Yeah you do need to be dedicated to do long range target shooting.
I always go down to Bisley which is a two hour plus drive for me dependent upon traffic.
"Accuracy" per se, in LR target shooting is a bit of a misnomer, as you can buy straight from factory unmodified rifles with standard shop bought ammo that will easily produce a 10 inch grouping at 1000yards, the bulls eye in most comps is 10 inches across, so to put all your shots in the bulls eye with standard kit straight out of the factory, makes it all sound a bit easy, also don't forget you are allowed bipods to support the barrel and sandbags to support the rifle stock, so you are hardly holding the rifle at all almost, just resting it against your shoulder to take the recoil.
Start spending money on custom gun parts, custom ammo etc, and you can drop groupings to within a couple of inches or so size, so beginning to sound pretty easy yeah, hardly holding your rifle at all, resting it on bipods etc, hitting a ten inch target when you know your kit can group all its shots within 2 inches, should be a doddle right ......
The fun bit comes in when you start to realise that at 1000yards a 2 to 3 mph breeze (very soft breeze) will push a 7.62mm bullet around 33 inches away from the point you are aiming at, and that's only if the breeze is consistent at the same speed and same direction throughout the 1000 yards range..
It is far more common to have a left right breeze at the stand, a right to left breeze at the target butts, and possibly a head or tail wind, or more often both somewhere in between the two ends.
Then throw in mirages on a hot day that can put where you see the target meters away from where it actually is.
Then on top of all that with fullbore target rifle shooting telescopic sights are not allowed, your spotter can have a telescope to tell you where your shots hit, but you then have to adjust without the aid of even being able to see the actual target sometimes.
That is the challenge I adore and am addicted to almost
