(3) Hiawatha Bray, Straight-A Shooters. Sure, MIT students tend to know their way around Bunsen burners and graphing calculators. Turns out some aren't too shabby with a pistol, either. Boston Globe, Feb 6, 2011.
www.boston.com/yourtown/wellesle ... traight_a_shooters/
Quote:
"paper targets hanging 50 feet away.
"in the world of collegiate pistol shooting, MIT ranks among the elite. In 2005 and 2007, the team won the National Rifle Association’s intercollegiate championship, beating out teams from the Coast Guard, the US Military Academy at West Point, and the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. As it turns out, the skills that make a good MIT student are pretty much the same as the ones that make a good pistol shooter. 'You need good focus, concentration skills, self-discipline, attention to detail,' says Will Hart, who coaches the MIT team.
"there are no spectators at all – and the most pervasive noise is the steady drone of a massive ventilation system designed to capture lead particles blasted from the bullets. Ear protectors are mandatory down here, one level below a university basketball court, and they’re quite effective. Tiny as they are, .22 rounds make an awesome crack, but protectors reduce the sound to a gentle pop.
"A perfect score in the “standard pistol” event means hitting the 10 ring [obviously a target has 10 rings, number 10 being the bull's eye], the dead center of the bull’s-eye, 60 times, for a score of 600. It’s never been done in official competition. The world record of 584, set by American Erich Buljung during a match in Caracas, has stood for 28 years.
"All firearms belong to the school; most students are too young to own a pistol legally in Massachusetts. He clipped a 14-inch-square paper target to a pulley system and wheeled it out 10 meters, or a little more than 30 feet [for this reporter, who is apparently a novice].
"A real match [ie, contest] involves shooting 12 groups of five rounds each under increasingly tight time limits – competitors start with a relatively relaxed 2½ minutes, and by the end are squeezing off strings of five shots in 10 seconds. Plus, in standard pistol, the targets must be 25 meters away (about 82 feet), which was more than twice as far away as mine had been.
"Then there’s free pistol, the most demanding of the handgun sports. Shooters use long-barreled pistols that hold just one round, and the distance is set at 50 meters, or about 164 feet. (Since the MIT gun range only stretches 50 feet, the school uses a smaller target to simulate the experience of shooting the longer distance.) It’s like aiming at a golf ball. The shooter loads, takes aim, fires, lowers the gun, does it again, for two hours or 60 rounds fired, whichever comes first. 'Scorewise, it’s the most difficult shooting sport in the Olympics,' says [Will] Hart[, who coaches the (pistol) MIT team].
"In 2007, MIT was set to challenge West Point, the reigning national champions. Looking for an edge, Hart’s shooters came to him with a plan. The weekend of the match would coincide with the switch to daylight saving time, and they hypothesized that they could gain an advantage by resetting their body clocks early. So in advance of the meet the team began getting up an hour earlier than usual each morning. The experiment was a success. At the match, Hart says, 'we were the first ones on the range every morning. We were wide awake. We were ready to go.' And they won.
"In April 2009, in the depths of the nation’s financial crisis, MIT announced that it was abolishing the varsity pistol program and seven other varsity sports, in a bid to save $1.5 million. The pistol team reorganized as a “club sport,” supported by a much smaller stream of funding. 'We were shocked, because we were one of the most successful programs in the whole [athletic] department,' Hart says. MIT’s rifle team, for instance, has never won a national title, but it was allowed to preserve its varsity status. * * * [MIT did not explain but assistant athletic director Barb Bolich] does say the fact that the national pistol championships are not sponsored by the NCAA, which does sponsor a national rifle competition, played a part in the decision.
Note:
(a) There is no need to read the rest, though the report, four Web pages long, is interesting.
(b) "Even with a dozen shooters firing at once, pistol is a curiously solitary sport. * * * even when rivals meet on the same range, there’s no effort to psych one another out; shooters are too focused on their own mental states. 'You weren’t really competing against the other competitors,' [a student surnamed] Lee says. 'You were competing against yourself.' It’s the kind of challenge MIT students are well practiced in, trained by long days and nights at lab tables and hunched over dense texts in the library."
(i) psych (vt):
"1.1: (as adjective psyched) excited and full of anticipation <we’ve told him you were coming—he’s really psyched>
2: analyse (something) in psychological terms <mother had it all psyched out in three minutes>
www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/psych
It is the definition 2 that fits the bill.
(ii) psych (vt): "to analyze or figure out (as a problem or course of action) <I psyched it all out by myself and decided — David Hulburd>
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/psyche
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发表于 3-15-2015 09:43:50
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