The Sandhills of Central Nebraska
After a healthy break from blogging (most of the month of August) I’m back in the game. I recently received an incredible incentive to both get in better shape, and hone my wilderness survival skills. My dad invited me to go deer hunting with him again up in the sandhills of Nebraska!
Last year was my first time, and I remember the pain and suffering all too well. I was overweight and out of shape (which are NOT the same thing), trying to hike dozens of miles, several hours a day. I couldn’t keep up with my dad, a veteran of numerous marathons over the decades. I seriously cut into his hunting that first day, and we were both glad to go our separate ways the next morning. If you haven’t hiked sandhills before, it gives you a whole new appreciation for the guy you see in movies, lost in the desert and traversing enormous sand dunes. It’s easily 2-3 times as difficult as hiking pleasant terrain.
As of Saturday, I weighed 300 pounds, with roughly 75 days before the hunting trip. I’d started to drop some weight with my survival activities, but without a proper incentive my “comfy chair” in front of the TV was just too inviting. Now I’m on a mission: to lose 25 pounds, and to log over half a million steps, before the start of the hunting trip. That’s a pound every 3 days, and just under 7,000 steps per day on average.
Doing this, I hope to spend our 2 pre-season scouting days out in the sandhills, tracking and photographing deer for several hours a day. I hope to be able to hike 8-10 miles a day during our three planned hunting days, never letting my fitness be a factor in bagging the best deer I can.
As I mentioned above, fitness and fatness can co-exist. No matter how well I do the next 10 weeks, I’ll definitely be overweight for this trip. But I don’t have to be unfit. I can build up a great level of endurance in that time. And if I keep up the activity after the trip, I’ll eventually lose the rest of the fat as well.
It’s been two days since the start of my challenge, and I’m down two pounds. Weight loss is easy early on, so I plan to keep pushing and get ahead of the game. This will buy me wiggle room during the last few weeks, when pounds will shed less easily.
