His explanation to the other guys in our Safari Club chapter, for my good ram versus his mediocre one, was that I got preferential treatment because I was a writer. (Did I mention he was corrosively competitive?)
There were many lessons learned on that trip. Many.
Anyway, one of the more positive ones was that for backpacking in the mountains—the most strenuous hunting imaginable, in my opinion—there is no substitute for training. I came back from that hunt having lost another ten pounds. The funny thing was that I got into the habit of staying in good shape (you never know when someone will offer to take you chamois hunting in the Austrian Alps) and became an habitual runner right up until a hip replacement three years ago. The athritic hip had nothing to do with the running or my fitness regime, I was assured by my surgeon. After all, the other hip was picture perfect, and it would have been equally damaged had running been the cause.
The doctor did tell me my days of running marathons were over, however, and when I asked—somewhat tongue in cheek—how he felt about backpacking in the mountains, to my astonishment he said “Perfect! Backpacking and hip replacements work beautifully.” And he wasn’t kidding.
This is fortunate because, next to distance running, I don’t think there is any better all-around conditioning exercise than putting on your mountain boots, strapping on a progressively heavier pack, and hiking progressively longer distances with a lot of uphills.
For years, I insisted on always doing this outdoors but for a variety of reasons I have taken to doing it on a treadmill at a gym, as part of a more comprehensive workout. One advantage of a treadmill is that you can vary both the speed and the angle of your uphill grade, and it will tell you things like miles covered and vertical feet climbed. One disadvantage is that you can press “stop” anytime you like and get off, whereas hiking two miles from home, you have no choice but to hike the two miles back.
A couple of weeks ago, while I was sweating on the treadmill with my 50-pound pack, a gentleman approached me and asked which mountain I was climbing. The Chugaches, I replied—and to my surprise, he knew what and where they were.
Turns out he’s a professional physical trainer who specializes in fitness training for hunters. His name is Jeremy Koerber, he has a website (www.stayfittohunt.com) and he offers a variety of options, from one-on-one, to group sessions, to programs you can do by yourself. These include training plans, schedules, and so on. I plan to go into this more in later missives, and deal with specific things like training for mountains, or training for turkey hunting. Jeremy being a hunter himself, he understands what’s required.
Meanwhile, if you have a big-game hunt planned for this year, you can start by putting 20 pounds of something in your backpack, and walking a mile. Then go up from there in both weight and distance, doing it no more than once every two days. And wear your mountain boots. They’ll add some weight to each foot (all to the good), you’ll soon find out if they don’t fit right, and they will be well and truly broken in by the time you leave.
Gray’s shooting editor, Terry Wieland, learned long ago that once you’re in good shape, it’s easier to stay in shape than to let yourself go and then have to do it all over again in a year or two.
