Re-Entering 3-Gun (Fitness)

After a long 3 year break, I plan to re-enter the 3-gun world once again.

I feel it is necessary for me to maintain and prove my skills in order to maintain my legitimacy as a competent ‘advice giver’ on tactical topics.
After all, would you trust an overweight running coach or a Call of Duty champion to lecture you on war?  Or worse yet some self-proclaimed internet firearms journalist with no legitimate firearms experience (there are a lot of those).

I plan to post periodically about my training regimen and events that I enter.

So I have started training for 3 gun about a month ago and I have yet to even head to the range or even pick up a firearm.  A fundamental that is
overlooked is fitness.  That is where I have started.

I have always been fairly good at medium to long distance running but that is not what 3-gun requires.  3-gun requires explosive short term energy
where you are constantly starting and stopping, getting down and up, possibly crawling and bending.  It is less an aerobic exercise and more an
anaerobic exercise.  What I mean is one primarily strengthens your heart so it can work harder longer and the other strengthens your body’s ability
to metabolize and hold oxygen as well as building up Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP).  It is long term power versus short term power.  3-Gun needs the intense, short term power.

3 times per week I do a shuttle run.
I sprint 55 meters stop abruptly turn around and run 50 meters back to the start line.  I stop, turn around and run back 45 meters. Then back to the
start line.  I repeat this at distances 30m, 24m and 16m.  Note how each leg of my trip gets shorter and shorter before I have to reverse direction.  The most difficult part of this exercise is changing direction.  In total this run is only 340m and I can run 2km easily but when I first did this I found myself gasping for air.  I simply could not breathe in enough oxygen.  After only a few sessions I was fine and now I have moved to the next step, you see, this is not about running; it is about improving my body’s ability to hold oxygen.  So my next step is to do this run with my CF gas mask… first without the filter (where I am right now), then with the filter attached.  Finally I will add body armor.

So why is Oxygen so important?  The more my heart pounds and the more Oxygen starved my body becomes, the more my body will tremble with every heart beat and breath, making aiming quickly and accurately harder.

My skill on the 3-gun feild will always be limited by my fitness level; that is why I am starting here.