Sudo Actual is an avid cross-country and run-and-gun (biathlon) competitor passionate about outdoor adventure. A dedicated hiker, camper, and fan of Type 2 fun, Sudo thrives in environments that challenge endurance and resilience. Whether he is navigating rugged trails or competing in high-intensity shooting sports, he prefers the freedom of the wilderness to time spent behind a keyboard and monitor.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Sudo Actual about mastering trail running for centerfire competitions.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How it’s crucial to maintain high levels of physical fitness for long-distance shooting events.
– Why participating in diverse shooting competitions enhances adaptability and proficiency.
– How focusing on finding a balance between speed and accuracy in shooting competitions is vital.
– Why simulating diverse terrains and variables helps prepare people to compete in biathlons.
– How video analysis helps improve performance in shooting competitions.
Connect with Sudo Actual:
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Connect with Steven:
Website: Xero Shoes
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Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen:
There are a lot of people who use Xero 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 for 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, sometimes the outright lies you’ve been told about what it takes to run, walk, hike, play, do yoga, CrossFit, whatever it’s you like to do, including what we’re going to talk about on this podcast and to do it enjoyably and efficiently and effectively.
And 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 Steven Sashen, your host of The MOVEMENT Movement podcast, the co-founder and chief barefoot officer at Xero 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 in the way and causing 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 where you can thumbs up. Give us hit the bell icon on YouTube and follow us on YouTube. But look the drill. If you want to be part of the tribe, just subscribe and let’s spread the word and have some fun.
So what else can I say? Oh, by the way, feel free to head over to www.jointhemovementmovement.com to find previous episodes, all the other ways you can interact with us on social media, other places you can find the podcast if you don’t like the one that you found this one at or found. You know what I’m trying to say. But more importantly, let’s get started. So Phillip, 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.
Sudo Actual:
Yeah, absolutely. Hi. So I am the face behind the sudo actual account now, that’s sudo underscore actual, and there is some meaning behind that name. It’s not just a bunch of misspellings of the term, pseudo or pseudonym, and I am focused-
Steven Sashen:
It’s also not a misspelling of sumo.
Sudo Actual:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Which is not the sport we’re talking about, so I just want to make sure people don’t go on that rabbit hole, down that rabbit hole or whatever the hell I’m trying to say.
Sudo Actual:
Yeah, sometimes in the tech world it’s kind of called SU DO, but I call it sudo. 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 colloquially known as running gun, but it’s more accurately known as center fire to gun biathlon. Now of course here in the States it’s kind of hard to find snow, especially down south in Texas. So the biathlon 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 in a single day is 14 miles, and then oftentimes they’re a full weekend event. These are large events when you compare them to I guess 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.
Steven Sashen:
So I’m going to back up a bit. I know some people when we hear the word shooting, lose their mind to begin with and I want to calm them down. So let’s back up and talk biathlon. At the very least, many people may know if they watch the Olympics, one of the sports that they will change the channel on is the biathlon, 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 at targets? That’s boring too. So we just got boring times two, I’m going to switch to something, whatever else they’re going to watch instead. Talk about the history of just the Nordic biathlon because I can only guess that what you’ve developed was inspired by that and like you said, ain’t a lot of snow in Texas, although every now and then all hell breaks loose in Texas either hot or cold.
Sudo Actual:
Yes. So to add some historical context here, so the original biathlon appeared in the Scandinavian era or region towards I think the late 1800s. It’s really got its official government sponsorship to become the civilian biathlon, I believe somewhere in the 1910s or 1908s and it takes its roots in light infantry ski patrol, which was the military roots of it, and then the civilian version of it was cross-country skiing with shooting along the way. They ski to particular stages. And that sport has evolved over time to what you see now in the modern Winter Olympics.
Where really when it comes to Olympic shooting competitions, what you see is kind of odd, right? You’ll see essentially what looks like space BB guns. These things are, 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 really trying to eke out every bit of performance that they can with the different setups that they get. They’re all within the rule set, which is a very rigid rule set to try and level the playing field.
