There are a lot of people who use zero shoes and minimalist footwear and natural movement for professional sports, but we're going to talk about a sport you've probably never heard of and that's probably because most people haven't heard of it, but it's very interesting and not what you think and that's what this episode of the movement movement is all about. This is the podcast where people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting feet first, you know, those things at the bottom of your legs that are your foundation where we break down the propaganda, the mythology and sometimes the outright lies you've been told about what it takes to run, walk, hike, play, do yoga, cross it, whatever you like to do, including what we're going to talk about on this podcast and to do it enjoyably and efficiently and effectively. Did I say enjoyably? Trick question, of course I know I did because, look, if you're not having fun doing something, you're not going to keep it up, so don't do that.
Find something you enjoy and do that. I am Stephen Sashan, your host of the Movement Movement podcast, the co-founder and chief barefoot officer at Zero Shoes and we call it the movement movement because we, that includes you more about that in a second, are creating a movement about natural movement, letting your body do what it's made to do without getting the way it causes problems as a result. The you part is really simple, spread the word. So give us a nice five-star review, give us a thumbs up or you can thumbs up, give us a bell icon on YouTube and follow us on YouTube.
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Philip, welcome to the podcast. Tell people who you are and what you do that is this interesting new thing you're doing or just to say anything and we'll kind of get to what you do where people are going to have some interesting thoughts. Yeah, absolutely. Hi.
So I am the face in behind the pseudo-actual account. That's S-U-D-O underscore actual and there is a meaning behind that name. It's not just a bunch of misspellings of the term pseudo or pseudonym. And I am focused on- It's also not a misspelling of sumo.
Yes. It's not the sport we're talking about. So to make sure people don't go on that, down that, or whatever that I'll say. Yeah, you know, sometimes in the tech world it's kind of called pseudo, but I call it pseudo.
We can get into that in a bit, but those accounts primarily focus on health fitness and competition shooting with competition shooting being kind of the primary focus, but specifically in what I would call an emerging sport, which some people might take offense to that. I can get into some of the history to it of running gun, which is colloquial known as running gun, but it's more accurately known as center fire to gun by Athlon. Now, of course, here in the States, it's kind of hard to find snow, especially down south in Texas. So the byathlon part of it is more cross country running.
So these courses that I shoot primarily are out in the rural areas of Texas and they are large one way adventure courses, essentially, with shooting events and shooting stages along the way. Some of these range from four miles out to I think the longest one I have done so far and a single day is 14 miles in the morning. Oftentimes they're full weekend event. These are large events when you compare them to some of the other shooting sports that are out there.
They take place from typically Friday to Sunday with multiple options on how to participate and how to compete throughout the weekend. So I'm going to back up a bit because I know some people when we hear the word shooting like lose their mind to begin with and I want to calm them down. So let's back up and talk by Athlon. This is at the very least many people may know if they watch the Olympics and one of the sports that they will change the channel on is the byathlon, which because they're going, it's like, why would I watch cross country skiing?
That's boring. And then why would I watch people shooting targets? That's boring too. So we've got boring times too.
That's whatever else I can watch instead. But so talk about the history of just the Nordic byathlon and because I can only guess that what you developed sort of was inspired by that. And like you said, ain't a lot of snow in Texas, although every now and then I'll help actually see the hot work old. Yes.
Yeah. So to add some historical context here, right? So the original byathlon appeared in like the Scandinavian era or region towards like I think the late 1800s, it's really got its like official government sponsorship to become the civilian by Athlon. I believe somewhere in like the 1910s or 1908s and it takes its roots in like infantry ski patrol, which was like the military roots of it.
And then the civilian version of it was cross country skiing with shooting along the way, right? They ski to particular stages. And you know, that sport has evolved over time. So what you see now in like the modern winter Olympics where, you know, really when it comes to like Olympic shooting competitions, what you see is kind of odd, right?
You'll see essentially what looks like space be begins, right? These things are, you know, there is a particular set of defined rules, right? They will whip out the tape measure and they will make sure that you are within those rules in terms of the equipment that you can use. That's why you see guys, you know, really trying to, you know, eke out every bit of performance that they can get, you know, with the different, you know, set up that they get, they're all within the rulesets, which is a very rigid ruleset to try and level the playing field.
Well, just to get it up again. So yeah, if you haven't watched Olympic shooting, it is fascinating because like you said, not to leave at the guns look space age, but yeah, all the stuff they're wearing on their face and on their body. I mean, it's really, it's very common. I just lost the movie that I'm thinking of, not the Terminator, RoboCop.
