"We've walked, now it's time to see if we can run."

EXERCISE ! - EXERCISE ! - EXERCISE !

Those three words (or rather, one word, repeated three times) evoke only one reaction in anyone with any military training or experience, they perk up, pay attention to the transmission, and immediately think "Well s**t, now what are they gonna do to us?"...

We've all heard that it's not practice that makes perfect, but perfect practice that makes perfect. And to a degree, I agree. Only through repeated practice of doing something correctly can you build the internalization of routine, and muscle memory for tasks that will save your life should you need to perform said tasks, however, by performing dry runs, and then HONESTLY analyzing the results, you can take away lessons learned, and best practices.

Now we all do things like use our preps to build fire, make shelter, and the like until we can do it in our sleep. However, something that the boss at work said got me thinking: "We've walked, now it's time to see if we can run."

What he was referring to was an upcoming event that was going to tie together a number of our core competencies into one (hopefully) fluid event. This got me thinking, I know I've got all of my tasks down one at a time, but what will happen when I try to tie them together? So, in that spirit, I've come up with a plan. I'm going to run drills, and I'll analyze the outcome right here on the blog so that we can all learn from what are sure to be a series of events that will not go quite as I plan.

For this week, I'm going to "bug out" from work. I'll leave my car, grab what I think I need, and get home. My wife will supply me with inputs that she dreams up, and I'll use my experience and preps to deal with them.

Depending on how this goes, I'll come up with some other scenarios and run them.