Steven Sashen:
Well, just to interrupt again, so yeah, if you haven’t watched Olympic shooting, it is fascinating because like you said, not only did the guns look space age, but yeah, all the stuff they’re wearing on their face and on their body, it’s very, come on, 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 the mounting pressure of knowing that people are competing to be fractions of a millimeter better than the other person can get really pretty intense. Watching it on TV, it’s like you kind get a bit of that, but I mean when I’ve seen some of those sports live, you’re freaking out. I mean, it’s crazy.
Sudo Actual:
Yeah, there’s definitely performance anxiety there. I mean, they are large spectator sports and the rule set in particular is kind of crafted in a way that makes it a good spectator sport. That’s why they usually are shooting at 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 or they’re skiing cross country in a method that makes it spectator sport friendly, kind of like a rally cross or rally racing. But yeah, coming back to 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 pellet gun or sometimes a rimfire gun, and 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 eke out every bit of 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, you’ll find USPSA or IPSC, they’re running in attack bay or a flat bay, but they’re running 40 yards. Now, the running gun I’m talking about really is biathlon. 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 is an endurance event, an annual endurance event here in Texas where I think the top runner put down 35 miles, maybe it was 30 miles and it was sun up to sundown. That’s a very stark contrast to what you’ll find in USPSA or any other shooting sport that you’ll, three gun, three gunners tend to have a lot of movement on stage, but not dozens of miles.
Of course, footwear. Footwear is paramount when you’re moving across country. That’s one of my favorite aspects of this whole style of shooting is the cross country hike or the run or jog, 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 biathlon here in the States, we’re shooting real guns, we’re not shooting BB guns and we’re pushing the distance. Some of these events I’ve shot out to 800 yards, which is very challenging. It also is not spectator friendly because you can’t even see where the targets are unless you have a spotting scope or something like that, which is a part of the challenge as well.
Steven Sashen:
So typically then for these events, rifles, not pistols, correct?
Sudo Actual:
Yeah. The full name would be two gun because you could classify this I guess as a triathlon, but not really.
Steven Sashen:
That is pushing it a little bit. Yeah.
Sudo Actual:
So it is two gun. There is a pistol component and a carbine mostly component. Most of the distances are inside of 400 yards, but every now and then they do push it. I actually had one last weekend that I was at and the furthest target was advertised as 650 yards. I don’t think it actually was. I think it was more like 550, maybe 590. But yeah,
Steven Sashen:
Well, when we first started talking about this, I was having flashbacks. Now obviously for anyone who’s listened to me, they know that the last thing I have any interest in is a cross country run as a sprinter, anything over 100 meters, and 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. And 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 riflery were my two favorite things to do, and I was the best one at the camp doing them, which was… And it’s such a fascinating sport, and it’s a weird thing to call it that because we typically think of sports as something that’s very physically active, but it is in many ways as a former All-American gymnast and now Master’s All-American Sprinter, there’s so many parallels between shooting and those things about what you need to do to do it correctly.
The mental training that’s 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 movement and 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, I mean 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 when the NRA was all about target shooting and it was barely about hunting even, and certainly not about what it turned into in the last 20 years.
So the whole thing I find totally fascinating and for 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 heartbeats. I mean, amazingly fine-tuned physiological stuff. So that’s the part that I find most intriguing about what you’ve put together.
Sudo Actual:
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 had been to do this kind of competition is 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 there’s 2, 3, 4 events every month, which is, I mean, it’s just incredible. Obviously the shooting community and the fitness community are merging 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 it 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.
Steven Sashen:
Interesting.
Sudo Actual:
Some of these ranches are just enormous, like the Y.O Ranch down in South Texas. I mean, it’s dozens of square miles.
Steven Sashen:
Wow.
Sudo Actual:
It’s absolutely enormous, and you don’t get to go on there unless you go to an event like this.
Steven Sashen:
How many people are coming to this from the fitness side versus the shooting side?
Sudo Actual:
Man, that’s kind of a hard one to answer. So I would say in terms of shooting competitions, there’s really like two categories. There’s the category that focuses almost 99% of their effort on marksmanship proficiency in some way. 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. I’m going to probably-
Steven Sashen:
Well, so USPSA United States?
