Ep. 736: Foundations - It's Now or Never

pouring into the groceries to compete for some calories. During the last few weeks of the season, I kind of just tend to want to phone it in because I know it's not going to be easy, and I'm always a little burned out this time of year, and i know the odds of having a fun, productive hunt aren't that great. But that attitude is kind of dumb, because hunting even when it's cold and the deer activity is probably going to be pretty light, can still be enjoyable.

You just have to find the motivation to get out there and then bring your a game, because tagging any buzzer beater deer is a tough proposition, which is what this whole episode is all about. One weird thing about being a human which makes me sound I don't know, like I come from the same planet as Mark Zuckerberg or hell Mark Kenyan is that we have to lie to ourselves all the time. Well, technically we don't have to,

but we do. Back when my job was just writing assignments for different newspapers and magazines, and I wasn't forced to be a social media influencer who wants to kick his own ass every day, I procrastinated. Often having a couple hundred deadlines a year keeps you in the groove. But it's easy to tell yourself you'll write that piece on training pheasant dogs tonight, and that you should probably just go bass fishing today since it's so nice out

and the frog bite is on fire. And then at the end of the night, the computer just sits there quietly waiting for you to tap out a thousand words or so, and often doesn't see your smiling mug until the next morning. We lie to ourselves in a lot

of ways. Think about all of the fad diets out there, all of the programs to take you from sitting on the couch eating potato chips slathered with onion dip while watching reruns of the Office, to someone with six percent body fat, who can bench press a small European car, and who prefers to spend his free time meditating. We lie to ourselves and say that since the daily motivation isn't there, we just need to commit to some program

like that that'll keep us accountable to ourselves. But the warden is us, and he's pretty lenient and prone to well lying, so we can have what we want, which is not drinking a kale smoothie after running a half marathon over lunch. He wants us to have cheesecake and take a nap, so he tells us we can work

out tomorrow. When I first started working out, which was a long time ago but created a lot of core memories because I hated it so much, I figured out pretty quickly that I had been lying to myself about a lot of stuff I wasn't remotely in shape, and I had the discipline of a seven year old at

an ice cream Sunday buffet. During my initial phases of trying to be a regular gym bro, I realized that lying to ourselves can go both ways, or at least, you can trick yourself into doing things you don't want to do, which ends up making you feel good and eventually means you don't have to trick yourself a whole lot. That's a tasty word salad full of mental kale, So

let me explain this. I love music. I think maybe one of the best things about our current level of technology is that you can listen to any damn song you want at any time, and you can find a whole bunch of new music that will make it into

the regular rotation. This is wonderful, especially if you're old enough to remember buying tapes to listen to when you were in elementary school, which sounds a little like admitting that you had to dodge dinosaurs on your way to drink water from the river after you woke up in your cave while wearing a saber toothed tiger skull on your head and a loincloth made from skunk fur anyway.

I love music, and I thought that would carry me along nicely on the current when I did some cardio or picked up some heavy stuff and put it down. But it didn't. The thing about trying to become a runner is that your body doesn't want to do it, and your brain is going to listen to your body. It'll ignore the sweet sounds of Reverend Maynard singing about California falling into the ocean and focus entirely on the misery.

At least that's what happened for me. I didn't realize how to take my mind out of the equation until I started listening to podcasts that really interested me. Maybe I'm just not a very good multitasker, but I had to trick my brain in focusing on a podcast while my body trudged through another slow, painful five k. That discovery changed everything for me about doing cardio. It's simple, kind of dumb, but it works, or at least it worked for me. Now, that same strategy in the weight

room proved to be a disaster. I don't know why, but if I am lifting weights, I need music. And I'm not talking about Mariah Carey Christmas songs or the theme de Frago Rock on repeat, like Mark would listen to while curling five pound dumbbells. I'm talking about the kind of music that makes your chest hair grow and probably qualifies you to fight on the undercart of the next UFC event. Think after the Burials lost in the

