Turning Heads Kennel

Alaska Dog Sledding Tours

Four Wheeler Training

Training Sled Dogs in the Fall and Why It’s Important For Success

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Although it is called “dog sledding,” much of the important training that happens to a competitive dog sled team actually happens in the fall on ATVS or carts long before there is any snow. While perhaps strange to those unfamiliar with the sport, fall training provides a crucial first look at the team a musher has to work with for the coming season and puts on the early fitness foundation required for later success.

Most mushers generally start fall training some time during the month of September. Our kennel generally starts towards the end of the month as many of our dogs run all summer long doing dog sled tours and a few weeks off between the last tour and the official start of the season are needed for both dog and musher alike. After a few weeks, however, it is back to training. A team, especially one training for Iditarod, needs to build a solid conditioning foundation and this often takes several months to accomplish.

Iditarod is a 1,000 mile long dogsled race but at its core, is really nothing more than a canine marathon. The race is an endurance event that requires high levels of physical fitness and mental preparation from both the dogs and the mushers that run it. Just as humans need months to prepare for a marathon, our dogs require several months of training before they set out on Iditarod.

Training Sled Dogs: The First Few Runs

Fall training starts out in incremental steps where we slowly build mileage up for our dogs. First runs generally are between 5-7 miles in length and are highly dictated by the weather: huskies cannot run in warm weather so most runs are done in the early morning or at night, when temperatures are coolest. Often, these runs require numerous stops that allow the dogs time to pant so that the dogs can get rid of excess heat. Mushers also cater their training runs to hit water sources such as rivers, streams, or even large puddles where the dogs can drink and cool off.

Training Sled dogs during the fall requires finding water sources. Here the team stops at a creek next to the road we train on.
Training Sled dogs during the fall requires finding water sources. Here the team stops at a creek next to the road we train on.

Training Sled Dogs On ATVS

All-Terrain-Vehicles (ATVs) are equipped with numerous features that allow mushers to maintain maximum control of their team during fall training. The ATV is a good choice because we have both gas and brakes at our disposal as training tools. The ATV can also be put into various gears to determine how much the dogs will pull. When put into 1st gear, the dogs have to pull against the gears of the machine making for a tougher pull. Higher gears ease the pull and allow the dogs to travel faster by having to pull less. Generally, mushers vary gears throughout training.

We primarily run in 2nd and 3rd gear as well as neutral but will occasionally put the ATV in 1st gear and require the dogs to do some tough pulling. Other mushers, of course, do it differently.

Training early on in the season allows mushers to look at their dogs with fresh eyes from the previous season. With another year on their belt, dogs that previously ran in the team may now show qualities that warrant their training as a lead dog. In the fall, we run enough short runs that it is a great chance to try new dogs up front.

Positioning Sled Dogs in the Team

The fall is also a good time to bring younger dogs up onto the main team. During the fall, we spend run after run looking at how we match our dogs and where we place them in the team to maximize our efficiency.

For example, earlier this week I ran a dog named Cricket towards that back of the team. No matter what speed we traveled at, Cricket always trotted. As a young, energetic but smaller dog, if she is going to make our race team it will probably be as a lead dog. Knowing this later in the week I ran Cricket behind our swing dogs. I wanted to give her more experience up near the front of the team where, some day, she will hopefully end up. Up that far, Cricket trotted but whenever we started moving at a faster pace she loped. Our travelling speeds were no different than the run I had taken her out on earlier in the week. The team was also identical. The only thing that changed was Cricket’s position and that, it seemed, affected her gait. In general, we want our dogs to maintain a nice steady trot. Does this mean I will run Cricket in the back of the team? No, it means I need to work with her so that she can have her smooth trot further up in the team.

Chemistry: Finding The Right Match for Sled Dogs

In dog sledding, finding the right match for your dogs is also important. A good pairing of dogs can bring the best out in each dog while a bad pairing can bring out the worst. Often, we find that dogs can be paired with one or two other dogs. We aren’t talking about getting along: all of our dogs get along well. When we talk about pairing, we talk about having two dogs that work and move in sync and that also motivate each other to work hard.

Ideally, we want a team that moves as a single unit, rather than as 16 disjointed pieces. A well-trained dog team should move in sync, the legs of the dogs moving synchronously so that as one dog swings his front legs forward, they all do. Having good pairs is important because it is the pairings that comprise the team. Mushers often talk, admire, and want beautifully gaited dogs because the dog is the first building block of smooth team.

Moving Sled Dogs Around

In training sled dogs, especially in the summer during tours and in the fall when we are more focused on short runs, we can try many new pairings. Many mushers like to move dogs around during runs but we generally do not do that in our kennel. We want our dogs to know that if they are hooked up in a certain position or next to a certain dog they will finish the run in that position next to their partner.