It's very RoboCop. And it's one of those things, and correct me if I'm wrong, I don't know if you've ever, how much you've watched those competitions. But like that and archery, any of those target sport kind of things, I imagine are much more interesting in real life if you can actually see them because sometimes you're too far away in the audience. But if you can see them, just that sort of, you know, the mounting pressure of knowing that people are competing to be fractions of a millimeter better than the other person can get really, I mean, pretty intense watching on TV.
It's like, you know, you kind of get a bit of that. But I mean, when I've seen some of the sports live, you're like freaking out. I mean, it's crazy. Yeah, there's definitely performance anxiety there.
I mean, they are large spectator sports. And the ruleset in particular is kind of crafted in a way that makes it a good spectator sport, right? You know, like 50 meters, it's something where you can see the shooter and you can see the target and they're plugging away to try and stack their shots, right? Or, you know, they're skiing cross country in a method that makes it spectator sport friendly, right?
Kind of like a rally cross or rally racing. But yeah, coming back to kind of the equipment, I would personally frame that as being a bit gamer, right? You're gamifying the rules. Well, because they are trying to pull out those milliseconds or pull out the less than an inch shot with open sights at 50 meters with a pelican or sometimes a rimfire gun, right?
And you know, it's, that's just the nature of the sport. You get a rule set and you get people who try to find that rule set and you got every bit of your performance they can. Now, that is very stark contrast to what you'll find stateside. So stateside, kind of the name that we use is running gun, but I do take a little bit of an issue with that name because technically most shooting sports incorporate running, right?
You'll find USPSA or Ipsyk, they're running, they're running in attack A or a flat bay, you know, but they're running 40 yards. Now the running gun I'm talking about really is by Avalon. It's a cross country adventure race. And so the longer the better we're talking miles and miles or tens of miles, in fact, there's is an endurance event, an annual endurance event here in Texas where I think the top runner put down 30, 35 miles, maybe it's 30 miles and it was sent up to sundown, right?
Wow. That's a very stark contrast to what you'll find in USPSA or any other shooting sport that you'll, you know, three gun, three gunners tend to have a lot of movement on stage, not dozens of miles. Of course, where, where is paramount? When you're moving across country, right?
That's one of my favorite aspects of this whole style of shooting is the cross country hike or the runner job, whatever you end up doing. There are no rules. You don't have to run. You don't have to jog.
Of course, you will be much better off running and having some levels of cardio that can actually put you into a competitive bracket. At the end of the day, this is a race and your overall scores are reflective of how fast did you move and how proficient you are in marksmanship. That's the other stark contrast here too is the bath long here in the States. We're shooting real guns.
We're not shooting DV guns. We're pushing the disc at some of these events. I've shot out to 800 yards, which is very challenging. It also is not spectator friendly, right?
Because you can't even see where the target bar unless you have a spotting scope or something like that, which is a part of the challenge as well. So typically then for these events, rifles not pistols, correct? So the full name would be two gun. You could classify this, I guess, as a triathlon.
That's pretty much it. Not really. It's a little bit. It is two gun.
There is a pistol component and a carbine mostly component. Most of the distances are inside of 400 yards. Every now and then they do push it. I actually had one last weekend that I was at.
The furthest target was advertised as 650 yards. I don't think it actually was. I think it was more like 550, maybe 590. When we first started talking about this, I was having flashbacks.
Now, obviously for anyone who's listening to me, they know that the last thing I have to be interested in is a cross-country run as a sprinter. Anything over 100 meters. I'm just like, I got to get a GPS watch and a nap. So that's not going to happen.
But at the same time, especially when you say you don't have to run it, that becomes interesting. Also, when I was a kid, I was really into target shooting of all kinds. I was never a hunter. That's not my thing.
But I'd go to summer camp and archery and rifle were my two favorite things to do. I was the best one at the camp doing them. It's such a fascinating sport. It's a weird thing to call it that because we typically think of sports something that's very physically active.
It is in many ways. As a former American gymnast now, master's all American sprinter, there's so many parallels between shooting and those things about what you need to do correctly. The mental training that goes with this involved. Some of the physical training as well about how you pay attention to your breath, how you're paying attention to very subtle things about moving in posture.
As a sprinter, someone gave me a cue just recently that changed my running form and made me faster. Tiny, tiny little thing. I mean, literally, if you look at the difference in a slow motion video at 240 frames a second, it's the difference of two frames but changed everything. So I find this all totally, totally interesting.