Static here or Archspire's Drone corpse Aviator. Something that turns your intestines to jelly and makes you want to wrestle grizzly bears. It's just a little trick to play on yourself that will keep you there and working out nothing more. These types of things happen in everyday life all the time. We play mental games. Think about how you envision time

passing as you work. You probably try not to look at the clock for as long as possible, sometimes so you don't obsessively focus on how slow the day is moving and how your boss sucks. And sometimes you just want to swan dive right out of the tenth floor window. These little personal lies, these mental gymnastics, they happen to us all the time. In hunting too. Think about how often you talk yourself into not hunting. Why, Because hunting is work, it's supposed to be fun. But there is

a lot of labor built into everything. If not on the front end of just going out and being around deer, or trying to be around deer anyway, the back end is certainly work. Even if you don't process your own deer, killing one or shooting one is going to result in some work somehow, probably stress, possibly frustration too. So we say, well, you know, I'd like to go hunting before the closing bell, but I only hunt public land and there aren't any

deer left after gun season. Or you think, the last five times I set my stand, I never saw a deer, why would one walk by? Now, if we do decide to go, we might lie to ourselves a little more since we don't expect much. We might just go someplace easy. We might think, while this guy in the Outdoor Channel who has killed five two hundred inch bucks said, if you're not sitting on food, you're not in the late

season game. So you just go out to a stand that you hung in September and you hope something picks its way through a chisel plowed beanfield. Never mind that that hunter spends his entire season hunting what is essentially high fence deer without the fences, never mind that the stand you hung for September deer actually sucks for a north wind, and there hasn't been three calories worth of food left available for the deer there since early November.

To put yourself in the game right now, you have to trick yourself into believing you have a good plan, that you have at the very least a chance. I often think this is something we never talk about, but it's essential to enjoying a hunt. Most of us don't need to be fully snowed in with deer on any given sit to enjoy it, but the mere promise of

seeing deer can be enough. If you don't believe you're gonna see one, hunting's gonna suck, especially you know when you don't see one, So you have to trick yourself into believing you'll see one. How do you do this well? For starters, If your cameras are pretty slow, which they probably will be this time of year, and they show mostly nocturnal movement, which they probably will this time of year, you need to forget about them. If you don't have a really good spot to hunt, cameras during a late

season are just playing dangerous. They will almost inevitably give you a reason to not hunt, but don't fall for that. Instead, ask yourself what you need to do to be in the game right now. For me lately that has been a lot of scouting and a lot of observation. I'm not that great of a late season deer hunter. I struggle with it every year, but I have killed some deer up until the last day of the season, and I find as the years pass, I'm more tolerant of going out just to go out, even if I know

the odds of filling a tag are super low. But it all starts with believing that you're in the game. You have to put yourself there. So look at it this way. How are you going to be around deer? Where will they be moving? What setups do you have or could you have to make it happen. A good way to look at this is to think of it like an early season hunt, only much much harder. You want to know where the deer are likely to eat,

which probably isn't too heavy of a mental lift. A destination food source, or the oak flat with all the red oak acorns still laying around, or that prime age clear cut whatever, you know, what it is. If you don't start with the idea of where they'll go to

fill their bellies, you're in trouble. It's also a good idea to make a real educated guess on where they are likely betting, kind of like, well, the early season, this is point a to b hunting, really, but that distance might be short, at least shorter now than it was three months ago, and the woods will be open, and the deer aren't all that excited to deal with another hunter after months of dodging arrows and bullets and

crossbow bolts. While this reality would, at least on paper, lend itself to a turn and burn scouting mission to look for sign, that's also a high risk move because you're likely to bump them. Maybe that's not too big of a deal, but it all depends on their sensitivity to pressure where you hunt where I hunt. Mostly that pressure makes them real sensitive, so I'd rather not send

them scrambling and blowing across the land. If you're paying attention, I've recommended forgetting your trail cameras and not putting your boots on the ground to cover every inch of your property, which leaves what observation kind of like early season. The one good thing about the late season is that the deer are visible, or at least they can be if you have a way to watch them. Do it. Play

it safe at first, if you have the time. I'm always amazed when I go out in the late season how easy it is to pick up movement in the cover and watch as deer do their thing. Why is this important? Well beyond the obvious, it gives you a glimpse in of their world. If it's forty below, they might be ling it straight from their beds to the food. But if it's not, they often take their time. They browse, they might even lay down a little sign, but generally

they kill time. They're not in a hurry. To most deer, an open field or other food source is probably the greatest threat to their existence. It's where the danger is most concentrated all season, and by now, believe me, they know it. They don't want to go there in daylight, and often they don't. But they also don't just lay down for all daylight hours either. Pay attention to the deer. You see, how do they navigate their way through the cover.

