I've been hunting red deer and roe deer for 31 years. Last autumn a 64-year-old new club member showed up to opening weekend with something I haven't been able to stop thinking about.
Save Up To 50% OFFI'm not exaggerating. I almost laughed in his face the first time I saw it. Let me back up. I hunt. Highland estates, private ground, wherever the deer are thick and the stags are high. Pack in. Pack out. Bring home meat. That's the deal.
Early mornings before light. Six-hour sits in the cold. A week at deer camp. Two weeks up in the Highlands. A month of scouting before the season even opens. Then you do it again next year. You sign up for the life. What you don't sign up for is what it does to your body after three decades.
I'm 58. My knees ache on the descent. My chest gets tight on the climbs I used to eat alive. I can't remember the last time I made it to my high seat without stopping twice on the ridge. A hillside I'd been running since my late twenties started beating me. Not wiping me out. Just slowing me down in a way I couldn't explain.
I've tried everything. Better boots. Trekking poles. A cardio program my buddy swore by. Fish oil. A statin my doctor pushed that cramped my legs so bad I quit after six weeks. Then back to stopping on the ridge.
Then last October our club got a new member. Guy named Carl. Quiet. Steady. 64 years old. His brother had been a hunter his whole life, fit, non-smoker, clean checkup the spring before. Dropped on a hillside at 58. No warning. No symptoms. Just gone.
You'd think Carl would be next. Same blood. Same family history. Six years older than his brother was when he died. But here's the thing.
Including men half his age. We had a climb in November. A long pull up a north-facing ridge to get above a bedding area before first light. Steep enough that you're grabbing branches on the way up. Cold enough that your breath is loud. Every man in the group was sucking wind by the halfway mark. Hands on knees. Headlamps pointing at the dirt.
Carl was at the top. Not hands on knees. Standing. Barely breathing. Asked if anyone wanted to push another two hundred yards to the secondary glassing point. I figured it was genetics. Some guys just age differently. 64 versus 58 doesn't sound like much, but some men are built for the hills and some aren't.
But I kept watching it hunt after hunt. The hills were what exposed everyone. A long climb with a heavy pack at altitude, that's where you find out what a man's arteries are actually doing. Carl was always at the top. I'd make the same ridge and feel it in my chest for an hour after. He'd shake it off and start glassing.
Then one morning I walked past the Land Rover where Carl was pulling his gear together. He had a small red bag sitting next to his rangefinder and his calls. "What's that?" He looked up. Almost didn't answer. "Cayenne." "A what?"
He explained it. Said it was the only thing he'd changed in the last two years. Said he started taking it after his brother died because his cardiologist told him the real problem wasn't cholesterol. It was what cholesterol hardens into. I stared at him. "You're telling me a capsule is the reason you're handling these climbs better than men six years younger than you?"
He shrugged. "All I know is I went back to my cardiologist after a year on it. He asked what I'd changed. The climbs eased off. The cold let go. And I'll tell you something nobody puts on a label. I stopped waking up with my heart pounding.
I stopped bogging down on climbs I'd been doing for twenty years. The doctor showed me the scan, and I understood then how close I probably was." At first I laughed about it. We spent a good twenty minutes joking about Carl and his little capsules. Big tough hunters and here's Carl popping pills from a red bag like somebody's grandma.
But it nagged at me. Because I couldn't stop watching how Carl handled the hills that used to wreck me. The steep pulls. The long climbs with a pack. The drag back to the Land Rover that leaves your chest heaving and your legs burning.
He'd shake it off and keep moving. A man six years older than me was outclimbing me on every ridge, dragging deer without stopping to catch his breath, making it to the high seat without his chest tightening on the way up. And it wasn't because he was tougher.
Something was helping him that wasn't helping me. One night three weeks later I was lying in my sleeping bag in the bothy after a brutal day. Knees aching. Chest still feeling the climb from that morning. Knew I wasn't going to sleep. And all I kept thinking about was Carl at the next camp doing just fine.
I went down a rabbit hole. I mean a deep rabbit hole. I started researching everything I could find about what actually happens inside arteries as men age. Why some guys slow down on the hills and others don't. Why a clean checkup doesn't mean a clean bill of health.
And every mainstream medical site fed me the same answers. Lose weight. Cut sodium. Exercise more. Take the medication if that doesn't work. But then I found a research paper on arterial health. And it mentioned something I had never heard anyone talk about in the context of feeling winded on a climb.
As we age, cholesterol and calcium and inflammatory buildup collect inside your artery walls. Picture it hardening like rock. That buildup traps more cholesterol. It traps calcium. It hardens. Year after year your arteries get narrower. Your lining used to keep those vessels open on its own. But after 50 that signal drops by half. So it keeps building.
That chest tightening on the climb, that heaviness on the drag, that's not age. That's reduced blood flow through a narrowing pipe. Bogging down on the ridge is the only warning you get. The next one isn't the climb. It's the heart attack.