In fact, for the fun of saying it, we'll see if anyone freaks out about this. I was a proud member of the NRA 50 years ago because that's when the NRA was all about target shooting and it was barely about hunting even. Certainly not about what it turned into in the last 20 years. So the whole thing, I found totally fascinating and the sake of being totally transparent because I liked that so much.
One of my post-retirement fantasies I shared with you is I'd love to go to sniper school. Not that I have any interest in shooting a person or a living thing but to your point of shooting a target 800 meters away or a click and a half away, what it takes to do that is really fascinating. In fact, for the sake of saying this, I spend a lot of time doing a lot of meditation and there's a lot of the people who are training to be able to shoot like that do a lot of that work as well because you've got to do crazy things like pull the trigger in between heart beats. Amazingly fine-tuned physiological stuff.
So that's the part that I find most intriguing about what you've put together. Yes, absolutely. Fitness and marksmanship do go hand in hand. Now it is very easy depending on how you're shooting.
If you're shooting at 50 yards, you can probably slack off on your fitness levels quite a bit. But to maintain marksmanship proficiency at nine miles in on a cross-country trail and get impacts at four or 500 yards, that's a different level. There is a bar there. Now yes, you can hike these events and honestly that's like 50% of the draw for me.
That's getting to see Texas and other states that I've been to do this kind of competition. It's just really fantastic to get to see the hike. I've been everywhere from the plains of Oklahoma over into Kentucky and Missouri and into Texas, of course, Texas is really just exploding with these events. When I first started about five years ago, there was maybe one event every quarter, maybe.
And now it's two, three, four events every month, which is I mean, it's just incredible. Obviously, the shooting community and the fitness community are emerging on this one and it's creating a big draw. And that's one of the challenges with Texas is that there's not a lot of public land. And so if you really want to explore Texas and not be at a state park or be at a national park, you got to find your way onto some of these private ranches.
And that's where all of these events take place. Interesting. And some of these ranches are just enormous, right? Like the YO ranch down in South Texas.
I mean, it's dozens of square miles. Wow. It's absolutely enormous. And you don't get to go on there unless you go to an event like this.
How many people are coming to this from the fitness side versus the shooting side? And that's kind of a hard one to answer. So I would say in terms of shooting competitions, there's really like two categories, right? There's the category that focuses almost 99% of their effort on marksmanship proficiency in some way, right?
If you look at USPSA, USPSA is all really about the hit factor. This is going to probably light someone on fire who's really into USPSA because I'm going to probably. Well, so USPSA, United States. Yeah, that's the United States Practical Shooting Association.
Right. This is probably one of the longer running organizations nationwide that hosts shooting competitions, right? It's almost entirely focused on pistol handguns. They do have some other divisions.
And it is, you'll find it mostly inside of flat ranges, right? 50 yards and in. Again, I'm painting a general brush here, painting pretty wide. But it is almost entirely a shooting sport, right?
I mean, that is what it is, right? It's focused entirely on your pistol proficiency shooting, nothing else. Whereas, you know, there's another group, right? That's kind of the one group is shooting proficiency only.
And then there's another group of shooting sports I'd put biathelon in this as well, where there is a very physical component to it, right? The other one beyond just biathelon or running gun would be like the tactical games, right? The tactical games, I would categorize this as 90% crossfit workout with some shooting involved as well. Now they have some different versions of how they run their events.
This is a nationwide event. Honestly, to me, it seems a lot like camp light here, right? It's that CG model with some shooting, right? There's a shooting element to it.
It is very spectator friendly, right? You can observe what they're doing and they're doing a lot of reps and they're doing a lot of crossfit inspired exercises. Very physical. There's a big physical bar there.
You can't really show up and expect to do very well or even finish if you don't have a certain level of physical abilities, which I think is great. That's much further towards where I'm interested. I mean, of course, I am interested in shooting guns as well, but I like the physical component. I like the, I believe I call it type two fun, right?
This is the kind of fun that's, have you ever heard that category? Sure, so I'll go over, you know, you could maybe say there's three categories of fun. Type one fun is margaritas on the beach, right? It's fun while you're doing it and it's fun in retrospect.
Type two fun is hiking Mount Everest, not very fun. And except when you think about it in retrospect, you go, wow, that was really amazing, right? It's stuff that sucks while you're doing it. And then in retrospect, you go, that's amazing.
I want to go back and do that again, right? It's type two fun and type three fun is just not fun at all. It's not fun in retrospect and it's not fun while you're doing it. Well, I was going to say type three fun should be having margaritas while you're climbing Everest.
