Ep. 739: Foundations - It's Time To Walk The Walk

the last time we celebrated this totally made up milestone. Right, For some of us, the new year means that deer season is over. For others, there might be a few weeks or a month or solo, but generally we're looking at a lot more in the rear view mirror than we are out in front of us through the windshield. This is as good of a time as any to reflect on what happened last year, but also to really

figure out how we want this season to go. It might seem like you have months and months to r act together on that front, but you don't, and I'm going to tell you why right now. I know I talk about this topic a lot, so bear with me. I'm going somewhere with it. You probably can't predict where, but I want to start with this statement. My wife has a lot of great qualities, but she's also a giant pain in the ass. If you're wondering if she feels the same way about me, you're wrong. There's no

way she would admit that I have great qualities. One of the reasons she's hard to handle is that her memory is unreal. I hate it. I can't remember anything because I pickled my brain with Jim Beam for way too long. But she's like an elephant in memory, not any other way. She breathed through multiple levels of education on academic scholarships, while I took the five year paths

to just barely getting a worthless four year degree. I don't know if you've ever been around someone with an insanely accurate memory, but the people who have it tend to succeed in life. The ability to retain information when coupled with the willingness to learn new things, is a sure way to open some doors in life that most folks would gladly walk through. It also can be a great deceiver. You see, my bride has a doctorate in exercise science. If you want to know weird facts about

human anatomy, she's your gal. In fact, she recently explained to me what the Paul Merris longest muscle is and why the tendon of that muscle is important to college and Major League baseball pitchers. Somewhere along the long timeline of human development, we needed to climb a lot more than we do now in what has taken hundreds of thousands of years. Some of us have retained this muscle, and some of us haven't. If you're a pitcher who needs Tommy John surgery and you have it, you're in luck.

It's like a spare part right there for you, you know, kind of like having that spare tire on your truck when you're antelope hunting and get that not so fun warning on your dash's display that you're about to have to dig out the jack and lay down in a dusty gravel road. If you don't have the Palmyra's longest muscle. Surgeons are going to have to root around in other areas of your body to find a suitable tendon if

you want to revive your pitching career. My wife knows this kind of stuff, and she brings it up often in random conversations. She also, and this is probably technically true, is an expert in exercise, largely due to how much she knows about how our bodies work. She could sit down and tell you exactly how how to develop certain muscles, or how to get your body into the creb cycle

to burn fat instead of sugar, or any number of things. Academically, she's pretty tough to beat in this category, but in the real world it's not so simple. What I mean by that is she'll often tell me how to run to achieve certain benefits or meet certain goals, but she doesn't really run a whole lot. I do, and it drives me nuts. My sweet spot for yearly miles is seven hundred now, which is my goal every year. I've run as much as eleven hundred miles in a single year,

but that proved to be too much. I say this to demonstrate something my wife has far more knowledge on running than I do, but I have far more experience. If you wanted to start running, you'd probably think she'd be a better source, but I probably am. Honestly, I've gone from not running at all and being pretty out of shape to running an occasional half marathon and just to prove I can, all while putting on the miles every week for nearly a decade. Now. So what does

that mean? It means that there's a wide gap between practical or accepted knowledge and putting that knowledge into real world use. There is no substitute for experience. An overweight doctor can tell you exactly how to lose weight by figuring out how to put yourself in a caloric debt, but they maybe have never actually done it for themselves. There are many many things that can't be learned from books and lectures. Now listen, I'm not shitting on academics

or anyone. I'm just using this to make a point. Personal experience is so important in hunting. You can read all day about certain tactics, or you can watch the hunting public guys blaze their way across the landscape while killing public land bucks in multiple states. You can see how it's done. You can take in a lot of information on hunting, but it's no substitute for actually hunting or scouting. This is something that is just missing in our world. I know this because people keep asking me

about it. They'll email and say, I just want to know how to scout my little area of the country. But the truth is, the information is out there. I've personally probably created seven thousand pieces of content on scouting, but I can't scout for you. No one can. You can read about how to keep your adrenaline check and how to go through a step by step shot process to never send a bad arrow toward a big buck, but that doesn't make you a stone cold killer during

the moment of truth. You have to get there through experience. I know this seems obvious, but I don't think it is. I don't think we actually acknowledge where we are most of the time on our hunting journeys, and we fill in a lot of gaps with information from other people. Now I'm not saying you can't listen to Andy May on a podcast and learn something about hunting that will be applicable to your situation, because you absolutely can, but you also won't have Andy May level success by listening

to him just talk. He didn't get there by reading magazine articles about hunting. If you get my drift, the path that the hunting industry wants you to take mostly is a bad one.

