To have confidence in your final prep, you have to start by asking yourself the right question. What matters right now? The answer to that question sets your training priorities. Then you can toss the training that seems productive but isn’t preparing you for climbs, descents, and days counted in miles instead of time.  Let’s give you the training focus necessary to use June’s four weeks well so you’re confident you’ll pound every ridge between you and your quarry.

Self-talk either makes or breaks our performance while also shaping our internal landscape and our identity. However, most hunters struggle with self-talk, especially during hard workouts and tough days in the mountains. They tend to talk to themselves like an enemy instead of a friend. The rise of positive psychology has also caused self-talk problems. It often motivates people to tell themselves flowery lies. Neither negative nor unrealistically positive self-talk works. Honest, instructional self-talk does. 

The chest strap heart rate monitor is a great tool. I think every hunter who’s serious about improving their endurance should own one and use it during most conditioning sessions. But sometimes we head out the door and forget to toss it in the truck. And other times, it’s just not practical, like when we’re hunting but still want to keep tabs on how hard we’re working so we don’t gas ourselves out. Each of those scenarios requires us to learn how to dial in on how hard we’re training using feedback from our bodies instead of following the heart rate read out from our chest straps.