Sudo Actual:
Yeah, that’s the United States Practical Shooting Association. This is probably one of the longer running organizations nationwide that hosts shooting competitions. It’s almost entirely focused on pistol handguns. They do have some other divisions, and you’ll find it mostly inside of flat ranges at 50 yards and in. Again, I’m painting a general brush here, painting pretty wide, but it is almost entirely a shooting sport. I mean, that is what it is. It’s focused entirely on your pistol proficiency shooting, nothing else. Whereas there’s another group that’s kind of the one group is shooting proficiency only, and then there’s another group of shooting sports. I’d put biathlon in this as well, where there is a very physical component to it. The other one beyond just biathlon or running gun would be like the tactical games. 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 Gladiator, right? It’s that CG model with some shooting though, right? There’s a shooting element to it. It is very spectator friendly. 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, have you ever heard that category?
Steven Sashen:
No, I haven’t heard that one.
Sudo Actual:
Sure. So I’ll go over, 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. 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? That’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.
Steven Sashen:
Well, I was going to say type three fun should be having margaritas while you’re climbing Everest. I think there’s something there.
Sudo Actual:
Well, you might end up staying on Everest permanently.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, there is that.
Sudo Actual:
Yeah, so type two fun is definitely where I find my weekends trying to go and 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 because you got to stay sharp as you age, and-
Steven Sashen:
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 sounds too pretentious, but someone who’s done athletic things 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.
Sudo Actual:
Yeah, I think we all need something hard in our life. It’s that recurring challenge that you can look forward to and feel yourself actually grow in. Right?
Steven Sashen:
Well, let’s be clear, I do not look forward to leg day. There’s nothing about leg day that I look forward to. I look forward to trying to find a way out of it because 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’ll say, “More than I can possibly explain.”
Sudo Actual:
Yeah, well that’s type two fun.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, it’s totally type two.
Sudo Actual:
With these biathlons, it’s almost always leg day. 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 biathlon. So it took place in the Davis Mountains, which believe it or not, Texas is not all flat. There are some mountains.
Steven Sashen:
Hold on, hold on. How tall are these mountains?
Sudo Actual:
I think the tallest one in that region is like 8,300 feet.
Steven Sashen:
It’s a hill. It’s like when Lane and I, we were in 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 they put sod over and then they put a bike trail that goes up and over it, and you see people like $10,000 bikes all decked out like they’re in the Tour de France acting like climbing 200 feet is the hardest thing they’ve ever done. So you’re 8,300 compared to the Fourteeners that I’m looking at right through the window. I mean, it’s a molehill. But okay, I’ll give it to you.
Sudo Actual:
It’s no Fourteener. I am a lowlander myself, so as soon as I get to a mile high, I start feeling it. Especially if I don’t acclimate, which I never do when I go to this event, I just don’t have the time. I show up and send it, right? And this event does take place at just below a 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 up and down, 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 hills of Texas, and that’s a part of Texas where the hills are really dramatic. 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 seven miles plus you have to carry all of your stuff. So I’m carrying 30 to 35 pounds worth of equipment and running Xero 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 tread through mud, swim with them, and of course do tons of elevation in those boots, and they’ve been really fantastic. I’m really enjoying the version two. That’s what I’m currently running right now.
Steven Sashen:
That’s a good one. Here’s a weird question now since you brought up footwear and remember you brought it up. So by the way, sorry, that line was a flashback When I was interviewing at colleges, I interviewed at this one small college in Pennsylvania. I don’t know why I didn’t mention was thinking of not mentioning Haverford College, it doesn’t matter, and the interviews with the dean. The first thing he did, this is 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 you call it then, and slides it across the desk and says to me, “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 have this interview, it’s all going fine. I’m about to leave. I’ve 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.” Stop 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.” Now, I will say that when they accepted me to Haverford, 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 don’t know how they responded to that one, but anyway, so 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 the bench press, which most people don’t realize, especially 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 target shootings, well in general, whether you’re standing or a prone, I do think about how I have my feet placed. Are you paying attention to that or 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 like a big stiff boot?
