Cameron Hanes runs a marathon at least twice a week and averages roughly 22 miles a day. On the days he doesn’t run a full marathon, he makes up for it with an hour lifting weights in the gym. He also sets aside time every day for target practice with his 80-pound compound bow. There are no rest days in his schedule. For the past 30 years, his workouts have varied but his commitment to physical fitness has never wavered.
Hanes isn’t a professional athlete. He’s a 51-year-old man with a job and a family. His “Lift Run Shoot Lifestyle,” as he calls it, isn’t a gimmick—it’s a means to an end, and that end is hunting.
Thanks to a compelling social media presence (he has more than half a million Instagram followers) Hanes has achieved cult-like status, especially among young men, for his grueling workouts and his bowhunting, and he’s credited with introducing many people to the sport. His mottos, “Keep Hammering” and “Nobody Cares. Work Harder,” appear on T-shirts, belt buckles, and snapback hats he sells on his website, all of which are eagerly purchased by his admirers.
“He’s definitely had a transformative effect on my life,” says Chad Grape, 20. “His attitude has been important in helping me keep focused . . . even with homework and stuff in school, which I’m not a huge fan of. Every time I want to quit or complain about it, there’s no reason. I’m doing good things that are going to help me further down the line, and I just gotta keep doing it, and so any time I think to myself I have an excuse, I just reference back to him and keep pushing forward.”
In person, the rugged appearance that makes Hanes so distinctive an Instagram presence also makes him seem unsuited to his nondescript suburban neighborhood in Eugene, Oregon. Hanes is bearded and tattooed, tan and sinewy. His posture gives him a faintly regal air and his large, dark eyes exude a cervine calm.
“I feel more at home in the mountains than I do here because I just feel like that’s what I’m supposed to be doing,” Hanes says.
When I meet him in front of his house, Hanes shakes my hand and invites me inside to meet his wife of 26 years, Tracey, and their teenage daughter Taryn. (He also has two older sons, Truett and Tanner.) Walking inside, we pass through a garage full of skulls of various megafauna Hanes has killed over the years. When we reach the family room, I’m taken aback by the wide array of deer taxidermy mounted on the walls.
Ask your average city dweller how he conceives of hunters and he will draw you a caricature: a beer-sipping rube on an all-terrain vehicle, eager to kill an innocent undeserving animal and even more excited at the prospect of putting its head on his wall. In other words: the monster that shot Bambi’s mother.
But this description does not match Hanes, who feeds both his family and neighbors with the meat he procures. The taxidermy doesn’t attest to his callousness, but rather to his skill.
Bowhunting has a lot in common with regular rifle hunting, except that it demands a more agile hunter. While a rifle hunter can shoot an animal from hundreds of yards away, a bowhunter must typically be within at least 40 yards to make an ethical shot, one lethal enough to minimize the animal’s suffering. “My number-one concern these days when bowhunting is that I do everything in my power to make a perfect shot that kills the animal quickly,” Hanes wrote in a recent Instagram post. “This involves months of practice to develop confidence in my equipment to perform with precision, visualizing success, and finally staying focused in heat of the moment.”
The challenges of killing an animal with a compound bow do not end there. Creeping up on an animal undetected, otherwise called stalking, requires gauging the direction of the wind to make sure your target does not catch your scent. Bowhunters also typically spend days scouting a location to familiarize themselves with the landscape and increase their odds of a successful hunt.
Many people—even enthusiastic carnivores—have conflicted feelings about hunting. Highly publicized controversies such as the Cecil the Lion debacle have reanimated concerns over indiscriminate “trophy hunters,” a label that has also been applied to Hanes.
When I ask him how he feels about being called a trophy hunter, he pauses for a moment before pointing to a deer head mounted near his kitchen table.
“So, that one I call Roy’s buck,” Hanes says.
Roy is Roy Roth, Hanes’s best friend of over 20 years and the person who introduced him to bowhunting. In 2015, Roth was hunting Dall sheep, a thinhorn species that can grow up to 150 pounds, in Pioneer Peak, Alaska, when he took a bad step and fell off the side of a mountain to his death.