There are some exceptions to this, of course, but most of those involve working with young dogs. With young dogs, our goal is to focus on making their time out on the trail positive and to inspire confidence. This is no different than we do with young kids: we don’t start off pitching curve balls to first graders, they hit a ball off of stand. We make things as easy as possible for our young dogs and build their confidence thus setting them up for success later on in their careers.

How Do We Pick Sled Dog Pairings?

So if pairings are so important, how do we pick them? Really talented mushers usually just know after a few runs. These are the dog-savy people who just innately have a gift of understanding and communicating with dogs. For the rest of us, it’s trial and error. Often, there are many clues that dogs will run well together. Typically littermates or dogs from similar genetic backgrounds will run well together as, genetically speaking, they should have similar builds. Similarly sized dogs also generally do well together. Other than that, it requires assessing a dog’s gait. Believe it or no, most top mushers do not have perfectly gaited dogs — what they have is well-paired dogs.

Training Sled Dogs: Finding A Lead Dog

The fall also lends itself as a great time to train new lead dogs as the control of the ATV makes it easy if problems arise or commands are perfectly followed. We say “finding” new leads dogs as, with any leader, the dog must have certain traits that cannot be trained into it. Lead dogs are generally some of the most eager to run dogs on a team as well as the most athletic. While most people believe that intelligence is important, it is actually the least important trait that our leaders have.

In our kennel, we look for three traits: athleticism, attitude, and aptitude. In some dogs, these traits stand out in a dog even as a young pup – at that time it’s clear this dog is a leader and should begin some form of leader training. Other dogs, however, mature into having the all-star can-do-it attitude that mushers look for and rely on in their lead dogs.

In any event, when we find lead dogs training them in their initial runs in lead on an ATV can be very beneficial as the ATV maximizes our ability to reward our dogs. Our dogs naturally want to run and pull – they wouldn’t be sled dogs if they didn’t – so training a lead dog is all about channeling that pull in the right direction. The commands we use in mushing are “gee” for right and “haw” for left.

Using the ATV, we can reward the dogs when they get a command correct by giving the ATV a little gas. If the dogs do not get the command right, we simply stop the team. Because these dogs want to run and because they hear us talking to them, they will try to do something different – like try a different direction – to see if that produces their desired result which is, of course, to resume running. That is it. That is the great secret to training commands to our lead dogs. While it takes lots of patience, we aren’t doing anything extraordinary. We are simply using our dogs love of running as positive reinforcement.

Why Is Training Sled Dogs In Th Fall So Important?

Fall training is important because it is a time of trying new things and getting back in the groove of training. Properly conditioning the dogs for long distance events such as Iditarod is important and requires that mushers start months in advance so that when it is time to race, the dogs are at their peak physical condition and have a solid foundation. It is also the start of that season’s adventures and we are always excited with possibility about what our team will be able to accomplish in the months to come.

You can learn more about fall training from an earlier post we did: Fall Training For Sled Dogs.

Seppala Kennel‘s also has an excellent post about the progression of training from fall to winter.

Fall Training Update from Willow

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The calls are few and far between from Travis, so I know things are going well and he is having fun. The dogs, he said, are enjoying the trails which are mostly soft clay. “Good for their feet,” he told me. “I can run them further.” Fall Training in Willow He’s been putting on longer mileage, slowly taking the dogs further and further. It sounds like he’s camped quite a bit and has run in to many other mushers out on the trails. That’s the nice thing about Willow known as “the dog mushing capital of the world” there are mushers everywhere. It’s fun running down the trails and passing other teams rather than just passing cars. They’ve mostly been running at night, using the lights of the four wheeler and a head lamp to light the way. The weather is still pretty warm and with the longer runs he’s been doing it doesn’t do the dogs any good to run them during the heat of the day. These pictures look like they were taken early evening on a somewhat rainy day. I’ve had a few calls around 10:00pm just before he heads out to run though. I hope the weather there is as nice as it has been in Seward! Mostly, It sounds like it’s going well. When he isn’t running dogs he’s been visiting with friends in the area, no doubt talking dogs and the upcoming race season. And that’s how things go. One run and then another and then another.   Back at home I’ve been staying busy catching up on projects. I finished painting our living room which I started during Iditarod and also somehow found time to paint my office. It’s amazing what a little bit of color can do to a room. The puppies have enjoyed plenty of play time too. It’s been fun letting all the dogs here run loose for an hour or so each day. Anyways, back to work for me!

