The Idea
Like most of you, I’ve read all the GlibFit articles and have really profited from them (not financially, but still.) But there’s one thing I’m thinking we’re missing; that would be an exercise machine dedicated to those folks who like hunting and fishing.
See, there’s a problem with most of the exercise equipment on the market today. Sure, for the most part, it’s effective, but if getting in shape to wander the outdoors is your goal, these machines won’t really prepare you.
So, I’ve taken it on myself (in the interest of enacting your labor; you’re welcome) to design an exercise machine that will give you an equivalent challenge to one of the more physically demanding outdoors activities you’ll find, and an activity with which I have some considerable experience – hunting deer and elk in the mountains.
The Machine
This is what you’re getting ready for.
The basis of this machine will be an honest old treadmill, but there the similarity stops. Remember, we’re going to want to simulate the actual conditions in the field. So, we will add several attachments to the basic treadmill.
- The first item is an adaptation of something most treadmills already have, and that’s a device to change the incline of the machine. Only, this change will have to be more dramatic; the incline should change at random, from forty-five degrees in the positive (up) to forty-five degrees in the negative (down), the better to simulate the terrain. Also, the treadmill should be programmed to suddenly flip you off, to simulate the falls one frequently is subject to in rough country. Some of the tumbles I’ve taken allowed enough time to get most of the way through a Tom Clancy novel before impact, but unless we want to mount the machine on top of a medium-sized skyscraper, we’ll probably just have to settle for having it toss you on your face every now and then.
- Now, we’ll want to simulate the terrain. I’ve never walked on a smooth, non-slip surface anywhere in the mountains, so instead of a regular treadmill surface, the belt will have a varied surface, to simulate walking over rocks. On random intervals, a device under the machine will spray the belt with ice, so that one step will result in (another) fall as your foot slips on the slick surface. Two rotating drums on either side will occasionally whip you in the face with plastic devices simulating the branches of a spruce tree. Every now and then the entire treadmill will drop you knee-deep into a big tank of ice water, to simulate crossing a mountain stream.
- Oh, and forget the comfortable, form-fitting workout clothing. You’ll want to dress as you would for November in the mountains. On this machine, you will be surrounded by an enclosure, inside which the temperature will be approximately -10 degrees. At random intervals a nozzle will blast you in the face with either icy water or snow. Also at random intervals, snow will drop down the back of your neck from an elevated hopper. The machine will come with special refrigerated boots, with ten-pound weights attached to simulate walking in boots caked with thick mud.
- Finally, when you step onto the treadmill, an arm will come down with padded metal loops that will lay on your shoulders, to simulate your pack. Another will rest on your firing-side shoulder, to simulate the weight of a slung rifle. The pack portion will simulate a weight of about thirty pounds, the rifle portion, ten pounds. But as you go through your workout, the weight will gradually increase to double the original figure.
The Benefits
Hunting in mountains in the late fall/early winter isn’t easy. But the right preparation could make it go much more smoothly.
In the long-lost days of the Old West, would-be warriors in the Plains Indians tribes would drive skewers under their pectoral muscles and hang suspended by those skewers for a day and a night. Following this ordeal, no hardship of fatigue, heat, cold, weather or any other extreme seemed quite so bad. A machine built as described here won’t go to that extreme, but it will provide an experience that is a pretty good simulation of a day in the mountains during deer and elk season.
But it won’t really prepare you for what happens when conditions get bad. Those times, on the other hand, will provide many opportunities to brag to your friends about how rough it was, assuming you survive.
??? – Profit!
Marketing a machine like this won’t be easy. Too many people will realize that, to get a similar experience, all they need are some nearby mountains and a healthy dose of masochism. And since elk hunters are one of the primary target markets, plenty of folks will already have those things close to hand.
But there are plenty of folks who live in urban environments and who would like to be prepared for a trip to the mountains. It would be smart for urban and suburban gyms to get in on the ground floor here.
I thought about a training simulator for ice fishing, but then I realized that all one would need to do is to spend the day sitting in a deep freeze and then going home with no fish, so there’s probably little to no market for that.
Buy one, get one free!
Will I be able to stop and survey the route coming up?
If no, I don’t want one.
I love it!
But what about altitude? Could the chamber also be programmed to restrict oxygen and stimulate red blood cell production?
Fucking genius, though.
Ooof. You’re reminding my sea-level living ass of trying to walk through Cripple Creek.
“Why am I winded already?!!”