That same day, Hanes was hunting deer in Colorado. Around dusk, he shot a buck but was uncertain if the animal had been mortally wounded. He resolved to wait until morning rather than give chase, fearing the animal would cover too much distance if it were merely wounded. Later that evening, Hanes’s wife called to tell him about Roy’s death. The next morning, Hanes went back and found the buck.
As he tells the story, Hanes’s voice trembles. “[Roy] was there from the beginning, so I mean, he knew me when I had nothing, and I was a loser, part-time college student, drinking—just a loser. And he was there from then up to where I had more success, up through where other hunters would talk shit about me, try to take shots at me, and try to knock down any achievements—he was always there and always on my side.”
Hanes gestures at the taxidermy around us and continues, “I can look at every single one of these and have a big story and a big memory about them so it really bothers me when people just say, ‘trophy hunter,’ and it’s just like, ‘You don’t understand what this means to me.’ ”
In many ways, Hanes’s lifestyle harks back to an American model of manhood that embraced the challenges—and dangers—of risk-taking. In a speech delivered in 1899, Theodore Roosevelt outlined what such a “strenuous life” looked like:
This conception of masculinity made room for more than physical risk-taking. “We admire the man who embodies victorious effort,” Roosevelt said, but also “the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life.”
Or, as Hanes puts it, “There’s enough negativity going on. I just want to be a guy who can inspire others. The word I like . . . it’s not hunter. It’s endure. Just endure. Life. Hard times. A race. Just the battle.”
Needless to say, this vision of masculinity has fallen out of favor. But the desire of men to challenge themselves has not. This might be why Hanes’s message of discipline, tenacity, focus, and resilience is so appealing to so many.
Spending time with Cameron Hanes means being ever on the move. After our brief first meeting at his home, Hanes drives me in his black Ram truck to one of his gyms (he alternates among several), International Fitness, where we meet Eric McCormack, a former bodybuilder and one of Hanes’s strength trainers. With his vascular legs and Vitruvian torso, McCormack, who is more widely known by his Instagram moniker, “Outlaw Strength,” takes us through an active stretching routine.
McCormack helps me contort my arms and legs into several unnatural positions before moving into a routine of three-minute circuits consisting of narrow-grip pushups, lateral raises with dumbbells, and incline presses on a chest press machine. We are supposed to do the maximum number of repetitions possible in each minute.
I make a regular effort to stay active, and my workouts of late have included short, low-rep, high-weight exercises to build strength. I start the lateral raises. Thirty seconds in, my arms are gelatin. I am in good shape, but not in Outlaw Strength shape.
“C’mon, beast!” McCormack shouts, squatting down next to me to offer encouragement.
“We try to go to muscle failure eight or nine times a day,” Hanes says matter-of-factly as he cranks out his pushups.
During brief breaks between the exercises, Hanes checks in with me to see how I’m faring, but for the most part he tunes everything out, moving from exercise to exercise with steely resolve. I watch him with envy as he gives a slight nod at the end of each repetition as though keeping time to an inner metronome.
After the workout, he checks his phone to see how Courtney Dauwalter, a fellow ultramarathoner and friend who is running the Western States 100 race, is doing. He will write an effusive post celebrating her and the other runners once the race is over.
“When it feels like everybody’s got the same goal and the goal is self-improvement, everybody’s on the same team and so that’s what I try to foster. I like the positivity,” Hanes says.
If he sounds like a good coach, it might be because he was raised by one.
Hanes’s father Robert, who died in 2010, was a track coach at South Eugene High School. He was friends with legendary high jumper Dick Fosbury, who often told a young Cameron stories of his glory days as a track star and Olympic gold-medalist (he invented the “Fosbury Flop,” a style of high jumping still used by athletes).
But the household wasn’t a happy one.
“I don’t feel like I had a great childhood,” Hanes says. “I remember not feeling happy, like I wanted my dad back around. Like a lot of kids, my dad was my hero. He was an alcoholic and, you know, that caused marriage issues, so they got divorced.”
After the divorce, Hanes’s mother remarried and Hanes did not at first get along with his stepfather. For the rest of his childhood he bounced back and forth between his parents, missing his father while living with his mother and missing his younger brother, who remained with his mother, when Hanes lived with his dad.