Rebuilding

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It’s amazing what water can do, even if all it is doing is slowly creeping up and up and up. First up the driveway and the dog yard, then up the basement walls into the sheetrock and insulation. It undercut fences and driveways and dog yards and all the places we loved to train. It seems so strange that time has even passed, that minutes have turned into hours, hours into days with nothing but our heads down, working. First, we worked to save the things we love: we worked to evacuate the dogs,we moved a little less than one ton of dog food not once, but twice, we built walls, we set pumps and schedules and watched and waited until the water finally left – and it did, thank goodness, so now we work more. Now we’ve been working to rebuild the things we love: our home, our dog lot, our routines, our life.

Tearing up the basement after the flood. We had to remove the sheetrock & Insulation. Now we have fans and industrial sized humidifiers going...

For the first few days after the water began to vanish, there was so much work inside: sheetrock to be torn down, insulation to be removed, all our gear reorganized and moved upstairs. None of the work particularly hard or demanding in itself except for the quantity of it and the weight of all that had happened, resting on our shoulders. We, of course, know we are lucky. Our home was damaged, not destroyed. Our dogs were moved, not lost. These were problems that could be fixed and yet it still seemed (seems) like so much.

As we worked inside trying to rid ourselves of the wetness we waited, trying to figure out what we do with our dogs. They were in temporary housing at the Seavey’s dog lot and we needed them back home. A few days after the flood we walked the dog yard and in some spots sank up to our knees in mud. We brought in a couple loads of gravel, but the bobcat was making a mess in soggy land and the stone simply wasn’t going far enough.

We fretted about what to do: we were supposed to be training our dogs, not letting them sit idle but we now faced difficult decisions. It was hard to look at the home we’d moved into, sink before our eyes. Where we once let our dogs run wild and loose in the back yard, there were now holes, ruts, and layers of silt. The back part of our dog lot where the water entered from was completely destroyed. In some spots, it created huge ruts. It undercut the chainlink fence in our back yard. Where the fence once connected to the earth there is a gap of some eight or nine inches. When we were removing the dogs the day of the flood, before the worst had even occurred, two people helping us sank up to their waists from holes carved by water.

Even though the rain was lessening, the ground was still saturated. Often times I’d take step, my boot sticking to the mud and when I’d finally pull it free, a small puddle would emerge in my boot-print. This wouldn’t do. This was not a place to bring dogs home to. If we brought them home, they would, we were sure, be swimming chest deep in mud: that is no way for any dog to live.

Then, it seemed, a miracle happened: We got a phone call from friends who wanted to help.

Team Zoya (Zoya D, John S, & Greg G) offered their assistance in a time that can really only be described as overwhelming and exhausting. The physical labor is tough, that’s for sure, but the tougher part are all the questions that come after the flood.: How do we do fix ___? How do we rebuild ___? Again and again and again, one question after another after another from when you wake up until you go to bed. How were we going to fix our dog lot? How were we going to bring our dogs home?

Our dogs are our friends, our family, our way of life. Looking out onto our empty dog lot was heartbreaking. At night, despite the fatigue of a full days work, we’d ask ourselves: How were we going to fix our dog lot? How were we going to bring our dogs home?

The answer is, without the help of Team Zoya, we don’t know. Because of their generosity, we were able to bring in the immense quantities of gravel needed to provide a good home for our dogs, out of the mud. We had 160 yards of gravel brought in late Friday night. We worked, continuously for the next 72 hours stopping briefly only to sleep, drink coffee, and run to the gas station so we could refill the bobcat we rented.

Once the gravel was down, we began the labor intensive task of pounding stakes into the ground — a task made more difficult because it finally decided to be sunny in Seward and it decided to be cold. At night we watched our breath rise out of us, and faced the impossible task of trying to drive stakes into frozen ground. It takes many, many, extra swings with a mallet to overcome the crunchiness of frozen, water-logged earth. But we overcame and my arms, I think, are twice as strong as they used to be!

We woke Monday morning to blue skies (again!) and went to pick up our dogs. We had spent the last two days, inbetween spreading gravel and driving posts, cleaning their houses. Several houses filled with water and were covered in silt. Others were starting to grow mold. We took our time and washed them with a dilute bleach solution and set them out in the sun.

When we finally brought the dogs back to the yard, you could see a sigh of relief in them. Many dogs we let run around the yard first and you could see their excitement at being home as they ran to pee on their favorite tree/bush/pole, smiles spread wide across their faces. In the photo above, Apache relaxes in the sun in the dog lot.

 

We are excited still about this winter. Snow has begun to creep down the mountains and we are excited for the things to come. We ran our first team of dogs this morning for the first time in over two weeks. It looked as if they’d never missed a day of training. We’re looking forward to seeing how our team will perform and are gearing up to enter some of the earlier races in the season.

Looking ahead at racing season, we’re trying to start filling out the paperwork and pay the entry fees. Hopefully we will both run the Sheep Mountain 150, The Knik 200, The Northern Lights 300, and then Travis will head to Iditarod.