That same research paper mentioned cayenne. It explained why a man six years older than me could climb like he was thirty. Capsaicin, the heat in cayenne, flips a switch on the artery wall called TRPV1. People have farmed those peppers for that same warming job for more than 6,000 years. And the heat Carl was taking came from 30,000 fresh cayenne peppers pressed into one dose.
I read that paper twice. Something clicked. I went to Carl at breakfast the next morning at the cook tent. I still had questions. For me it sounded too good to be true. But I wanted to hear it from him.
He reached into his pack and put the bag on the table. The text on the label read: GetJacked Cayenne Pepper Softgels, 300 mg from 30,000 peppers. I'd never heard of it.
"This is what I went looking for after my brother. 90% of cayenne supplements on the market are thin dry powder in a capsule. That's a powder that sits in your stomach before it reaches a single artery. It does nothing for what's already hardened in the wall."
Then he mentioned the delivery. The thing I had probably glossed over reading that paper at midnight. "The cayenne that actually reaches the wall is pressed from 30,000 fresh peppers into a liquid softgel. That's the form that gets into the bloodstream instead of sitting in your stomach. Most of what's on the shelf can't do the job people are buying it for."
When he said that the form matched what I'd read, something shifted. I'd read it for myself. And I'd seen the results on Carl. I still felt a bit stupid ordering it. 31 years in the field. Three decades of packing meat and reading terrain. Ordering a capsule because a 64-year-old told me to. But I was willing to try everything to keep doing what I love. It showed up a week later before my next trip out. I packed it in my kit. Didn't tell anyone.
First climb I took it on was a ridge I'd been dreading. Two miles in, eight hundred feet of gain, heavy pack. I stopped once. Not twice. Once. And when I stopped it was to glass, not because my chest made me. I figured it was a good day.
Next hunt. Same thing. Made the pull without the tightness. Woke up the morning after the drag and my legs weren't screaming.
By the third week something shifted in the high seat. My hands were warm. I've had cold hands in the high seat my whole life, always figured it was just how I ran. Gone. By the end of the first month the climbs I'd been dreading started feeling like the climbs I remembered from ten years ago.
Routine visit. He ran the panel. Then he pulled up the previous scan and put them side by side. He looked at me. "What are you doing differently?" I told him about the cayenne softgels. He didn't laugh.
"The heat in cayenne hits a receptor on the vessel wall called TRPV1, and the wall makes its own nitric oxide so the vessel opens. People have grown those peppers for that same warming job for more than 6,000 years, and the peer-reviewed literature on capsaicin and nitric oxide documents it clearly."
"And it only works if it reaches the wall. A dry powder sits in your stomach, but a liquid softgel pressed from 30,000 fresh peppers goes straight into the bloodstream." "The dry powder won't reach what's already hardened in the wall. It just won't." Then he showed me the before. That's when I understood how close it probably was.
What the people already taking it report:
That's when I thought about Carl's brother. Carl noticed before I said anything. We were loading out after a successful morning and he watched me throw a buck into the back of the Land Rover without stopping to catch my breath. He just nodded. "You ordered a bag, didn't you?"
I nodded back. "Told you." By the end of the season two other guys in the club were on it. The one who'd laughed hardest texted me from a stalking lodge in the Highlands asking for the link. Nobody's been the one holding up the group on the climb this month. That doesn't happen in a club where half the members are over 55.
The mountain hasn't changed. The men have. I'm telling you this because I should be slowing down at 58. I feel better on the mountain right now than I did at 48. Carl said it's spreading quietly through hunting camps and sporting clubs. Most guys have never heard of it.
I believe that now. Three bags. One at home. One in my pack. One at camp. I don't go into the field without it. If you're a hunter. A guy who still wants to drag his own deer. A man who isn't ready to be the one waiting at the Land Rover. Just read the research and become a cayenne believer yourself.
👇 The exact brand is in there. Make sure it's pressed from 30,000 peppers into a liquid softgel. The dry powder won't do what you're buying it for. P.S. The one Carl and I use is called GetJacked Cayenne Pepper Softgels.
Capsaicin flips on a switch called TRPV1 in the lining of your blood vessels. That tells your body to make its own nitric oxide, which relaxes and opens them.
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“56, type 2 diabetic. Feet cold for years. One month in: warm. Like a normal person. Also “morning improvements” I was not expecting. If you know what the article is hinting at, it’s real. That’s all I’ll say.”
“Construction 35 years. Standing on concrete destroyed my calves. My dog used to wait while I grabbed my leg on every walk. 4 weeks in and we do the full loop now. No stopping.”
“Did the same 2 months ago. He resisted. Takes them every morning now. Also noticed some “other improvements” that I will NOT discuss publicly but ladies you know what I mean 😉”
“Retired army. 40 years of handling pain. These 2am cramps were the one thing that beat me. Not anymore. 6 weeks in and I sleep like I’m 30 again.”