I think there's something there. You might end up staying on Everest permanently. Yeah, there's that. Yeah.
So type two fun is definitely where I find my weekends trying to go, right? And that usually comes down to physical exertion. Physical exertion is the thing that drags most of us down. And it's the thing that I find as I age, I'm pursuing more, right?
Because you got to stay sharp as you age and. You know, so I started working with a trainer about, oh gosh, eight, nine months ago. And this guy, we work over zoom. So he's in Brooklyn.
I'm in Colorado and the workouts that we do three times a week, 10 minutes, maybe 12 minutes max as a person who's been an athletic person my whole life. I don't like to say an athlete that just has two pretentious, but someone who's done athletic thing since I was seven. This is the hardest thing I have ever done by a long shot. It is excruciating when I'm doing it.
It takes me 10 minutes to get off the floor when we're done with an arm and chest workout. And it's the thing that makes me happiest three times a week every week. Yeah. I think we all need something hard in our life.
Yeah. Right. So I think that you can look forward to and fill yourself actually grow in, right? Well, let's be clear.
I do not look forward to leg day. There's nothing about leg day that I look forward to trying to find a way out of it is I know that if it's a really good one, I will then have four to five days of I need help getting on and off the toilet. So I will have to slide down the stairs and crawl up the stairs. And my wife will look at me and my wife is not an athletic person.
And she'll say, are you enjoying this? And I would say more than I can possibly explain. Yeah. Well, that's fine.
Too fun. Yeah. With these by Atholons, it's almost always leg day every single time. So this past one that I just competed in, it's the closest thing I know of at least in the United States to a mountain by Avalon.
And so it took place in the Davis Mountains, which believe it or not, Texas is not all flat. There are some mountains. Oh, yeah. Hold on.
How tall are these mountains? I think the tallest one in that region is like 8,300 feet. Yeah, it's a hill. It's a, you know, it's like when I went, when Layne and I, we were in the Netherlands years ago and staying with a friend who lived at the highest spot in the Netherlands, it was 200 feet high.
It was a former landfill that put sod over and then they put a bike trail that goes up and over it. And you see people, you know, like $10,000 bikes all decked out like they're in the sort of France acting like climbing 200 feet is the hardest thing they've ever done. So you're 8,300, you know, compared to the 14ers that I'm looking at right now. I mean, it's a molehill.
It's, you know, I'm a lowlander myself. Okay. As soon as I get to a mile high, I start feeling especially if I don't acclimate, which I never do when I go to this event because I just don't have to. I show up and send it, right?
And this event does take place at just below mile high and then you get to a mile high on course. So this course had about 1200 feet of elevation change total. That's, you know, up and down. Yeah.
Um, which is not the craziest I've done here in Texas. The craziest I've done is about 3000 feet of elevation change, which was. Yeah. And that's in the, that's in the hills of Texas.
And that's a part of Texas where the hills are really dramatic, right? They're pushed together. So they have steep valleys and steep hills. And so it was just up and down, up and down, up and down, which is quite the challenge.
That's a challenge to do. That in miles plus you have to carry all of yourself. So I'm carrying 30 to 35 pounds worth of equipment, you know, and running zero scramblers the whole way. That's been my preferred shoe or boot for probably three years now.
That's what I've been running. And I've done everything from shred through mud, swim with them. And of course do tons of elevation in those boots. And they've been really fantastic.
I've really joined the version too. That's what I'm currently running right now. Yeah, that's a good one. I hear a weird question.
Now since you brought up footwear, you brought it up. So that line was a flashback. When I was interviewing at college, as I went to, I interviewed at this one, small college in Pennsylvania. I don't know why I didn't mention the name.
I was thinking of not mentioning it, I have a different college. It doesn't matter. And the interview was with the dean. The first thing he did is like way off topic, but it's a fun story.
The first thing he did, I sit down in front of his desk, he's behind his desk, and he takes my transfer report card, whatever the hell he would call it then, and slides it across the desk and asks it says, so what do you think? And I then gave explanations for every bad grade that I had, including almost failing wood shop because I had a personality clash with the teacher, and so he gave me an E instead of an F. Anyway, then we had this interview. It's all going fine.
I'm about to leave. I got my hand on the doorknob. And he says, hey, by the way, just want to let you know, you're the one who brought up grades. It's not me dead in my tracks.
It's like, mother, God, he was right. He just shoved a piece of paper across the table. When he said, what do you think I could have said? You just shoved a piece of paper across the table.
