More cold days

Hi to everyone. Rachel went out with friends for sleep over night on a friday night. This is relevant because she has to get home in the morning to train dogs. As a parent you are always concerned what your kids are doing when they are out. The best part of Rachel needing to be home to train is she is likely thinking of the early morning and may just change what she is doing during the night. She made it home and was very cooperative and willing to train the dogs on Saturday morning. This was great.
Saturdays training. Was cold and the trail was pretty hard. The condition were perfect for snow balls to form on the dogs feet. It takes a combination of conditions and various types of dog feet to make this happen. I believe it has to do with different foot temperatures and various insulting qualities of the dog's foot itself. The snow temperature and air temp is a factor as well. Some dogs never develop snow balls on their feet others will. When this happens the little snow balls start to grow on the hair inside the foot. The balls get bigger. When the dogs step down the balls get stepped on and it hurts their feet deep inside . You end up with cracks on the webs inside the feet. This takes time to heal up because of the location of the wounds. Dogs have a tendency to lick at their sore feet as well. This takes off any ointment you apply and makes their feet worse with all the licking. The cuts have to heal from the inside of the body out so it does take quite some time to heal. Dogs that have these cracks need to have booties on to keep training. Booties are not good because it slows the dog down and can cause slipping. A dog that slips at high speeds can injure themselves. It takes the dog time to get used to the booties and they soon learn how to run on them.
Sunday's training run started late in the day. It was hard for everyone to get going. The trail was perfect. Hard fast and better for the feet. Rachel ran one of her fastest average of the year so the average is coming up. good sign as this is the purpose of the training to make the average speed to climb. Once the average speed is up near 19-20 they are ready to race. We do not train the dogs at these speeds ever. We do have training runs where the dogs do bursts of top speed but that is all. The training is going good. Almost time to leave.