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Thread: AAR--ECQC, North Carolina, March 5-7 2021

  1. #1

    AAR--ECQC, North Carolina, March 5-7 2021

    There is probably nothing I can say about ECQC that will come as any kind of revelation to the PF cast, but I thought I'd write up a quick quasi-AAR anyway, principally aimed at older folks, physically limited folks, or just maybe slightly timid folks. This class has an aura about it, and I suspect many of us in those categories might be intimidated or otherwise hesitant to take the class. That would be a bad choice.

    I exaggerate a bit, I guess, by putting myself into those categories. I'll be 50 this year, so I'm not really old yet. I don't have any serious physical limitations other than being a desk worker. I do some physical labor around our homestead, but I'm not an athletic person, and I certainly have virtually no combatives background, and no great strength or speed or such. I'm kind of an average middle aged man. I did not attempt to make comparisons among my fellow students, but I am pretty confident in saying I was the least capable student in the class in terms of physicality. In short, the class was a huge challenge for me, and I struggled the whole time to try to actually learn the various techniques. And when it came time to try to deploy them under real pressure, I generally found I was kind of bad at it. On the other hand, since I was starting from virtually zero, I can say I improved almost infinitely! And at least during the shooting portion of the class, I felt like I learned a lot, but I was already squared away enough as a shooter that I didn't ever feel over my head or stressed. During those hours, I was just a regular participant doing more or less just as well as anyone else. This is not a shooting class, though, so it's important to show up more or less squared away in that department. And in this class, from what I could see, everyone did.

    Being the slow guy means I saw the class from a different place than a lot of the younger, stronger, more knowledgeable students. My classmates--it was a full class, with 20 students--were pretty amazing. Lots of veterans, including a sort of busload of former Marine comrades who came as a group, at least a couple three cops, and many or even most of the students had very strong skills in BJJ or wrestling or other such stuff. These folks were dealing with the class material at an extremely high level. On Saturday, we learned a ton of new techniques and then broke out to practice them amongst ourselves. Often we'd do a one-minute or a three-minute session, then switch training partners and do another, and repeat. So I spent a lot of hours on Saturday practicing techniques that I often had a difficult time getting straight, with a lot of training partners who had no such difficulties, and anyway could have picked me up and broken me in two if they'd decided to. Time and time again, these guys--19 guys and one super skilled lady--would help me figure the skill out and patiently let me try it, screw it up, try it again, etc. Very generous, very friendly. Nobody ever showed me any frustration or impatience. You expect the instructors to be able to handle the slow students, but other students may not be so kind. This group was.

    Some people will read what I just wrote and draw from it the wrong lesson. Some people will think that if they're the slow student, they're going to be a drag on the other students, and detract from their experience. I don't think that's the right way to think about it, for three reasons. First, we switch partners every few minutes. There are 20 students. I didn't burden any one other student for any more than a few minutes. Yes, they maybe could have spent those few minutes more productively, but it was still just a few minutes. It's not a huge deal. Second, even the students who are good at the skill can actually grow a lot by teaching someone else. Having to articulate what you're doing and show it to another person makes you better. Third, I'd like to think that there's a genuine community of sort in the training world. Any real community involves commitments and some genuine sacrifice. Giving up a few minutes to help a member of your community makes you a better person.

    It is humbling and hard to be the object of charity, frankly--most of us want to see ourselves as the strong, self-sufficient person, rather than the needy one. But we're all needy in one way or another and recognizing that honestly is character building. I wouldn't let your felt inability keep you from taking ECQC or other classes that force you to work on the things you are bad at.

    The instructor situation: we had Craig, obviously. But we also had two official AI's, both super competent, attentive, generous, patient, etc. And then we had the course host, who served as a third AI, as well as a young friend of Craig's who was there much of the class occasionally stepping in as yet another sort of unofficial AI, but it seemed to me principally spending a lot of time dealing with the Sim guns and magazines and such. This naturally freed up the other AI's to focus on the students rather than the technology. I understand that Craig doesn't always have AI's, and this may be a new thing. For me personally, the AI's made a tremendous difference. The amount of personal coaching you can get when you have something like a 5-1 ratio is obviously very different from the amount of coaching you can get when it's 20-1. And again, these AI's were outstanding, so the coaching wasn't some kind of half-baked thing, it was full on Shivworks instruction.

    We were in class for 25 1/2 hours from 6 pm Friday through about 6:30 on Sunday. I cannot call to mind any single point where I felt like we were wasting time. I can't recall any point of instruction that seemed superfluous. Everything flowed into everything else, and we got an organically unified body of material that all made sense together. It's hard to imagine a better-designed class, or a better-run class. I get easily irritated, I'm afraid, by classes where I spent inordinate amounts of time waiting, or listening to pointless war stories. Craig told a few stories, but only something like three or four over the whole weekend, and not only were they brief rather than rambling, they were directly relevant illustrations of important class concepts, or explanations of the sources of class concepts. This was more or less my ideal for how to run a class. I've never seen it done better. And that includes not just design and flow, but details of the presentation. Craig is very precise. He actually mentioned that he's been criticized for being too verbose or too detailed in some of his teaching points. I guess if you don't want to understand what you're being taught, you might find it irritating that Craig takes the trouble to explain. Otherwise, I don't get the criticism.

