Given a hunt area of 100,000 square miles, that is a circle with a radius of only 178.4 miles. It would not surprise me that the area is centered on a large metropolitan area with some outlying towns/suburban areas.
I like the idea of changing my appearance and going off the grid. For me I would shave my beard and head, buy a few fake wigs and some unassuming wardrobe additions and go underground the best I can. It would be a challenge, but I think I could pull it off.
I’d follow the advice in the training film.
Stay off Facebook, let your family know that if they don’t hear from you that means you’re still in the game. Ideally, rent a room somewhere you can pay cash in dense neighborhood, if you need money see if you could pick up some day laborer work hanging out at a Home Depot.
You’ll have to change that to the Appalachian Trail, since the location is the southeastern US. The show is based in Georgia, so the 100,000 sq miles likely includes the area between Tuscaloosa, AL; Knoxville, TN; Columbia, SC and Orlando, FL. That doesn’t contain a lot of the Appalachian Trail, but does include plenty of mountain hiding places.
Emphasis mine.
One of the rules not mentioned on the cited page but included in an Atlanta Journal-Constitution article on the game is that you cannot let anyone know you are on a game show/reality show.
I’m undecided. The Okeefenokee swamp to the south may be a better bet for hiding, although getting there will take a while. Clean water would likely be more plentiful and easier to find in the mountains. For someone with survival skills sufficient food can be found in either area depending on the time of year. Much depends on your starting point (since you only get a 1 hour head start) and their definition of “limited funds”.
I watched the first tow epsiodes. I had thought hiking trail but the hunters picked up on hobbies from social media and are already hitting trailheads looking for one couple who is trying that.
So it looks like you need to do something that is not in character for you and do not use family and friends. An amazing amount can be learned and predicted about a person in todays world.
Per rules of the contest, make one ATM withdrawal, drastically change appearance, and go homeless.
IRL, get as much cash and supplies as possible lined up, buy a car for cash on the downlow, dump electronics and credit cards (prefereably where someone would pick them up and use them), change appearance, and drive somewhere unexpected and work in the underground economy.
I guess it depends on how limited the funds are.
I’d buy a short hop on a Greyhound bus (with cash) in order to maximize the distance gained in the one hour head start.
Rent a room at one of those seedy motels next to the highway.
Get a “buzz” haircut and dye the stubble.
Stockpile room with cans of soup and wait.
I would go bum. Ditch the nice clothes, dirty, greasy tangled hair sitting in an alleyway talking to myself.
Thinking about it some more, I think the best strategy would be to keep moving. If one had enough money (shouldn’t need a lot), then take public transportation for an hour or two every day, aided by commercial transportation, such that one is in a different town each day. Select destinations at random. Sleep in tents, hidden, and use truck stop restrooms and the like for showering.
Are their camera crews following everyone around? That might make things a lot harder to lay low.
How much in the way of “limited funds” are provided? And can I spend my own money, and is there a head start on buying stuff before that one-hour window?
If they are close enough to actually see you they are there because they know where you are. It really doesn’t matter what you look like.
I wonder if they are truthful with their methods of finding the contestants. There is a lot of information on the internet that people have posted or is available commercially. We use that at work. But things like tracking cellphones or subscriber information for IP addresses need a court order. Reality TV is not probable cause.
That’s more about standing out – if you’re 7 feet tall, people will notice you, and remember you, and when the investigators say “did you see a 7 foot dude getting on a bus”, more likely to say “yes I did!”.
From what I have seen advertised: funds are very limited. Like $600 and you can only take out 100 at a time from an ATM, which is logged/seen by the hunters. The area allowed is 3 southern states.
I’d probably take as much money as I could for a couple of days then ride the boxcars with protein bars and a good book or three.
That’s what I wondered.
I don’t know what anyone would learn from my online presence. My FB profile is Friends Only. If you google my name and city, you can get my phone number and address. You also get a page showing the former owner of our house still owns it (he died in FL 3 years ago) and that our daughter (the teacher in Orlando) lives here and is a blue collar worker. 
So I’m not sure what one could learn about me to help a search. Being an older female, I’m pretty much invisible anyway, so it might be fairly easy for me to lay low. Now, if I have to be with someone else, that could make it more difficult.
I’ve only seen about 5 minutes of the show, but how could they keep it secret that they are on a show? In the scene I saw, the contestants were staying with friends. They were filming everything. At one point, the friend tried to smuggle the contestants out of the neighborhood in his car. We see him driving down the road, so obviously there had to be another car filming him. They had to have told the friend that they were on a show or how else could they explain the cameras and why they were doing all this crazy stuff?
Sell my card and its PIN for $500 cash, to someone who would agree to withdraw cash every few days from different ATMs.
This is the part that might make viewers accuse the TV show of being scripted.
If there are camera crews tagging behind a fugitive, and he or she still isn’t caught, and part of the TV management knows where the fugitive is and the hunters “officially” don’t know, well yes, it could give a scripted appearance.
Turn my phone tracking on and conveniently leave it in the back of a cab headed away from me.
With the CCTV footage at public transportation, and the need for IDs, it seems like public transportation would need to be avoided like the plague. Basically, anything a terrorist or a fugitive escaped from prison would want to avoid, would be what the game contestants would want to avoid.
I haven’t watched the show, I’m only going by what I read. It wouldn’t be beyond the AJC to be wrong. OTOH, who knows what lie the contestants may have told the friend? “We’re actually international spies and our cover has been blown - please help!”