Yeah. Yeah. Now I will say that when they accepted me to have referred, I replied saying that I wasn't going to be attending because instead I was going to Montgomery County Community College major in automotive repair. I was like, oh, I don't know how they responded to that one.
But anyway, since you brought up shoes, I'm going to ask you a weird question. I was not surprised when I first heard powerlifters who were swearing about how our shoes were improving their performance, even on things like a bench press, which most people don't realize if you're doing really heavy weight, that the impulse to push with your arms starts with an impulse to push through your feet, through your knees, into your hips and away it goes. And when I think about targeting, well, in general, whether you're standing or prone, I do think about how I have my feet placed. Are you paying attention?
Are you noticing anything different when you have a shoe that's flexible enough to let your feet really anchor, even when you're lying down versus a big, stiff boot? Absolutely. So a part of that too comes from the feel. So you can feel a lot more with a minimalist shoe than you can with a big boot or something that has a shank in it.
There's plenty of those. And for this kind of shooting in particular, where it is all natural environment, you're not shooting in a manicured range, the feel is very important because you're shooting in very unconventional space. You're prone to your lean up against a tree and you're trying to find a good way to brace against the natural environment to pull off a shot that's out hundreds of yards. And so that's very important.
Your ability to be flexible is incredibly important as well to adopt unconventional shooting positions, positions that you would never find yourself in if you're just at your local range. Your local range is not even practiced, I would say. It's really just a zero, your rifle. Anything beyond that, you're kind of getting yourself in terms of the realistic natural environment and what you have to offer up.
This is deep down the shooting rabbit hole, but in the natural environment, you don't have known ranges. You don't have a lot of feedback either. You could be missing, but you're missing in a field of grass. There's absolutely no impact feedback there.
And so being confident in your stature, being confident in your position, in your holds, those are absolutely crucial for this style of shooting competition. So I'm just imagining, you know, if you're going to turn this into a triathlon, then there's a kind of beak room yoga component to it. So you've got to do warrior pose and then shoot, which would be an appropriate pose. So very difficult to hold a rifle with that in that pose.
Yes, absolutely. I mean, there's no good position to shoot from in the real world, right? There's almost nothing to brace on. And a lot of times going prone doesn't work either.
You can't lay down because there's grass on the way. There's bushes in the way. You can't even see the target at that point, right? These are all things you don't really think about at the moment.
No. I'm not diving into the shooting component then because it's a target. Some number of distance, some distance away. There we go.
That's English. What's the target and more, you know, how many shots, how are and how are that graded and how do you do the whole time to complete versus accuracy in the marksmanship side? Yeah. So in terms of targets, it's an assortment, right, which makes it very difficult to try to actually gauge distance, right?
Because you can measure out distance if you know a target size, right? There's mathematical formulas and there's different reticles and stuff that will tell you distance. If you know what you're looking at, right? If you know you're looking at a 12 inch piece of steel, gong or square steel, you can measure that out with a reticle and it will tell you the range, you know, give or take, right?
There's a margin. And so, yeah, it's usually steel. It's usually gongs or squares of some kind and it's all unknown distance. Now the scoring aspect is it kind of depends per event, but you typically get three scores, right?
You get your shooting proficiency. Sorry, sorry. When you're in the shooting part. So one round, multiple rounds.
There is no restriction, right? You typically have three minutes to complete a stage, right? And the stages will have what they call a course of fire, right? Sometimes it's highly prescribed.
Go here, do this, right? And there could be, you could be covering two, three hundred yards worth of movement on that particular stage or it could be completely static, right? You never really know. And so that's, sorry, coming back to how the scoring for that works, right?
So it depends on the events. My preferred method of scoring is kind of called time plus. Sometimes it's called down to finish DNF. DNF, you mean, did not finish.
Down to finish is my favorite. Basically, it's, if you hit the time, the R time, say it's three minutes and you just, you didn't get all the targets, you get your three minutes plus the number of targets you failed to actually, right? So it gives you, it still gives competitors a feedback. They're just not like, Hey, you all failed and you all get the same grade.
No, it's, you failed, but you got to this point, right? So you get partial points, essentially. The second time or second score that you actually get is your runtime, right? So that's the time it takes for you total to get to each stage, right?
And between stages. Now you do get, you do get paused when you get to a stage, right? So you get a little, sometimes you get a little bit of a break to catch a breath or, you know, get some candy or drink some water, do something, right? And then your third score that you get is your total score.
