35 Days Chasing One Pennsylvania Buck: What Kept Me Going | HOS

Nobody needs help getting out of bed on opening morning. The gear’s been laid out for a week and you’re awake before the alarm. That’s motivation, and on opener it’s free.
The morning that decides your season is the one three weeks later. Same 4:15 alarm, the fourteenth time you’ve heard it, no shooter in ten days, and a very reasonable voice in your head making a very reasonable case for sleeping in just this once.
That morning is what this episode is about.
In 2024 I hunted one deer in the Pennsylvania mountains for more than thirty-five days straight. A legitimate Boone and Crockett buck living in country where deer like that almost never exist. I lived out of my travel trailer, hunted mornings, worked remotely through the middle of the day, and went right back in every afternoon. On October 11th I saw him on the hoof for the first time. Then he vanished. A week of not finding his sign later, the excitement was gone. What got my feet on the floor after that wasn’t motivation. It was something I’ve started calling truthful lies. Small, technically true things I told myself every morning. A big scrape I hadn’t seen before. Old rubs from past seasons. The tallest rub I’d ever found in those mountains. None of it was proof. All of it got me to the truck.
From there I get into why motivation acts like weather, and why Angela Duckworth’s Grit is a book I come back to every fall. Enthusiasm is common, endurance is rare. Effort counts twice. In hunting terms, that means the small, boring reps nobody brags about. A few arrows a day through your full shot sequence. Ten minutes on the map. Logging every sit, especially the empty ones. Enough sleep and strength to be sharp on day twenty instead of just present. Before the season, during it, and after.
I also break down the three places guys fizzle: when the novelty wears off, when fatigue turns into one excuse a week (I own one of mine from this season), and when a miss guts you. That last one comes with a story from a sixteen-day Midwest public land trip where I missed a big buck twice, kept getting up anyway, and on the final evening, truck already packed, killed a deer I didn’t know existed the day before.
Then the practical part. Build the floor, not the ceiling. Set minimum daily standards for your bow, your intel, and your body, plus one rule for the hard mornings. Mine is simple. The alarm is not a question.
And yes, I tell you how the Pennsylvania deer ended. It isn’t the ending you’d guess.
Motivation’s going to show up for opener. It always does. This one’s about what gets you out of bed when it doesn’t.
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