Sudo Actual:
Absolutely. 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 spaces. You you’re prone to or you’re leaned 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 practice, I would say it’s really just a zero your rifle. Anything beyond that, you’re kind of kidding 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.
Steven Sashen:
So I’m just imagining if you’re going to turn this into a triathlon, then there’s a kind of Bikram yoga component to it, so you’ve got to do warrior pose and then shoot, which would be an appropriate pose except very difficult to hold a rifle in that pose.
Sudo Actual:
Yes, absolutely. I mean, there’s no good position to shoot from in the real world. 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 in the way, there’s bushes in the way. You can’t even see the target at that point. These are all things that you don’t really think about at most competitions.
Steven Sashen:
I want to dive into the shooting component then because it just occurred to me. So there’s a target some distance away. There we go, that’s English. What’s the target and more how many shots, and how are that graded? And how do you do the whole time to complete versus accuracy in the marksmanship side?
Sudo Actual:
So in terms of targets, it’s an assortment. Which makes it very difficult to try to actually gauge distance, because you can measure out distance if you know a target size. There’s mathematical formulas and there’s different and stuff that will tell you distance if you know what you’re looking at, right? If you know that 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, give or take, right there. 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-
Steven Sashen:
Sorry, sorry. When you’re in the shooting part, so one round, multiple rounds?
Sudo Actual:
There is no restriction, right? You typically have three minutes to complete a stage and the stages will have what they call a course of fire. Sometimes it’s highly prescribed, go here, do this, right? And there could be covering two, 300 yards worth of movement on that particular stage, or it could be completely static. You never really know. And so that’s, sorry, coming back to how the scoring for that works. 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 usually means did not finish-
Steven Sashen:
Did not finish. Yeah.
Sudo Actual:
Down to finish is my favorite. Basically, if you hit the time, the par time, say it’s three minutes and you didn’t get all the targets, you get your three minutes plus the number of targets you failed to actually hit, right? So 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 run time, so that’s the time it takes for you total to get to each stage and between stages. Now you do get paused when you get to a stage. Sometimes you get a little bit of a break to catch a breath or get some candy or drink some water, do something, 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 and running typically say 60/40, so running is very much in your cardiovascular capabilities is very much a part of your score, but it’s not equal to your marksmanship. 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 the wind and you shoot like Annie Oakley, then you’re going to get the top score. That’s how it shakes out. Which that’s my favorite, personally, I like 70/30 to be honest. As I age, and honestly some of these events, I like to stop and look at the scenery. Smell the flowers, so to speak, but man, the views out the way out on some of these ranches that I go to, it’s incredible. I would be there just for the hike, honestly. It’s worth the price of admission is the hike.
Steven Sashen:
Love it. When a race is starting, is everyone starting at the same time and it just looks like the beginning of a biathlon triathlon or is it staged in some way?
Sudo Actual:
No, it is. They do send runners out typically every five minutes, so most of the time you get a block, a heat one, heat two, heat three, so on and so forth, and then they stagger it out. They don’t typically send people out in groups unless it’s a team event, which there are team events that they, they’ll send out two to, I think it’s usually two. I haven’t seen any that are bigger than two, but 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. 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.
Steven Sashen:
If you’re going in pairs, are they both shooting or is it a shooter or a spotter?
Sudo Actual:
The paired biathlon is typically, yep, you’re 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, there’s one shooter shooting at a time, especially since this is not at what you would see at a gun range where there’s a line of fire. There’s safety concerns there. You can’t have two people shooting at the same time, and so 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.
Steven Sashen:
Clearly, when it comes to what it takes to get into this, obviously the footwear side, get a pair of Scramblers 150 bucks, that’s easy. So on the equipment side, where does this fall in between, say bowling and golf or whatever else would be on the low end of a cost barrier to entry versus a high end?