Now total score, it depends per event. Again, there's not really a standard here. Usually most events are weighted with marksmanship taking a higher percentage of your total score, right? And running, you know, typically say 60, 40, right?
So running is very much in your cardiovascular capability. This is very much a part of your score, but it's not equal to your marksmanship, right? You can slack off a little bit and just shoot really well and then you get a better overall score. Of course, if you run like the wind and you shoot, you know, like Annie Oakley, then you're going to get the top score, right?
That's right. That's how it shakes out, which that's my favorite personally. I like 70, 30, to be honest. You know, I, as I age and honestly some of these events, I like to stop and look at the scenery, you know, smell the flowers, so to speak, but man, the views out the way out on some of these ranches that I go to are just, it's incredible.
I want to, I would be there just for the hike, honestly. It's worth the price of the mission is the hike. Love it. So when, so when a race is starting, as everyone's starting at the same time, and it just looks like the beginning of a biological outdoors in a station somewhere.
No, so it is, they do send runners out like typically every five minutes, right? So you get, most of the time you get a block, right? A heat one, heat two, heat three, so on and so forth. And then they staggered out.
So they typically send people out in groups unless it's a team event, which there are team events that they'll send out, you know, two to, I think it's usually two. I haven't seen any of that are bigger than two, but yeah, so they have to stagger it, which means sometimes too that you get a bit of a queue at a stage, especially if you send three dudes out who are all fast runners, they're going to stack up at the next stage. Yeah. You know, which there could be some strategy in there too of like, hey, I can run and come in hot to a stage, but then I've got 10 minutes to cool down, right?
When, if you're going out in pairs, are they both shooting or is it a shooter or a spotter? The paired by Avalon is typically, you have your shooting together and their stages are usually set up specifically for two people to be on stage at the same time. But on the normal non team events, right? There's one shooter shooting at a time, especially since this is not at what you would see like at a gun range where there's a line of fire, right?
The other safety concerns there, right? You can't have two people shooting at the same time. And so, you know, there's typically two to three range officers working on a stage at a time and they're pushing people through as fast as they can, right? So you know, clearly when it comes to what it takes to get into this, obviously the footwear side, get a pair of scramblers, you know, kind of for the bucks, that's easy.
So on the equipment side, I mean, where does this fall, you know, in between say bowling and golf and or, you know, whatever else to be on the low end of a cost barrier entry versus a high end? Well, this is both bowling and golf at the same time. You know, this is where I could come back to some of the other shooting sports too that you find. I'll pick on USPSA again just because it's the most popular one, right?
Always punching up. Yeah. There's a ton of divisions in USPSA, right? And to the point where they will whip out the tape measure and start measuring your equipment.
In the American biathlon scene, there's almost none of that. There are some safety related items, right? You can't show up with something that's going to be outright dangerous. Yeah.
But there's never that I've seen any divisions related to your equipment, right? So you can show up at the backpack and, you know, a good attitude and shoot what you want, right? Bring what you want and shoot what you want. Again, within a margin of safety, right?
You can't show up with like a extremely large caliber firearm. That's, you know, that could be a safety issue. Yeah. The most common calibers are 100% give it a go and it doesn't matter whether it's an open division race spec, you know, custom built pistol or if it's just what you got, right?
There's no divisions. You'll be competing, which some people might find completely unfair, but I will say that the most of these forces, the terrain alone is a great equalizer. Right. So what I was thinking is it not the kind of thing that you could necessarily practice for because the variables are so tremendous.
Nope. Unless you own a massive ranch land that you can set your own up, it's very difficult to practice for. And honestly, I would say that equipment, when it comes to the actual hardware, right? Again, if you're running a $8,000 custom built open division pistol, it's honestly probably not going to give you the advantage you think you were going to get it.
In fact, some of that stuff, some of that stuff just flat out doesn't work in the real world, right? As soon as you get a spec of dust on some of those things, it's malfunction city. And so your proficiency at a stage, it might just completely fall apart because you were forced to go through a creek crossing with a bunch of mud on it. And it got inside of your extremely nice, but somewhat delicate open division pistol.
And now you're shooting just your DNFing everything, right? Which even if you run like the wind, if you DNF two, three stages, you're at the last of the pack now overall. Wait, where's the question that's prompted in my head? Oh, I know what it is.
You know, given the combination of running slash hiking or however you're going to traverse the terrain and the challenge of doing that, especially for time. Some people are crawling. Running, running, you're going to cycle, you know, whatever floats your boat. And then the challenge of the shooting component, I imagine part of it and then the nature component, but I'm going to leave that one out for a second.
