Posts by Aaron Proffitt

  • HUGE alligator gar bow fished

    Quote from Nate

    Aaron, how do you guys prepare gar? Down here we do gar balls.. try to make them taste more like crab meat than anything else :D Every now and then we end up with a gar or 2 that are gutt hooked on the catfish jugs.. I clean them and bring them to the housekeepers at work. They would take a 3ft gar over 10lbs of the finest bass fillets any day of the week, and they can sure as hell make it taste damn good as well.


    Nate, we like to take tin snips and cut them right down the center of the back then I'll peel 'em open and remove the backstrap filet . From that point on... it's game on. Broiled, roasted on the grill, bite sized cuts that are rolled in spices with corn meal & flour and deep fried. Poor man's lobster.

  • HUGE alligator gar bow fished

    In Oklahoma , at least , they're listed as a non-game ,rough fish . Which is both good and bad. Good cause you can target them with a myriad of gear. Bows, spear,harpoons whatever....which is great !! However, it also means that they don't regulate as far as creel limits.


    I'm not really to concerned about the ones ,say, 3-4 feet and under; but I'd sure love to see them put a season limit on the giants. In some bodies, they're becoming quite rare .

  • HUGE alligator gar bow fished

    Very cool thread, Judah. And these are neat,neat animals.


    You know, I kinda got myself in hot water a few years ago down near the Red River a long the Texas/Oklahoma regarding these giant fish . My brother and I and his in-laws had just returned from a night of bowfishing when a boat pulled up to the ramp with not one but four of these giants being towed along side. Each one was well over a 100 lbs..


    Now guys, I think by now everybody here knows that I hunt everything I can legally with all kinds of tools and weapons...but this went all over me. Four gar, at over a 100 lbs. ? It takes one of these a century or more to reach that size. We have a limit in our group of one...that's not one per person,but for the group. If someone in our little band takes one monster. That's it. And unlike a lot of folks in that area, we eat the damn thing. Anyway, long story short I asked them if they intended on calling it a season and they saif they'd be back that night . I told them our policy and they told me to go f**k myself and everything went down hill from there.


    As many cool species we have available to bowfish , and many that we need to shoot as many as we can such as carp...it just pissed me off the waste.

  • 'Born to Run' , natural steps to training

    Quote from LunkerBuster

    Very cool. Def looking into this. I love running but my body doesn't. This might be perfect


    Unfortunately barefoot shoes are really douschey


    I have some that are similar to the Vibram Five Fingers ... but not quite as douchey .:D


    Actually, you can get something similar with a very similar effect without going that route. Look at road racing shoes... I bought two pairs of Saucony Shay's from Eastbay for $70 . That was with shipping .Two pairs shipped here to Afghanistan, $70. They are simply a thin sole and nylon foot cover. That's it. Road racers . Since I can't wear toed shoes during organized PT, I opted for the Shay's and love 'em.


    Compare these types of shoes to what distance runners wore in the 20's and 30's ( speaking of the 30's there have been 3 times when an interest in running spiked. The 30's during the Great Depression, the 70's immediately following the Vietnam War and directly after 9/11. Co-relation to stress and our desire to run ? Perhaps.) . They wore a shoe similar to leather ballet slippers. Look at pics yourself. Just leather slippers.


    Anyway, my Shay's are what I typically wear .

  • 'Born to Run' , natural steps to training

    Quote from 75th

    Short strides. This is the first I've heard of this. I'll try it out. Faster than jogging, right?


    Ivan , it's one of those things you'll know by feel . At first it felt incredibly awkward as I've got pretty long legs and the standard SOP was for me to stride out and use the length to my advantage. So ? What'd it get me ? Prominent heel strikes.


    But just try it to get a feel for it,bro. You'll know at what pace you can use.

  • 'Born to Run' , natural steps to training

    Incidentally, the American he met down there in Copper Canyon ,Mexico was a man named Micah True. I remember reading about Micah True back in March when he passed away during a run in some very rough country. Took 3 days to recover his body by horseback . Turns out he had an undiagnosed heart condition. But, ya know ? He lived and died his way and doing what he loved. I'm envious.

  • 'Born to Run' , natural steps to training

    In my past life I was a pretty talented distant runner. Enough so, that I could enter a race from a 1600 to a 10k and have all the wind I needed to not really have to think about it and just strategize my way thru it. Then the injuries began . Eventually, I found it excruciating to even take a shower as the mere water hitting my feet was agonizing . The years of 150 miles a week had taken their toll. Time to pay the Piper, and good-bye college sholarship offers.


    Here in Afghanistan, I decided I was going to take advantage of the altitude and time on my hands to regain some of my former glory, but I've had to completely re-think how to do it. I've had to go minimalist on the footwear. Sometimes even barefoot all together, but I have to do that really late at night as running barefoot around one's combat outpost/FOB is frowned upon.


    Below is some more detail that I sent a buddy in an email...I think Dan'll find a lot of this interestingas I know he studies more natural approaches to athleticism.:)


    Hey, wanted to tell you about this book I'm reading called 'Born to Run'. I've gotten back into distance running as a way to keep my head clear and basically beat the cabin fever I get living on a square kilometer city block area. A friend of mine back home saw where I often times have issues with injuries , but am working to beat them by adopting a minimalist footwear approach ...more on that later.


    The premise of the book is the author likes to run, even though he had never really planned to be competitive with it . He's a big guy, 6'4 and 230, so he doesn't really fit the mold anyway. But still ,he'd get out and jog 2 or 3 miles a day. And then bam, he started having problems . Foot,shin and knee issues. He went to Dr after Dr who told him that running was his problem . They did all kinds of scans, put him on a treadmill and analyzed his gait...you name it. All said the same thing. In his mind that just didn't make sense.


    In the meantime, he started looking at people across the world who run as a way of life . From Kenyans to the Tarahumara tribe down in Mexico. So he headed down there to meet an American that lived with Tarahumara to find out what the deal was. What he found were people into their 80's who still ran hundreds of miles ,sometimes in a day. In fact, 4 Tarahumara's won the Leadville 100 ultra-marathon in the 90's . That is a 100 mile race held at 10,000 feet ele. in Leadville, Co.. One thing he found in common is nobody wore shoes. Simply sandals. And all ran with very short strides as opposed to the long strides that we're taught to run with. Even modern shoes encourage long strides by having raised heel soles. Long strides equate out to pronounced heel strikes and the injuries and pain that come with it . Running with short strides encourages you to run more on the balls of your feet and keeps your back straight with a relaxed upper body. And all groups that run as a way of life do the same thing. The Kenyans, Incas, rural Egyptians, the Southwest American Indians. And I've started doing it,too. So far so good at least 5k's a day, sometimes up to 10.


    This'll be good for me.