(Okay, 53 feet above sea level, but still)
I was doing a job in western colorado once. All my co-workers were younger, smoked, and seemed to work circles around me.
Only upon going back to the hotel one night did I notice a sign saying “elevation 6200 ft”.
Well, that explained it.
I read this in Steve Martin’s voice when he did the cruel shoes bit.
LOL
Needs a video screen, with a hot trainer leading you down the trail. By paid subscription of course.
When your subscription exires, it switches automatically to a Meth Hag.
Beat me to it. Also a break period for bathroom breaks, which you could set as “young, old, and incontinent”
A rear screen with a bear to motivate when a trainer just won’t do.
+ 1 Cocaine Bear
Cocaine?
Like this?
I was hoping for that scene from The Eiger Sanction.
+ 1 The Archer Sanction
Dog lovers should watch a double bill of The Eiger Sanction and The Dambusters.
Damn you for mentioning that. It doesn’t help that the german shepherd puppy is black.
Ass.
Speaking as a hillbilly squirrel hunter, I like this. I think there needs to be a payoff. A device similar to those hoity-toity exercise bikes which has a screen that displays the terrain being walked, and gives you a chance at the end to virtually shoot something would be great. Maybe even one with a hunt leader cheering you on, or a fake bear chase.
You need random holes to step into, and some downed trees to clamber over.
And what about dragging your elk back to the truck?
Prowler sled would work for that.
My thoughts exactly. Now drag that 150 pounder back over those same downed trees, through the brush, and sometimes downhill (not to much of that). A quarter elk on the back pack, 2 trips, 3 if you’re bringing out a 6 X 6. (Your partner’s gonna carry some of the quarters, a deal is a deal, right?)
Excellent training but don’t practice by falling down in the yard. I learned the hard way and you don’t want a practice run.
Great article, Animal, but I’m happy not to have to do it anymore. Easier to climb a ladder, sit, ponder, sit and if the weather’s nice, ponder with eyes closed.
I think you can sell it to Peleton, they are looking for new ideas.
Good job. And OK, I’ll say it – for those of y’all who don’t know, it’s a McManus tribute article. Didn’t you do the one a few years ago, or was it somebody else?
So for anyone who liked it, go order “It’s a Fine and Pleasant Misery” or “They Shoot Canoes, Don’t They?” I used to save up my meager $ as a kid to buy them at the bookstore, and still have them on the shelf.
Seconded. Great books.
I’ve produced a few Glibs articles that were outdoor humor along those lines, yeah. McManus was the Master, although there were some other good scribes in the genre back in the day; Ed Zern comes to mind.
I love this idea. Build it and they will cum…but I think you missed the true profit market if you don’t consider the US military: throw in some camo, VR head-set with Nite vision, depleted uranium rounds, ect.
Cool idea but it seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen. You’d have to have the operator sign off on all sorts of paperwork waiving liability if the got injured. That’s a tough sell.
I need a hologram of my dog running so far ahead of me that he’s out-of-sight. Then I have to call him back as loud as I can.
I laughed. Fucking labs.
A terrier, but same spastic attitude.
My wife and I joke that if we walk 3 miles, he runs 10 miles.
If you want to make money on this, put a dozen of these in a studio in a strip mall, and market it to suburban moms as the latest workout fad.
There is an archery elk hunter who wrote a book called: Endure: How to Work Hard, Outlast, and Keep Hammering by Cameron Hanes. Similar to Goggins (in fact Goggins wrote the forward). He runs ultramarathons and competes at weight lifting so he can be a better bow hunter.
He claims to have a 100% success rate at getting an elk every year.
I have to wonder what his family thinks of him being gone all the time.
Sounds like cross fit.
*runs out of room*
We put a treadmill in the doorway so that you can’t actually get out.
High Hurdle training
I like that idea. Now make an exercise machine that simulates getting a couch up a narrow stairwell and in an apartment door.
South Park may have hit on that with the Shake Weight.
+ 1 refreshing gel
OT: This is why I find it so puzzling that the LGB so heartily embraced the T because it has always seemed to me that the “activist” side of the Ts is utterly homophobic and anti-gay.
https://nypost.com/2022/07/11/trans-woman-returns-to-life-as-man-and-hits-out-at-the-activist-doctor-who-turned-his-life-upside-down/
The saddest part of this is the revelation that his “alpha male” dad was fine with him being gay all along.
Medicaid pays for this crap???
Yes – YOU pay for it. Either directly through government programs or with your healthcare premiums you pay to a woke insurance company.