Sudo Actual:
Well, this is both bowling and golf at the same time. 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, always punching up. There’s a ton of divisions in USPSA 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. You can’t show up with something that’s going to be outright dangerous, but there’s never, that I’ve seen, any divisions related to your equipment. So you could show up with a backpack and a good attitude and shoot what you want, bring what you want, and shoot what you want.
Again, within a margin of safety, you can’t show up with a extremely large caliber firearm. Now, that could be a safety issue, but the most common calibers are 100% give it a go, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s an open division, race spec, custom-built pistol, or if it’s just what you’ve got, right? There’s no divisions. You’ll be competing, which some people might find completely unfair, but I will say that most of these courses, the terrain alone is a great equalizer.
Steven Sashen:
Well, that’s what I was thinking. Is it not the kind of thing that you could necessarily practice for because the variables are so tremendous?
Sudo Actual:
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. In fact, some of that stuff just flat out doesn’t work in the real world. As soon as you get a speck 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, you’re DNFing everything, right? Which even if you run the wind, if you DNF two, three stages, you’re at the last of the pack now, overall.
Steven Sashen:
Wait, where’s the question that just popped in and out of my head? Oh, I know what it is. 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-
Sudo Actual:
Some people are crawling.
Steven Sashen:
Crawling, running a unicycle, whatever floats your boat. Then the challenge of the shooting component, I imagine part 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 to this, just the intermittent reinforcement. And the fact that you can never get it perfect, but you always just like in a sprinting race, at the end of a sprint, people come up and go, “How’d you do?” And I go, I literally say to people, “Do you just want the number or 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’ve screwed up something else. But so how much, other than enjoying the nature and the challenge of it, do you find yourself attracted because of that intermittent reinforcement thing in your brain?
Sudo Actual:
Yes, there is always hindsight with all of these things. That’s actually why I started off filming myself. For years I filmed myself. I never put it on the internet. I just watched it to in retrospect, remember what did I do? That’s one of the big components here is when you spend five miles getting to a stage, you go into monkey brain mode. You’re just working off of instincts maybe at that point in time, and you could be incredibly fatigued. You could have been constant exposure to the wind and the sun for that entire duration. And you got to remember too, five miles in the natural environment, when we’re talking about hills or what I would call maybe mountains, that could take hours.
Steven Sashen:
A whole different game than being on a road.
Sudo Actual:
And especially out west in Texas, there is absolutely no shade or shelter from the sun and the wind. So I find myself definitely going into monkey brain mode a lot. And so I don’t remember what did I do on these stages? And you watch yourself on video and you go, man, that was a really inefficient way to tackle that, right? And so that’s the other component too, that I have to make pretty clear, that distinguishes this style of shooting sport from the other shooting sports, there are no walk-throughs. You get to a stage and you get a brief description at best, sometimes they’re wrong.
They put targets where they’re not actually, they didn’t tell you those targets where, and it just is what it is, and you get one shot, you get your one shot to go through it. They don’t hold your hand and walk you through and let you kind of feel out where are things. You got to think on your feet, which again, nine miles in thinking on your feet’s not great, right? There’s definitely been some courses where I was so exhausted I would not have passed a cognitive test. If you’d asked me some simple addition, I would’ve looked at you like, you’re crazy. I have no idea what this simple addition is, right? I’m just trying to find water at this point.
Steven Sashen:
Oh my God. Yeah, boy, you sure know how to sell it.
Sudo Actual:
Remember, type two fun. Type two fun.
Steven Sashen:
No, I got it, I got it. Well, wait, so how are you videotaping yourself? Is someone running with a camera or what are you doing?
Sudo Actual:
So I started off with just the simple setup, right? Put a camera on my head so that way I can see, oh, I was leaning up against something I shouldn’t have been leaning up against, right? Or, oh, I flubbed a malfunction clearing and why did I do that? How do I get better? Or some of the more embarrassing ones, oh, I went empty and then I really had poor form on pulling the trigger, thinking a round’s going to go off. That’s the big one. Yeah, those are not my proudest moments, but again, I’ll make the excuse. I was tired.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, no, I can only imagine that thing of feeling like, oh God, I’ve got this shot nailed, and then click, I forgot to load the chamber.