There are a lot of people we would like to thank for helping us through the flood and their recognition should not go unnoticed. First, we’d like to thank The Seavey family for generously taking our dogs and for feeding them when we could not get to them due to high water. We’d like to thank Greg G, Zoya D, and John S, for their assistance in rebuilding our dog lot. We’d like to thank Rolf Bardersen and Ressurection Rentals for coming to our aid not only with pumps to help get the water out of our home, but with a bobcat to help make a channel to ensure that the water would drain away from our home , and for delivering a bobcat for us to rent in the middle of the night after the flood so we could finish building our doglot so we bring our four-legged friends back . We’d like to thank Cole Petersen and C.A.P. Construction for generously helping us time and time again, both during and after the flood with equipment, suggestions on repairs, and friendship. We’d like to thank Roger & Andrea Stokey who came to visit our home during the worst possible time and who rose to the occasion helping us tear down dry wall, remove insulation, clean mud out of the basement, the garage, and the fireplace, and for giving us relief at the end of all our long days in the form of good food and good company. We’d like to thank all our family and friends who stopped by, called, or emailed to make sure we were, in fact, ok and for all the well-wishes and kind thoughts sent our way.

It is always nice to know that we have a community around us both near and far who love us and want to see us succeed.

Thank You

The Lovely Trail Work Adventure

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The weekend has, once again, kept us rather busy. Yesterday we went out to take a tree that had come down off the trail — it was supposed to be a half hour project at most but somehow we ended up out doing trail work for 5 or 6 hours. It was necessary. It needed to be done. It wasn’t exactly boring but… it definitely wasn’t what I had in mind. I was less that thrilled to be out there and, I’m quite sure, I made this clear to Travis several times. I was hungry. I hate being hungry. And anyone who knows me well can attest at just how lovely I can be when I am hungry.

Still, we got what we needed to get done, done (or at least mostly done.) We actually created one entirely new section of trail that we ended up running on today, which was exciting. It’s basically a shortcut to our main trail but it’s still nice because the dogs like to see new things. It will probably be better to run on in the winter than it is now, provided we get plenty of snow. As it is, there are a lot of rocks and we have to crawl through several sections so that the dogs can get good footing.

We also cut down limbs on our main trail and fixed areas that were lacking in dirt. On several sharp turns we had places were some of the dogs had the potential  of getting swung into small branches. This wasn’t really something we wanted to happen so we removed them just as a precaution. In more than one place, we may have gone slightly overboard but better to be overly cautious.

There were also several places where we hacked away at banks and added dirt. One section of the trail was particularly rutted because it’s essetially become a small creek. While this itself wouldn’t present a problem, the way it was rutted in particular made it difficult to drive the four-wheeler (for me, not Travis) so we fixed this section and made it Sarah-proof.

We also filled in one particullary deep hole on the trail so that dogs couldn’t fall in and get hurt. We were sitting looking at it trying to find a good solution (it was a mud hole, full of water, and at least knee deep if not more) when Travis came up with a brilliant solution: there was an old rotting log nearby and we took the rotted wood, broke it up into chunks and filled it in. It worked really really well.

Funny enough, the tree we set out to remove had, by the time we got out to it, had been taken care of by someone else who was probably looking for firewood. Sick of working, we embarked on an adventure up a trail that Travis couldn’t remember where it led to. We never did find out. The willows started growing in too thick and we kept getting hit as we tried to drive up the trail. We ended up turning back. I’m sure we will try to tackle it again soon.

Strangely, at the end of all this I felt rather unaccomplished. Although the changes were evident when we hit the trail today, it seemed to take longer than it should have (probably because I was working at a glacial pace.)

Today we took the dogs out on two long, back to back runs. We ran them this morning, came back to the house and let them eat and rest for awhile, and then we hit the trail again tonight. All-in-all we were really impressed with how the dogs did. It was there first real big test and they all passed with flying colors.

I wish there was something special to tell you about, something that jumped out in particular about the run itself, something exciting we saw or did, but the real exciting thing was just seeing how well the dogs performed and how excited they were even at the end of the second run. Even when we got back to the yard, the dogs were still barking and screaming because they wanted to go. You can’t ask for more.

Well, that’s all for now!

Fall Training Video Update

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Here’s a video to show off the team. Unfortunately, we haven’t yet mastered the art of recording so you’ll have to tilt your head to watch it. Travis shot this while out on a run. Loon and Hatchet are in lead.  We are hoping to get a gopro camera here soon so that we can take some stellar footage. Right now we are using my little Canon Power Shot point and shoot. It used to work really well but we went on a puppy walk this summer and I stupidly dropped it in the river…. Whoops!