Strange Occurance

I went hunting and while in my deer stand, I noticed my cell phone battery was low and outside stand, it got very foggy. I decided to plug in my phone to a 12v charger on my Foreman 12v assessory. I turned the switch to on and let it charge. To my demise, I hadn't noticed my headlights were still on. Well two hours later, I was leaving the woods and found my battery completely dead. Hmmm, now I did it. I remembered I can pull start it and did so and worked great. I backed up and sent to change gears to forward using the Forman ES and woudn't switch out of reverse. I played with it a while and finally went to 1st gear and took a while to go to second and long while again to go to third. After a long while, I was finally able to get into fourth and never got to fifth until I got back to the camp. I put a battery charge on battery and finally everything shifted fine again. Seems like it takes a lot of battery to shift gears? Anybody else ever see this? This would be a good reason to not seal the pull start but a first time I have ever done this. Guess, it takes a lot to shift?