a roth Ira for a year. That's the dream. But what it does for all involved is creates a situation with a ton of gravity that will pull you to that blind over and over and over and over again. It answers the questions you still need to ask, you know. Couple this with the advice the best way to kill a big one is to stay out of the woods until he gets too confident in his safety that he's going to move in daylight and bang, You're done. So what does that do? It convinces us to stop scouting.

Aside from running trail cameras. It makes the decision making process easy because we don't have to make a lot of decisions. Just go sit the blind. But wait, you also have to not hunt most of the time to make it work when you do want to hunt, because the conditions are right now. If that's what you want, that blows the wind up your skirt, go for it. I honestly don't care how anyone else wants to hunt.

I'm just making an observation that method is a great way to consistently kill big bucks, but it's not a great way for a lot of people to actually enjoy hunting. And it's also a terrible way to get better at hunting. And some folks don't want to get better. They want to relax and kill deer. And that's great, but it's

probably not you. If you're listening to this. The rub here is the information you're consuming is coming from a lot of folks who want to hit the easy button as much as possible because their livelihood depends on them being an expert on hunting, and one way to appear to be an expert is to kill a lot of big bucks, no matter the difficulty level involved. Now, I'm not calling for an all out revolt because my neck would be in the guillotine at some point, I'm sure.

I'm asking you to look at last season. I'm asking you to look at what did you love about it? What did you hate about it? What nagging feeling do you have about what you should have done at one point or another? Then think about this. It's blank slate time. It's January, so most of us have about nine months before going to suit up and hunt once again. What do those months in between mean to you? What do you want to do with them? So much of what we focus on is the physical side of things, like

actively winter scouting or hanging stands or whatever. And I'm going to talk about all that stuff here in the next couple of months. But this right now is mostly a mental exercise because that's just what it should be. You know, just like running eleven hundred miles in a year sounds like an awful lot of physical effort, it's mostly the mental side that gets you to that goal. Trust me, what do you want out of this year?

And don't say, well, I want my first one hundred and forty inch deer, because that doesn't matter, at least not yet. That's the wrong focus. That's like the guy who goes on his first public land l hunt and spends all of his prep time thinking about how you know he's probably gonna pass a two to eighty bowl to kill a true three hundred. That's like wondering what you'll do with all the leftover cake when you haven't even brought the ingredients out yet and you don't even

own an oven. If you're having trouble envisioning what I meant, break down what I know I'm going to work toward this year. I'm gonna hunt Elk in September, come hell or high water. This is the last year for over the countertags in Colorado, so I'm planning on driving out there and competing with all those Michigan and Texas hunters who are also going to get in before the gates start to close. At least if I don't draw a new Mexico tag. That's my plan, and I probably won't,

so I probably will head to Colorado. I'm going to work on a property I own too, so my little girls have another rock solid place to hunt that will feature a food plot and a blind and really the makings of me being a huge hypocrite for what I just said a little bit ago. In my defense, it's not for me, but I see why you'd give me the suspicious side eye on that. I'm also going to keep working at two things, arrowing a big one in the Big Woods and figuring out how to kill a

buck out of a cattail slew at public land. Those two environments couldn't be more different from each other or the typical places I hunt. But man, have they sunk their teeth into me. They kick my ass and I love it. I actually do because new is good, different is good, Struggle is good. Remember that. Aside from those goals, I don't know where my hunting journey will take me this year, but they represent a pretty solid framework upon

which I'll try to build a great year. The elk thing will keep me working out and will light a fire under my ass the September draws closer. The Big Woods goal will get me to winter and spring scout a ton which I love, but I always need a little bit of motivation to go do in that Western

Minnesota cattail deer thing. I don't know what that'll do for me, but I bet it'll involve a lot of map work on on X and at least a few off season scouting trips, you know, and the food plot habitat work on my property will just give me a great excuse to load up the girls and the dogs this summer and go get things done, you know, while taking a few breaks here and there for some brook trout fishing and maybe a little ice cream. Will some of these things help me level up as a hunter?

