Golly gee,
when has a weather forecaster ever been
wrong. Our anticipated 3" of snow turned
into 1", careful not to sneeze. However,
small things come in big packages and
that aptly describes our seemingly
miniscule amount of snow. To the trail
surface the whole complexion has
changed. Instead of wildly slewing
around corners using one leg as an
outrigger the other pushing on the
outside runner with a heel on the drag
mat, we are now able to put both heels
on the mat and more controllably
negotiate our gee and haws. Primarily
dictated by trail conditions, it has
been quite some time since we've
consistently trained at a slower pace.
Now, with a small amount of new snow, we
increased the team size to 8 and as
anticipated with all the smaller team
running our pace did not appreciably
increase although with the added 2 dogs
the traveling pace, once the initial
burn is off, is now pretty much
sustained throughout the run. A few runs
to verify this and we will jump the
mileage run up. One of the pitfalls of
long distance training is, once the dogs
are in shape, most drivers continue to
hammer out mileages and though this may
seemingly satisfy the inner sole it
probably behoves one to consider if all
that continued wear and tear is
beneficial to the dog. When this happens
the process ceases to fall under the
category of "training" and for all
intents and purposes is simply going out
for "exercise". Once we feel the dogs
are in long distance condition, then we
like to take the dogs on different
trails or travel with them to different
locations, each offering various
elements different to the more familiar
"home" trails. At this juncture, we are
not close to being able to do that. I am
a little concerned that we are a little
to paced down but will be patient and
use mileage, team size, and trail
complexity to manipulate and "read" each
run. The dogs do have to be tough enough
and simply exercising them is not good
enough. To condition them, training has
to put physical and mental stress on
them.
Interesting
encounters on the trail system the past
few days; head-on passed another
yappy-snappy-grabby group of dogs, only
this time it was an 18 dog string.
Fairly intimidating but aside from a few
stutter steps all went well. Then
head-on passed a train, yep, a train.
One of the neighbors, with a large
kennel, likes to hook-up 14 dogs at a
wack, which would be fine except he does
this with 4 teams and each team runs
nose to driver behind each other.
Roughly, if one 14 dog string is
conservatively 64 feet long, 4 equals
256 feet and throw in 10 feet between
teams and the grand total becomes 286
feet. Now that is intimidation!
Had to laugh
today, a little reminiscing of when I
initially cut this trail out, some of
the reflective markers are now going on
20 plus years of service. One trail
marker has an added feature, a shovel
blade, the result of when Mike Jonrowe
and I were out after a deep snow dump,
trying to get the trail back in.
Normally we would have used dogs but
with circumstances we opted for the
"iron dog". Anyway, we frequently
needed our shovels to dig out the
dog-machines when we got off the trail.
Mike's shovel finally had given up the
ghost, too much flexing and probably too
many muttered words as well, when its
back conveniently broke. Wonder if Mike
remembers that day when he passes it on
a sled?
The early
portion of our trail parralles the
Anchorage-Fairbanks Highway (Parks
Highway) for about a mile and a quarter.
It is along this stretch the dogs get
used to the traffic noises of; cars,
highway snowplows, and double length
tractor trailer trucks. In addition,
many travelers seeing us, often stop to
photograph us. We always give a; hearty
wave, smile, "hi how are ya?" Guess we
are still unique to some areas of the
world. The past few runs, cars have
stopped and photographed us. Fortunately
the crew was not goofing off. At least
to me, one photo op was with Sonny and
Toby in lead, both black dogs, had to
make a pretty nice picture.
Not all of
our trail is in the open but much of it
towards the Talkeetna Mt. foothills in
the woods, full of twists and turns but
a few areas exist that are pretty
straight.