Sudo Actual:
It’s the click in the dip. For somebody who is into firearms and proficiency when you click and dip, that’s really embarrassing. That’s very poor form.
Steven Sashen:
Wait, what’s the dip part? I mean, the click part’s obvious. What’s the dip part?
Sudo Actual:
The dip part. Here, I’ll hold it up. Right. That’s when you click and do this, you jerk the 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, but I’ve caught myself doing that on camera a couple of times, and again, I’ll make an excuse. I was tired.
Steven Sashen:
This is a bit off-topic, but what the hell? When you are watching a movie or a TV show that involves people shooting in some way, it doesn’t matter if it’s targets or whatever else. Do you find yourself getting exasperated at their complete lack of proper form, proper weapon handling, et cetera?
Sudo Actual:
The one that gets me the most is blinking.
Steven Sashen:
Blinking?
Sudo Actual:
Blinking. Yeah. If you watch an actor, particularly when they’re using some of their prop guns that actually make a noise, they blink before they pull the trigger. And 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 and they’re blinking before they pull the trigger, and it’s because they’re not accustomed to the bang, right? The bang is freaking them out. They’re not looking through the shot.
Steven Sashen:
Wait, hold on. That’s reminding me. Oh, come on. It was a Hitchcock movie and I’m blanking on the name of it. No, no, no, no, no. Where there’s a kid, there’s basically, I think it’s a gun that goes off or explosion of some sort, and they’re in a cafeteria in 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.
Sudo Actual:
Yep.
Steven Sashen:
It’s brilliant. Well, Philip, 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 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 any trail running, don’t get why that’s more interesting than being on the road and just putting in the miles. Or how it can be just delightful that you get to somewhere and see something that you don’t typically see, especially if you go off trail and yes, even though 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’ll 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, I love that you’ve been putting this together and spending the time to share what it is, and I do hope people can find out more about it. Whether even if it’s the 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 and going, I got to go 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 segue too, if people want to find out more about this, where do they go? What do they do?
Sudo Actual:
So you could find my social media accounts on Instagram and YouTube. They’re both under the handle sudo, S-U-D-O, underscore actual, so both YouTube and Instagram. It’s pretty much all I post is these kinds of events, is cross country shooting events. Which I mean they’re really, they are, full disclosure, I don’t like long distance running either. I’m a sprinter, I like to sprint, I like to sprint as fast as I possibly can. The long distance component is, yeah, 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.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. I’m imagining or tell me, obviously we talked a bunch about Texas and the nearby environs. Where else are these events happening?
Sudo Actual:
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 of them, but 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.
Steven Sashen:
Given that winter biathlon exists in the Olympics, are there people talking about trying to get this as a whatever, I don’t want to say trial sport for Summer Olympics?
Sudo Actual:
I have not heard any bit of that. Again, I think there’s a difficulty here in the spectator sport aspect, so-
Steven Sashen:
Good point.
Sudo Actual:
… that’s the hard part with these. It’s also the hard part too is getting a lot of people pushed through these courses. They typically just daylight hours, daylight restrictions. When you start bumping up to 120 competitors, you run into issues with the daylight 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 it down for the Europeans and their pellet guns. But hey, the more eyes on this is probably the better, the more opportunity there is for people to actually combine both trail running or just their love of hiking and getting to shoot some stuff along the way too. That’s for me is a Texan, that’s the best weekend I can think of is camp, hike and shoot.
Steven Sashen:
That sounds great. Well, once again, Phillip, it’s been an absolute pleasure and thank you so much. For everybody else, I do hope you go check out sudo 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, for me, whenever I have some serious reaction like that, I go, I got to give that a whirl because why am I having that thought about something I know very little about or certainly haven’t experienced it.
Speaking of 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 the podcast on other places 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 cranio-rectal reorientation syndrome, whatever it is, you can email me at move M-O-V-E @jointhemovementmovement.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, but most importantly, go out, have fun and live life feet first.
Sudo Actual:
Thanks.