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Sunday, September 30, 2007

Ready! HIKE!

It's been 6 months since I've said those words. Nushagak Kennels if off and running!

We made our first two runs this weekend. I had hoped to start fall training earlier, but we've been working on the land. The pole barn is just about done so the dogs are finally getting some attention in the evenings.

Fall training consists of hitching up the dogs in front of a 4-wheeler and mushing down the right hand side of the road. One of the reasons we bought our property on Waskey Road is its great mushing location. It's really the only road you can safely mush dogs on in Dillingham.

The goals for fall training are: 1. Get your leaders tuned up 2. Build their muscles back up 3. Begin putting miles on the dogs. Alethia and I made the maiden voyage Saturday night. I hitched up a solid team of 8 easy going dogs, Luke and Lucky in lead. They were a delight, standing in place quietly during hitch up and then pulling hard the whole way. Tonight, Johanna, Jacob, and Alethia came along so I hitched up some of the more "wild" dogs. Wild by my standards would include, jumping and screaming in harness when stopped. This is normal behavior for most sled dogs, but I don't prefer it. The team did very well tonight. The three newcomers (the "wild" dogs) did jump and scream, but they also pulled very well. We're going to work on the jumping and screaming with them, see if we can't get them to mellow out a little.

Distance mushers keep close track of each dog's "mileage". Basically it's a tally of the number of miles the dogs have run. Most mushers enter the Iditarod these days with 2,000 to 3,000 miles on their dogs. I've been told that 1,000 miles should be a minimum goal for running the Kusko 300. My goal is between 1,200 and 1,700. I'll be posting each dogs mileage on this blog. You can see how well we're doing that way. So the mileage total as of September 30, 2007 is...

Lucky = 2 Hagar = 4 Luke = 4
Bing = 4 Bernard = 2 Charlie = 2
Ginger = 2 Phoebe = 2 Felix = 2
Olaf = 0 Chester = 2 Lucy = 2
Pete = 2 Blacky = 2 Arctic = 2

We ran two miles each day. You can see that most of the dogs ran on one of the days and a few ran both days. I now see that Olaf didn't get to run at all. Poor Olaf!

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