I imagine just those first two and all the variables that get applied make part of the attraction of this just the intermittent reinforcement and the fact that, you know, you can never get it perfect, but you always just like in a sprinting race, like at the end of a sprint, people come up and how'd you do? And I go, I literally say people, do you just want the number? Can I give you the excuse first? Because you never do it perfectly.
There's always when you look back, I mean, if we're going to talk type two, you're also looking back at all the things that you could have done better in your mind. And the reality is if you had done those better, you would screw up something else. But so how much other than enjoying the nature and the challenge of it, do you find yourself, you know, attracted because of that intermittent reinforcement, you know, thing in your brain? Yes, there is always hindsight with all of these things, right?
That's actually why I started off filming myself, right? For years, I filmed myself, I never put it on the internet. I just watched it to, in retrospect, remember what did I do, right? That's one of the big components here is when you spend five miles getting to a stage, you go into monkey brain mode, right?
Like you're just working off of instincts, maybe at that point in time, right? You could be incredibly fatigued, you could have been, you know, constant exposure to the wind in the sun for that entire duration, right? And you can remember two, five miles in the natural environment when we're talking about hills or what I would call maybe mountains, back in the hours, right? You're holding it again and being a road.
Yeah, and you know, especially like out west in Texas, there is absolutely no shade or, you know, shelter from the sun in the wind. So, you know, I find myself definitely going into monkey brain mode a lot. And so I don't remember what did I do on these stages, right? And it's you watch yourself on video and you go, man, that was a really inefficient way to tackle that, right?
So that's the other component too that I have to make pretty clear that distinguishes this style of shooting sports from the other shooting sports. There are no walkthroughs. You get to a stage and you get a brief description at best. Sometimes they're wrong, right?
They put targets where they're not actually, they didn't tell you those targets where they, you know, it's just is what it is, right? You get one shot. You get your one shot to go through it. They don't hold your hand and like walk you through and let you kind of feel out where are things.
You know, you got to think on your feet, which again, nine miles in thinking on your feet, not great, right? Like I, there's definitely been some courses where I was so exhausted, I would not have passed like a cognitive test, right? If you'd asked me some simple addition, I'd have it if I looked at you like you're crazy. Like I have no idea what this simple addition is, right?
I'm just trying to find water at this point. Oh my God. Yeah, boy, you sure how to sell it. So never.
No, I got it. No, I got it. No, that's, well, wait. So how are you videotaping yourself?
Are you, I mean, is someone running with the camera or what are you doing? So I started off with just a simple set up, right? Put a camera on my head, right? I can see.
Oh, I was leaning up against something I shouldn't have been leaning up against, right? Oh, I flubbed a malfunction clearing and why did I do that? Why did I do that? Why did I get better, right?
I'm not embarrassing ones, right? Oh, I went empty and then I really had poor form on pulling the trigger thinking around is going to go off, right? That's the big one. Yeah, those are not my proudest moments, but you know, again, I'll make the excuse.
I was tired. Yeah. No, I can only imagine that thing is like, you know, feeling like, Oh God, I've got the shot nailed and then click. I forgot to look at the shipper.
It's click in the dip for somebody who is into firearms and proficiency. When you click and dip, it's that's really embarrassing. That's very poor form. Wait, what's the dip part?
I mean, the click part's obvious. What's the dip part? The dip part here. I'll hold it up, right?
That's when you click and do this. It's a firearm, which is very poor form. It shows there's a lot of reasons for why people do that. Usually beginners, right?
They're scared of the recoil. Yeah. But I've caught myself doing that on camera a couple of times, and it's, you know, again, I'll make an excuse. I was tired.
This is a bit off topic, but what the hell when you when you're watching movie or TV show that involves people shooting in some way, it doesn't matter if it's, you know, targets or whatever else. Do you find yourself getting exasperated at their complete lack of proper form, proper, proper weapon handling, et cetera? You know, the one that gets me the most is blinking. Blinking.
If you watch an actor, particularly when they're using some of like their, some of their prop guns that actually make a noise, they blink before they pull the trigger. And that one, that's the biggest one. That's the one that takes me most out of it, especially when the setup is that this guy is some sort of proficient sniper. Yeah.
Yeah. And they're blinking before they pull the trigger. It's because they're not accustomed to the bang, right? The bang is freaking them out.
They're not looking through the shot. That's reminding me. Oh, come on. It was a hitchhanger.
