Hi I will catch up for anyone who has followed in the past. There has been allot of snow gone by between the runners. Or water under the bridge sort of speak. I just could not get back on again. After some effort well alot of effort I got back on to start to blog again.
We did have a great winter. Rachel and Ben had the best teams we have seen. They are all yearlings so with that in mind the winter was spent taking care of these young dogs. It was the warmest winter in memory for us. SOme of the races were hot. It was ridiculous. The first time that we ran into problems was at he world championships in Anchorage. We did learn allot about the heat and the difference between young dogs and older dogs. The younger dogs have very little tolerance to heat. There are two reasons for this. One reason they cannot take the heat is they do not know to slow down and take it easy because of the heat. They run and run hard despite the situation. Before they even realize it is hot out they are already in danger. Older dogs on the other hand do not work as hard going out. They then do not have such a over heating problem. They also have many many miles of running in the heat this makes them more tolerant to it. When dogs do over heat It can be very hard on them and some times they never ever recover. They seem to have endless trouble to try and control their body temperature. Rachel had a really hard driving dog in her team and he over heated. when he returned to the dog truck we used snow and water to bring his body temp. down. This works but you have to be careful not to bring the temperature down too fast or this can hurt the dog as well.
The dogs did well but not as good as they could have if the weather was colder. We actually were very lucky to have a dog race at all. It was a good time there and we went to the aleska ski hill as well. Very much fun.
Sunday, June 6, 2010
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