But they’re good Progressives, and that’s what counts.
Trans beliefs inherently deny that homosexuality exists. As our gay brethren here can undoubtedly attest, if they wanted to have sex with human beings who have vaginas, they’d simply be hetero.
Don’t stick it in crazy!
Program in a rest break where you have to drop trou in subzero temperatures?
Daily Quordle 395
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boring
#waffle398 5/5
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better
I thought about a training simulator for ice fishing, but then I realized that all one would need to do is to spend the day sitting in a deep freeze and then going home with no fish, so there’s probably little to no market for that.
🙂
Selfie contest?
The Department of Defense has released of a photo of the Chinese spy balloon that was shot down earlier this month off the coast of South Carolina after it had traversed the country.
The photo, obtained by Fox News Digital, was taken Feb. 3 by one of the U-2 pilots. It shows a U.S. Air Force pilot looking down at the suspect Chinese surveillance balloon as it hovered over the central continental U.S.
The big surprise (to me) is that the U2s are still on the job.
They never left. The SR-71 cost a fortune to operate.
So with territory that is relatively non-hostile and and low/no SAM coverage they use the U2. It has the advantage that you don’t have to wait for a satellite to fly over and that it can loiter.
They’ve done several generations of avionics and camera upgrades so no reason not to use a prove airframe. It’s far different from plane that first flew.
James May at the Edge of Space
I worked for a while with young woman that had spent time on a skunk-works type project before coming over to commercial aerospace.
She would answer the phone with a crisp “Hello”, and pretty much refused to answer any question asked over the phone. It drove my boss nuts.
[Agency], this is [Redacted]. Please hold while our elimination teams vector to your location.
I was trained to answer with the last four of the phone number when on push-to-talk phones. Much better than working in unsecured areas “[UNIT] [OFFICE] [RANK] [NAME]”.
Boss pickups up the phone and dials Jane.
Jane: Hello
Boss: Is this Jane?
Jane: Is it supposed to be?
The TRUTH came out on that last night, it was the Hat surveying Donald’s once and future kingdom.
Hello Joy. I don’t want to live in your world. Bye. Thanks.
This sounds too much like drill weekend. Maybe there’s a money making opportunity for the Guard here?
Wheeeee!
At the risk of taking Marge seriously — which is always a potential intellectual hazard — let’s just play this out for a hot minute, shall we?
First of all, the last time Southerners like Marge proposed a national divorce, it was because they were holding 4 million African Americans hostage as slaves … and didn’t want to let them go.
Today, roughly half of African Americans still live in the 11 Southern states that comprised the Confederacy, and so if this national divorce happened, they would be trapped in an apartheid hellscape of a new country with zero health care, crappy public schools, barely a right to vote, and a full return to ownership by someone else of their bodies — except this time it wouldn’t just be Black women, it would be all women.
——-
And if there was a national divorce, what would red America do for industry, given that many of its economies are dependent on blue state manufacturers who utilize red state nonunion labor to manufacture their goods more cheaply?
If red America was merely a competitor to other low-wage manufacturing countries, they’d have to continually reduce wages in order to compete.
And based on the way individual red state economies like Mississippi, Kentucky and West Virginia operate now, they would be a nation of largely impoverished workers ruled by a small oligarchy of the very rich, with no health care, scant voting rights, and no autonomy for women.
The world inside your head is a dystopian Hellscape, that’s for certain.
https://twitter.com/BobMurphyEcon/status/1628746543464316928
I agree with Bob that the term is stupid.
While I like Bob’s orgy analogy, I personally prefer ‘battered spouse escaping from their abusive partner.’
Yes, but it’s still just two parties. This needs to be hundreds.
JR: We’re not actually divided by states. The reality is, we are a nation not divided by states, but rather by counties. It’s one reason Marjorie Taylor Greene calling for secession isn’t just inconceivable as well as foolish, it would be disastrous for Republican-voting states.
Fine Joy, 3,000 options.
When I proposed my divorce map here some years ago, proposed states included Cuyahoga, Chicago, Orlando, and Miami on a par with, say, Rockies or Lakota.
I propose we wall-in the cities and reduce them to territorial status.
Self-governing independent city states would be an excellent idea.
NYC could have their own army, but logistics would limit its size to where it wouldn’t be effective as an aggressive force.
That would just lead to a worstening of the refugee crisis. Take away their ability to fuck things up.
Bring back the city-state. Let those fucks be their own country and leave the rest of us the hell alone.
https://www.glibertarians.com/2020/06/pushing-boundaries/
Woah! Turns out we hashed this out pretty good years ago. Forgot what an epic that article; and I useta be funny!