I'm gonna blank out on the name, but no, no, no, no, no, no, no, where there's a kid. There's a basically, I think it's a gun that goes off for explosion of some sort. And they're in like a cafeteria and a lodge and right before the explosion, if you look carefully in the background, there's a kid who puts his fingers in his ears. Yeah.
That's brilliant. Well, this has been totally, totally fascinating. I hope it has been for other people as well. And for anyone, well, anyway, I just hope it has been.
I love the just finding something that's novel that is combining these very interesting things that are often both, frankly, quite misunderstood. Many people who've never done a trail running don't get why that's more interesting than being on the road and just putting in the miles or how can be just delightful that you get to somewhere and see something that you don't typically see, especially if you kind of go off trail. I'm a sprinter. I have done that.
And of course, the shooting component, which I would argue, I was going to say rightly so, but that's not quite it. I can understand why there are people who have misconceptions about what that is and how it applies in this situation and the kind of people who are into it who are at the very least the most responsible gun owners you will probably meet and more who are treating what they're doing in a way that most people have never imagined because they've never hung out with people who do this. So I really appreciate it. I love that you've been putting this together and spending time to share what it is.
And I do hope people can find out more about it, whether even if it's kind of thing, I don't know if other people do this. I like finding things that I've never heard of and things that I might have some uninformed opinions about going, I got to try that just to see what the experience is. And I hope other people have that same mentality or willing to adopt that for certain things, whether it's this or other things. So that said, long-sung way to, if people want to find out more about this, where do they go?
What do they do? Yeah. So you can find my social media accounts on Instagram and YouTube. They are both under the handle pseudo that's S-U-D-O underscore actual, right?
So the both YouTube and Instagram, it's pretty much all I post is these kinds of events, right? So I'm not really shooting events, which I mean, they're really, they are a full disclosure. I don't like long distance running either. I'm a sprinter.
I like the sprints. I like to sprint as fast as I possibly can. The long distance component is, yeah, you know, I don't like to just jog endlessly, but man, out in the rural country, it's fantastic. I love the adventure race aspect of it.
Yeah. And so I'm imagining, or tell me, I mean, obviously we talked a bunch about Texas and the nearby environs. Where else are these events happening? All over the country.
The eastern side of the United States is just also absolutely popping very much as Texas is with the number of events that are coming online. Unfortunately, I don't see too much out West, even though it seems like there would be ample opportunity for land out that way to host an event like this. There's a few, there's a few of them, but it's becoming, again, it's becoming more and more popular. This has been around in the United States since I think around 2001, but again, those events, they were kind of few and far between.
And now there's more events than I can fit into my schedule. Given that, you know, the winter by outline exists in the Olympics. Are there people talking about trying to get this as a whatever, what's a trial sport for summer Olympics? I have not heard any bit of that.
Again, I think there's a difficulty here in the spectator sport aspect, right? So that's the hard part with these. It's also the hard part too is getting a lot of people push through these courses, right? They typically just daylight hours, daylight restrictions.
When you start bumping up to 120 competitors, you run into issues with the daylights since they have to go out kind of staggered. So that would be amazing to see a cross country style sport like this in the Olympics would be really cool. Of course, they'd have to water down to the Europeans and their pellet guns. But, you know, hey, the more eyes on this is probably the better, right?
The more opportunity there is for people to actually combine both trail running or just their love of hiking and get in the shoots themselves along the way too. For me, as a Texan, the best thing I can think of is camp, hike and shoot. Sounds great. Once again, Philip, I've been an absolute pleasure and thank you so much.
For everybody else, I do hope you go check out pseudo underscore actual and find out more about this again. And if you think this is totally not your thing, I would say definitely check it out. Whenever there's something, you know, for me, whenever I have some serious reaction like that, I go, I need that world because why am I having that thought about something I know very little about or certainly have an experience that speaking experience? Everybody feel free to head over to www.jointhemovementmovement.com to find all the other podcast episodes, the previous episodes of which there are many and where we dive into a whole lot of things about natural movement and all sorts of applications as this is an example of one that you probably never imagined.
And you'll also find where you can find a podcast, another place that you can find podcasts where we are on social media. And if you have any requests, any suggestions, anybody you want to recommend to be on the podcast, if you want to tell me that I've got a case of cranial reppore orientation syndrome, whatever it is, you can email me at movemovementmovement.com. Once again, spread the word, share, like, subscribe, hit the bell icon on YouTube, give us a thumbs up or a five star review where you can. Like I said, if you want to be part of the tribe, just subscribe.
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