What trees do they walk by? What patches of brush do they disappear into where do they stop and stare for two minutes at a time. Don't just watch them, observe them. I talked about this last week too. This is important, and while you're at it, plan to hunt them. This might seem dumb, but the reality of watching and then moving in to hunt isn't what most people think it is. It takes skill. It immediately exposes you to holes in your game. When you thought you just walk

in and saddle up. Where they went turns into a mission to just find a suitable tree, because everything looks different at twenty yards versus one hundred and fifty. The more info you have on the way in to hunt, the more likely you are to find a suitable ambush point, or realize you can slip into a stand or blind you already have and use that to your advantage. While you're doing this, do something else for me. Forget about

big bucks for a few days. Forget about the fact that you started the season thinking it would be a one forty year bust. Those days are gone. That goal, which is great, is an early season goal for most of us. This is the time to do something I preach about a lot, which is to just hunt deer, dose, pahone, scrapper Bucks, two hundred inch typicals, they're all on the menu.

But here's the thing. If you can't get within range of a button buck right now, you're not going to get in range of a five and a half year old stud. Remember when I told you that I listened to an alarming amount of German death metal when I lift weights so that I keep going when I don't want to hunting any and all deer is like that. It's the Romstein of late season deer hunting. It's so much easier to go hunting when you know it's going to be really difficult, and you lower your standards right

to the floor. Do you want to know what's crazy about that? Even if you wouldn't stoop so low as to ever consider shooting a fo, you probably can't get one in front of you in the last week of the season anyway. It's that hard. I think that rattles around in the back of our minds and we know it. I think that's a big motivator to stay home, because we don't want to encounter the reality that we might not be the trophy hunting studs we'd like to be.

But this is exactly how you get better at this stuff. You recognize whatever opportunity is in front of you, and you figure out a way to lace up your boots and get out there. You don't acknowledge that nagging voice that says it's not worth it. You find a way to go. It might just be that you want to doe in the freezer, or you just don't want to waste the last days of the season, whatever it is,

find that motivation. And if you're worried about shooting a scrapper or a dough fund and having your buddies give you shit, forget it, or worse, you're worried about keyboard warriors you'll never meet giving you shit, forget it. They aren't out there arrowing the hardest dear to kill all season. They're sitting at home, eating chips lathered an onion dip and laughing at Michael Scott's management style. They aren't getting better.

But you will be, or you could be. It just takes the right motivation and a plan to get out there and see some deer, and if you're lucky enough to see them, you're lucky enough to have a loose foundation for a successful late season deer hunt, and you know what, if you go out and do this, even if you know the odds are low, you're going to

carry that lesson with you. Sometimes the late season deer do cooperate, and a little bit of that success, mixed in with the reality of not filling tags is enough to change you as a hunter. It'll make you better next year when the clock is ticking and the days are short, but it will also make you better next October when the lull is supposed to keep all the bucks from moving. It'll make you better when it's seventy degrees and the rut's supposed to be raging but mostly

feels like a lost cause. It'll make you a better hunter because you won't be like most hunters. You'll be out there scouting and learning and hunting when most folks just don't see the value in it. So your job is to find the value in it. Do this anyway, you have to lie to yourself, trick yourself with the reward, lower your standards to where you'd never lower them. Whatever. Just find a way to get out there because the season's going to be over soon and that well sucks.

Don't waste what's left, you've got this. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As always, thank you so much for listening, and thank you so much for supporting us here at med Eater. You guys have been buying that new Mediator trivia board game like crazy, which is awesome. I hope

you're having a ton of fun with it. If you want to buy that, or you just want to read some articles on deer hunting or listen to a podcast, whatever, the Mediator dot com is your place to go. Check it out.