It’s been a busy week for us so far, here at Turning Heads Kennel. On Monday, the Seward Student Leadership program came out to the kennel. The Student Seward Leadership program has 18 students from grades 4-6 in it. They have decided to help us fundraise for this year’s Iditarod and we couldn’t be happier! We spent the afternoon teaching them not only about our dogs, but also talking with them about what a good fundraiser might entail. We showed them some of the important gear our dogs use like dog booties, wrist wraps, and dog jackets.
We decided that a spaghetti feed fundraiser here in town would be a great way not only to help raise money for essential items for our Iditarod: like booties, new dog jackets, etc, but it will also be a great way to get the local community involved. We really love sharing our sport! Of course, we also took the Leadership team out on a dog ride which they loved and let them play with our puppies (who are now getting very big!). All-in-all, I’d say it was a successful meeting!
On Tuesday, we woke up early to get ready for our friends wedding. It was a low-key affair down at the local court-house. It was perfect. The bride, Nichole, looked absolutely stunning and you could see the happiness in both their eyes. Mark, the groom, looked dashing. Nichole and I had fun in Anchorage a few days before picking out his and Travis’ ties and shoes. Both Mark and Nichole have been helping us around the kennel, and we couldn’t be more grateful. Nichole is a world-class chef and has been cooking some really wonderful meals for us to come home to after a busy day of promoting our tour, running dogs, and trying to keep everything functioning. Mark has been helping us take care of dogs, chopping wood, and just helping us get prepared for winter. We’ve been really lucky to have their help as things are only getting busier and busier around here!
Unfortunately, as the week winds down our work winds up. We have more teams to run and have been running them longer and longer each day. I recently started training some of our older puppies, while Travis has been focus on the main racing pool. We have 28 dogs in the main pool which is perfect for both of us to race this winter. Last year, it was almost impossible to run two teams in the same race due to the number of dogs we had. This year, we’ve both signed up for several races: Sheep Mountain 150, Knik 200, Northern Lights 300, and now, with the Tustumena 200, announcing they’ve changed their dates, we are hoping to sign up for that. I had a wonderful experience running the T-200 last year and would love to be a part of such a wonderful race again.
Travis is also going to sign up for this year’s Kusko 300, run out in Bethel. We’ve talked it over a lot and we think it will be a great race for a number of reasons. With all the racing we have planned for him, Travis will have put on 1100 miles on his dog team just through racing. This will prove really valuable as a lot of our younger dogs haven’t had a lot of racing experience. It will also be a great way for him to look at all 28 of the dogs in our racing pool. Believe it or not, dogs are sometimes like human athletes…they perform better when racing, not when training. With that many miles, he’ll be able to look at his dogs really critically. The best part, however, is that the last race we are signed up for (if we do sign up) would be the Tustumena 200 which is run the first week in February. What this means is, after a strong month of racing in January, the dogs will have almost a month between our last race and Iditarod. This will really allow us to focus in on training and choose our top 16 dogs — which isn’t always as easy as you’d think.