Probably not, but some of them will. And I like that promise a lot. So, dear listener, what are you going to do with this fresh year laid out before you? Are you content enough with your results over the last few seasons to do the same things you've always done? If so, carry on? But what if you want something different? What if that is just making your first good shot on a deer? How will you accomplish that? It won't

be just through more time at the range. Although that's certainly a good move, it's definitely also going to involve more scouting, more prep work for stands. Also, you can put yourself in a position to take that dreamy fifteen yard broadside on a relaxed deer, which is one hell of a good way to make good shots. Is your goal to kill your first big one or some level of buck that is a step up from everything else you've shot good. Do that, and I'll give you a hint.

If you want to buy something to aid you on that journey, get some more trail cameras, just kidding, Buy some hiking boots. Use cameras all you want, but remember that it's time in the woods and boots on the ground that will give you the experience necessary to level up as a hunter. On this note, I should say something else. If you want to set a new goal

for yourself this year, make it tough but attainable. Don't be the couch potato who decides he's going to run a marathon in six months because he won't get there. That's nearly a guaranteed failure. Don't be the hunter who has a few weekends to go each season who hunts public land and decides that it's one fifty or nothing. Even in Iowa, which is candyland compared to every other state.

That's a lost cause for most hunters. So figure out what would be a challenged year for you where you hunt and with consideration to your life and your time available. Maybe that's your first two year old wish. To a lot of people, probably sounds dumb, But as someone who had to hunt hard for like ten years before he killed a buck that wasn't a fawn or a year and a half old, I fully endorse that goal. Now, maybe it's your first mature buck. What does that mean?

Is it a three year old one hundred and fourteen inch year or something bigger and older. Ask yourself why you're picking that goal and what it would take for you to have a reasonable chance of getting there. Maybe it's not about buck size at all. I find myself in this world as venison becomes more and more important to me, where I'm not thinking about buck size as much as I'm thinking about how many pounds of venison

i have in the freezer. So when I start the season, I tend to focus on the goal of how many deer my family will need to feed itself for a year, and that takes into account if I'll split meat with cameraman or give meat to a landowner who wants some, or whatever. That goal is one that drives me hard. Hell, it nearly got me divorced during this latest muzzle Older season,

but it all worked out in the end. So what's the goal, my friends, what's the best way for you to get lots of practical, real world experience out there where the wild things live. Instead of phoning it in for the next nine months and then hoping a new grunt call or a bottle of dope will save your struggling ass next fall, make a plan to scout and hunt, shoot whatever, so you don't need to rely on anything more than your ability to set yourself up where deer

like to walk. Then maybe add some of that other stuff in later, at the very least, give this some thought. This is the time of year for it. It's not the general hunting knowledge that is everywhere that's going to help you kill more or bigger deer, or even help you have more fun out there, which is probably the

most important part. It'll be the work you dedicate yourself to, the discipline you bring to the table, and the realization that for you to get better at this stuff, it's going to take personal experience and a lot of it make that happen. And you know what, just like finally getting to a point where you accept a six mile run is nothing more than what you do on your lunch break. The work and stress of being a hunter will meet the enjoyment and feeling of contentment that is

the back end of the hard stuff. When you get to that place, it's sweet, but it's just a stop on the journey. There is no ultimate goal. You'll never beat the final boss because there's always a new environment to hunt in. There's always a bigger deer out there, or a chunk of public land that you've never hunted that is just worth hiking into. There's always something to do.

Figure out how to do it. Come back next week because I'm going to talk about the lay of the land and why you probably don't know as much as you think you do about the spots you hunt. So really it's going to be a winter scouting episode that focuses heavily on what you should be looking for right now so you can reframe your thought process for next dear season. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which

is brought to you by First Light. As always, I just want to thank each and every one of you for all of your support, you know, reading the articles, listening to the podcast, showing up at these Mediator live events we've been doing all this stuff. We really really appreciate it, so thank you for that. If you want some more content, you know where to go, the mediator

dot com. You can find all of our YouTube series, you can find all of our podcasts, all of our articles, maybe a recipe for some wild game you want to cook this month. Whatever, it's all there at the mediator dot com