Well, it's looking good for this to be the last picture of the year showing the team running on frozen dirt roads! 

And I can't tell you how glad I am about that!  The frozen gravel has been causing us no end of trouble (and money!).  It's really hard on feet, just like if you tried running barefoot on miles and miles of 60 grit sandpaper.

On many, many, many of my dogs feet- 8 out of 12- little round rasberries formed on their pads.  Totally my fault!  Normally, at this time of year we are running on snow.  So as Novemember hits and the training miles start to pile on, their feet are not getting nearly as worn down.  And I didn't adapt quick enough to the different conditions.

I should have predicted it though, and taken the precation of putting booties on all the dogs feet before any problems showed up.  I didn't, and even though I check feet after ever run- one run is all it took!

They looked great one day, maybe their nails were getting a bit short, and then puff! 8 worn rear pads!  Darn.

We worked through it though!  Booties ( a dollar each, 24 per run), oitment, and sideharness (which forces the dogs not to pull as hard, and thus limits the wear on their feet) did the trick!  We managed to stay pretty close to our training schedule (You can check that out on our Ning site) And now all the wears are healed up and we just got an inch of snow to cover our sandpaper highways!  With more on the way tonight!

It's not enough to safely get on the sleds yet, but it's a start!

We have well and truly begun training dogs for this upcomming 2009-2010 winter race season.

This should be an interesting year as a few multi-year plans are comming together.

First, I have a whole new crop of yearlings that I will be taking racing this year.  The older dogs have all gone to my son... but I'll talk about that in a minute.

The yearlings are part of a kennel wide re-evaluation after scratching from the 2007 Iditarod.  They are a mix of our older "village" line of dogs and some fresh ONAC sprint lines out of the Streeper Kennel (via Hollingsworth) that we bred into in early 2008.  These guys are FAST compared to the dogs that I was used to and it is really fun to run them.

We took all last year and trained them very methodically to be ready for racing over the next 6 to 8 years.  We worked heavily on attitude and mental skills last year and were very careful not to push them physically, while at the same time laying in a good cardiovascular base.

This year we will be building on that base and entering them in a few short and mid-distance races to get them the kind of experience they (and I) will need in future Iditarods. 

The plan is to then take next year and run a very pleasant relaxed Yukon Quest (my wife and I are going to run it together in 2011) then go and race Iditarod the following year (2012).

My goals are to then fininsh top 30 that year, then top 20 the next, then top 10- where I will be content since I don't really think I have what it takes to push dogs into the top 5.  Lofty goals for a two time scratcher!

I will also be focusing on the Copper Basin 300 and Tust. 200 the years that I run Iditarod.

My son begins his first year of dedicated mushing this year!  I am really excited about this because training dogs takes A LOT of time and I am looking forward to spending it with him and my wife out on the trail!

He'll be running our older dogs and expect they will have bunches to teach him.

Stay tuned as I'll be updating our progress nearly everyday from here on out throught he winter... I'll even try to start getting some regular photo updates as well!