Hanes’s father eventually recovered from his alcoholism and dedicated his life to the high school athletes he coached. “He had several state champions, individual state champions in the triple jump, long jump, pole vault, it didn’t matter if they were male or female. He could work with everybody,” says Dave Hancock, the current director of athletics at South Eugene High School. “He was just truly for kids and really did a lot to help them out in a lot of different ways. Not just teaching, he would get to know them, he would help them off the playing field and in any way he possibly could.”
Fosbury also has warm memories of the elder Hanes. “He and I would talk about the quality of coaches and how to improve their knowledge base so they know what they’re doing and, you know, both of us really had a love for helping kids find out what they love to do and helping them to become the best they can be,” he says.
Yet it wasn’t the father he loved but the stepfather he hated who first took Hanes hunting.
“Yeah, it was an olive-branch-type thing to, you know, to have a connection,” Hanes says.
That first hunting experience was with a rifle, not a bow. It wasn’t until high school that he would be introduced to bowhunting by Roy Roth, and not until he was in his early 20s, attending community college, working, and hunting in his spare time, that he decided to dedicate himself to it.
“I was working part-time at a warehouse making, like, $4.72 an hour, going to school part-time basically, and hunting, so it was like I really didn’t have anything going. I mean, the word failure might be strong, but I wasn’t doing anything. . . . I didn’t really wanna accept responsibility, was drinking with my buddies on the weekends, and was just not going anywhere.”
But he had a family to support (he and his wife had just had their first son, Tanner), so Hanes got a job as a buyer at the Springfield Utility Board, the company he still works for today. And he began taking bowhunting seriously. Eventually, he established himself as a dominant force in the hunting world, becoming the editor of Eastman’s Bowhunting Journal and self-publishing two books about hunting.
Hunting has declined precipitously in recent years. According to a survey by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, today only about 5 percent of Americans actually hunt, half as many as 50 years ago, and the numbers are expected to continue to decline.
The number of people who have mastered Hanes’s preferred method of “backcountry” hunting with bow and arrow is even smaller. Backcountry hunting involves arduous treks on foot through wilderness, often for weeks at a time. It requires patience as well as physical and mental resilience. In his book Backcountry Bowhunting, A Guide to the Wild Side, Hanes writes that he had only taken a total of 12 shots in the four years before publication of the book.
“If you want to execute an ethical shot on an animal, you have to be obsessed,” says Joe Rogan, host of the popular Joe Rogan Experience podcast, who was introduced to bowhunting by Hanes. “You have to practice every day. You have to be thinking about it every day. . . . Most people are just not going to have either the time or the inclination or the discipline or whatever it is, the mental fortitude, whatever it is, to do that right.”
Hanes has frequently spoken about why practice is so important for hunters who hope to survive the hazards of the wild. I witness this commitment to preparedness when we drive over to a farm owned by a longtime friend of Hanes’s who has a large archery range set up on his property.
Hanes gets out of his truck, pulls out his compound bow, and begins taking warm-up shots. He draws the string back slowly, aims, and releases. He walks over to the targets between shots to check his accuracy, then walks back, draws another arrow, and starts all over again.
After roughly 15 minutes of warming up, Hanes gets a yellow balloon from his truck, walks out into the field, and ties it to the farthest target. He backs up to 140 yards and asks me to film him as he repeatedly attempts to puncture the balloon. He does not succeed on his first shot, or his second, or even his third. Hanes swears a couple times under his breath but otherwise shows no signs of discouragement and eventually hits his target after half a dozen tries.
One hundred forty yards is well beyond the distance Hanes would ever feel comfortable taking a shot in the wild, but this is the kind of determined practice characteristic of him; he is always looking for ways to challenge himself.
One day on a run, Hanes noticed a 130-pound boulder. Intrigued, he decided to add it to his exercise routine and began carrying it one and a half miles uphill once every seven days. (He stopped when the boulder disappeared from its usual spot on the trail.)
This Sisyphean challenge, among Hanes’s many other strenuous workout methods, is what originally caught the eye of Joe Rogan, who invited Hanes onto his podcast. “He just struck me as this odd human being,” Rogan says. “He’s a very stoic, kind of quiet but intense guy, and he’s absolutely obsessed with perfection and perfection in bow-hunting and the moment of the kill, like being at his physical best to be able to perform the perfect shot and kill an animal in perfect ethical fashion.”