    My performance during the evolutions was unsatisfactory to me. The first one on Saturday evening went OK, I guess. I don't know if I could have done any better than I did. The 3 person event on Sunday was a little bit of a mess, though. I'm not going to explain the set-up here, and I'll just assume the reader here at PF knows the structure. I was the 3rd party in the first iteration of my group. The other two had a little dialogue about the location of a bar, and had more or less separated amicably when I got turned loose. I bumped into the bad guy and got a bit thrown off, and started talking to him...then I realized that I should probably not focus on the bad guy, but on the good guy (the good person--it was the female student), so I went and started talking to her, but then I realized the bad guy was more or less cut out of the situation and I shouldn't be taking his place, so I went to try to rope him back in, and then I got fixated on that conversation and wound up just leaving with him, cutting the good person out. It was an improvisational mess. I felt bad for spoiling the evolution. There were some obvious hooks that I could have used to help keep the evolution really challenging, but I just didn't see them on the spot.

    The other two iterations went better, I thought. When I was the bad guy I played sort of mentally ill, which I hoped created enough ambiguity to push the good guy, and I think it worked. He did wind up having to "fight" me, because I pushed him into it, but he was really not trying to hurt me. The third party did a great job of adding to the confusion and provocation and ambiguity. When I was the good guy there was a kind of domestic violence scene where the woman approached me to ask for help, I started calling 911, and then the boyfriend showed up and started beating her. I sprayed him with an inert pepper spray training, which I think surprised everyone. The bad guy did a great job of (a) recognizing what I'd done and (b) pretending it hurt him, but the evolution doesn't end until Craig says it's over, so he recovered and beat me up anyway.

    In the carjacking, I just got frankly crushed both times. I knew enough as the victim to not just grab for the gun, but to actually get my weight over towards the bad guy and control the space, I just wasn't fast or strong or agile enough to manage it against a much stronger opponent. I did eventually get my gun out and shoot the bad guy--and my own wrist, but I'd already been shot by the bad guy at that point. And as the bad guy, once the good guy attacked the gun, he was able to simply push past my feeble defenses and get total control over me.

    A couple of things I took away from watching the evolutions: knowing the laws of self defense very well, to a level of intuitive competence, is crucial. There were several cases where guns came out and they really (IMHO) shouldn't have. Now there's a guy holding a gun on another guy, and telling him to stop....but stop or what? If you shoot this dude, you're pretty likely to be facing serious charges, since he did not pose a legitimate lethal threat to you. The other thing was seeing how many times pepper spray would have helped. The bad guy comes into your space, loud, threatening, but not presenting a lethal force threat. Zap. For me, that's a straight up face full of OC, no hesitation, no warning. It's not guaranteed to stop the bad guy, but it's a pretty decent bet. And even the pain doesn't shut him down because he's too drugged up or crazy, he's still diminished in some sense--can't see as well, maybe can't breathe as well, etc. I'll take it.

    I think the thing I liked best about ECQC really was that the scenarios went until they were called. There's none of this, "oh, you shot me, I lose!" that in my opinion makes a lot of FOF counterproductive. You get shot, you keep fighting. You don't say "Craig, this guy just put four rounds into my face mask, I'm done, right?" No, you just keep on fighting like it never happened. Man, is that powerful. You don't get to quit. You just keep fighting.

    I've got four or five nice welts from the sims, including my self-inflicted one--another super serious lesson from the class!--and more bruises and aches and pains that I can count. Best class ever. Quit it with your dumb ass excuses and sign up.
    O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts, And men have lost their reason.

  2. #2
    Site Supporter Totem Polar's Avatar
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    Aug 2013
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    PacNW
    Solid review, and I concur with your assessments, as one post-50 desk jockey guy to another.


    As an aside, Mrs Totem and I had dinner last night with another young couple that we first met at an ECQC several years ago. The “personal quality filter” aspect of the course is absolutely a thing. I have a number of good friends gained over the course of 3 Craig classes, and would gladly spend time with any of the other folks I’ve trained with.

    It takes a certain true humility, work ethic, and open world view to pay that sort of money to go get your ass kicked for 25-26 hours.
    ”But in the end all of these ideas just manufacture new criminals when the problem isn't a lack of criminals.” -JRB

  3. #3
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    Mar 2019
    Location
    Western US
    I can completely relate to your experience. I took EWO a few years back (coincidently with Totem Polar) and it was very humbling for me going from typically being in the top of a shooting class to the bottom of the class when it came to the wrestling/grappling skills. I'm hoping to train with a Craig again sometime and maybe not be at the very bottom of the class lol.

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