Photography Note
Credit to Run N Gun nation for the event photography in this one. He tours around the country helping RO and do action shots of these kinds of events. He told me I could use whatever I'd like for my write up, so I grabbed some great photos from his Flickr album of this event. Give him a follow on YouTube!
Run N Gun Nation

Okay, here we go. Preparing for this event, and others like it, has been a big topic so far this year. I signed up for a ticket to the West Virginia Gun Run as soon as they went on sale about a month before, and I ran an eight-week physical training prep plan running up to the event that a few readers like you also downloaded for themselves.
While updating my gear write-ups, I even put together a specific load bearing harness just for events like this.
So how did it all end up shaking out? I brain dumped a lot of my thoughts in the Discord server a couple of hours after I finished, and now I'm doing the full after action review. This covers both how things actually went for me, which was honestly a mixed bag, but also what kind of changes I'll make for running the event again in the future.
Overall, I finished #31 out of 93. My run time was #13 but my shooting score fell in the middle of the pack. I took a huge hit against my shooting points because I completely (and accidentally) ran past a stage and didn't shoot it at all.
My performance on the remaining stages was still good enough to rank in in the top third, though.
The Gun Run [vs. WTF]
Right off the bat, I want to highlight that the tactical biathlon event I did in West Virginia with The Gun Run was quite a bit different than I expected it to be. Different match directors and philosophies behind them, and I didn't really have a way to know that until running it for myself.

Compared to what I learned from some of our community members about the Waco Tactical Fitness (WTF) events, this session of The Gun Run seemed physically less demanding of strength and focuses more on the running. At my event, held at Shadow Hawk Defense in Hedgesville, WV (great facility, by the way), there were no walls to climb over, trees to scale, or mud holes to crawl through. Even though photos of other Gun Run events in other locations included things like holding cinder blocks overhead and dragging sandbags through tunnels, this one didn't have it. The course consisted of six stages spread over a distance of about 3 miles, and the focus was squarely on running and navigating terrain quickly.
Your final score was a combination of 50% your completion time and 50% your shooting score.
The standard par time for every stage was 90 seconds, with some notable exceptions that I'm sure Ellis (the match director) wouldn't want me to talk about- but I'm going there anyway!
Ellis, the match director
Ellis says that he was inspired by similar tactical biathlon event around the country, and he wanted an environment where armed citizens had a chance to test out there equipment, fitness, and marksmanship in a way that most shooting matches simply do not. It's a very Everyday Marksmen-oriented idea, so of course I'm all over it.