Hanes’s hunting has earned him condemnation as well as praise. Condemned by media outlets such as the Huffington Post and some animal rights groups, he was the focus of an unsuccessful Change.org petition signed by over 3,000 people demanding that Under Armour, one of his sponsors, sever ties with him. He received particularly vociferous criticism on social media recently when a group of hunters he was with in Alberta, Canada, killed a three-legged bear.
In a long Facebook post defending his fellow-hunters, Hanes wrote, “I wonder what they thought would happen to the bear if we hadn’t killed him? That he’d limp around on 3 legs forever and live happily ever after? Or maybe he’d live to see his 80th birthday and all his grandkids would come over for cake and he could tell them stories from the good old days?”
“Man has always been part of the equation as we’ve always hunted,” he wrote. “And, we must continue to be. Hunting is conservation.”
Though Hanes is fiercely loyal to the hunting community, he thinks it can do a better job of promoting the sport. “I don’t think we’ve done a very good job of explaining hunting and why it’s important and how conservation works,” Hanes says. “I think we could do better not only explaining trophy hunting but just be public land advocates and how we can work together with . . . I don’t know, say, Patagonia, Sierra Club, those types.”
Hanes has engaged in some mild activism himself. On January 24, 2017, Congressman Jason Chaffetz introduced HR 621, which immediately sparked a backlash from the outdoor community—hunters in particular.
HR 621 mandated the sale of over three million acres of public lands in Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, and Wyoming. To combat the bill, Hanes and other high-profile hunters took to social media to express their opposition. Their efforts succeeded, and on February 1, Chaffetz announced that he would withdraw the bill.
More recently, Hanes traveled to Washington to meet and shoot bows with Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, who has since made him part of his International Wildlife Conservation Council. Hanes concedes that politics is not his strength. Though he has an amiable relationship with Zinke, he is no Washington pol and he worries that he could be taken advantage of if he’s not careful.
“People love telling me, ‘Oh, see, they f—ing lied to you. You’re an idiot,’ ” Hanes remarks. “And then I’m like, ‘F—k, did they? Am I?’ Because I don’t know. And so it’s tough. I’m trying to do the right thing. I’m trying to make a positive impact.”
During my visit with Hanes, we went on a run. He’s an extremely successful amateur runner. Last year he placed thirteenth in the Moab 240-mile race (a punishing three-day trek through deserts, canyons, and mountain ranges) and in 2008 he beat Lance Armstrong in the Boston Marathon.
He’s mapped out a challenging nine-mile route for us up Mt. Pisgah. “These hills aren’t gonna run themselves!” he grins, as I do my best to match his long strides.
At the top of the mountain he tells me to jump onto a cylindrical bronze monument that marks the summit. The monument makes regular appearances on Hanes’s Instagram feed (it was erected in memory of Ken Kesey’s son Jed, a college wrestler who died in an accident at age 20).
“And here we are, we got Dylan. He’s hammering,” Hanes says as he films a short clip of me jumping onto the monument that he later posts on Instagram. “You guys know where we are,” he says.
And many people know who Hanes is, too, even on top of a mountain. “Good luck keeping up with Cam,” a passerby says as we head back down the mountain at a brisk clip. “Look at him. He’s not even breaking a sweat,” another man remarks to a friend as Hanes passes him by.
During the run, when I have to stop to catch my breath, Hanes slows down, giving me time to rest before encouraging me to start up again. As Hanes patiently calibrates his speed to match mine, I realize I’m being gently coached. Hanes pushes me when it looks like I can handle it and backs off when it’s clear I need some rest. I thank him.
“I just respect you being out here, man,” he says.
“You know, everybody struggles,” Rogan says. “People struggle to get out of bed, they struggle to go to work, to get their chores done, and deal with their lives, and when you see someone who’s living their life [like Hanes does] . . . he’s not just doing what he’s doing in terms of preparing to hunt and, you know, practicing archery. . . . It’s a very strange thing, what he’s doing. That resonates with people.”
One of Hanes’s mottos is “Nobody cares. Work harder.” But it’s clear Hanes does care—about cultivating resilience and discipline in himself, yes—but also about encouraging it in others.
