped on Mat's pole breaking it ¾ of the way down and then he broke his own tip, so ended skating the rest of the loop with no poles. We did hill reps alternating between skiing without poles and using techniques called skate 1 and skate 2.

In the afternoon we went to the range and had a ply-metrics circuit with shooting, it took me a long time to zero my rifle, I think because the sun was above the targets making it hard to get a clear sight picture. We began by doing one shot drills in the prone and stand position, followed by 5 shots (a full magazine) onto paper targets. The ply-metrics circuit was hard after the morning’s session, there were 10 stations that alternated between bounding, upper body and agility exercises and were all explosive exercises then straight into shooting on metal targets with a raised heart rate and wobbly legs.