The wise FourScore observed: I’m beginning to believe this once great country is too big and too diverse to try to manage. De-centralization sounds like a good idea. Can be on present state lines and agreements with adjacent states that will be free trade within that trade area plus free trade with any other adjacent trade areas. Freedom of movement as well.
Well, he didn’t ask for smaller American unions, but here’s a batch of them, a weak and lazy attempt from a guy who knows a lot about a lot of the country and almost nothing of the rest: both classes will be readily obvious. Don’t get me wrong: this won’t work and has a bunch of obvious problems we’ve hashed out before.
City-states are needed to address the urban/rural conflict.
Most jurisdictional splits are 60/40, so lots of people are always in the wrong place.
“That would just lead to a worstening of the refugee crisis.”
Who said they would be allowed entry to Deanistan?
Hundreds? Ugh. No. Two have fucked things up enough. We need zero political parties.
I meant hundreds of independent entities. Not political parties.
You can’t have anything approaching a representative government without political parties. The Founders didn’t want ‘em, but they spring like fungus from the fresh manure of popular politics.
And we have to keep these benighted people in the Union so we can lift them up to the light. It’s the liberal woman’s burden. Just don’t try to ship the people who are trapped in this hellscape to the Liberal area like some modern day underground railroad. Those areas don’t have the resources to handle a few illegal immigrants. Much less the millions who would be trapped in the Red areas.
The fact that so many people see the world this way makes a pretty strong case for a national divorce.
She’s worried we might like the other options.
I think we should see other countries.
Unlike the public schools found in large cities right now, right?
Ha. Hahahahaha.
Government. Schools.
C’mon, people. Tow the lion.
So let us destroy ourselves.
If people don’t want to live in the new Hell on Earth, they could certainly leave. You know, kind of like how they’re leaving New York right now.
I know Democrats are pissed because you assholes might just succeed where they failed so many times, making them look bad.
Joy is just stupid and malevolent.
First of all, the last time Southerners like Marge proposed a national divorce, it was because they were holding 4 million African Americans hostage as slaves … and didn’t want to let them go.
Just ignore the slave states that stayed in the Union.
And ignore that the Emancipation Proclamation was carefully crafted to not have an effect anywhere the Union army was in control.
Absolutely. Just ask Joey Plugz, he loves to explain that Delaware was a slave state.
Also ignore the fact that screaming leftists o the west coast are far more likely to provoke a national divorce than conservatives. That already happened in Seattle and Portland in limited areas. That is a test run for “fuck America” on a state scale.
There needs to be random scat that has to be avoided as well as a mode for stalking.
Stalking mode would have a sound and visual meter attached that would scare away game if it is exceeded. kind of like the one in Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six videogames. In stalking mode you would have to make it a certain distance without scaring the game while all of the other stuff you mentioned happens.
By the way this would be a great place to add augmented reality or actual VR goggles.
skunk encounters
Of the first (see one), second (see and smell one), and third kind (see one, smell it, then receive a full on garlicky blast to the kisser).
I’m still here, pay attention to me!
Former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., slammed Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., on Monday for calling for the U.S. to have a “national divorce” to separate red and blue states and to “shrink the federal government.”
In a tweet responding to Greene, a far-right Republican from Georgia, Cheney said the remarks were “unconstitutional.”
“Our country is governed by the Constitution,” Cheney tweeted. “You swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Secession is unconstitutional. No member of Congress should advocate secession, Marjorie.”
“Til death do us part.
Poor Liz. Why don’t the reporters come around anymore?
Has she returned home to NoVA?
No one is surprised Liz would try and kill anyone who tries to leave.
Im always happy to read “former” before Liz Cheney
It’ll do until “the late” comes along.
“Cheney said the remarks were “unconstitutional.”
Not as unconstitutional as, say voicing support for gun confiscation or a federal office of disinformation.
In fact, I cannot lay my finger on the provision of the Constitution that prohibits a state from seceding. Funny, that.
The White House Deputy Press Secretary retweeted Greg Price, aka ‘Joe Biden Showered With His Daughter’
Whoopsie!
And still hasn’t deleted it.
Oh sure there were never any bad-faith attacks on Trump administration officials.
They were too busy doing bad-faith attacks on Trump.
Betsy DeVos, to the white courtesy phone please.
I don’t recall such an incident. Perhaps she can remind us of one and how Chao responded.