The Late Fall Blues have struck the team!

Feet are sore, attitudes are down, and training is in the pits!

But this isn't all that uncommon, actually we seem to go through it every year to some extent.  This year seems a bit worse because the team is so young.  They have no idea that it will get better in just a few short weeks.  And the in experience is really effectin my young leaders the most! 

They aren't listening, they are running on the wrong side of the rode, they are stopping to drink at every puddle (rather than taking a quick drink and keeping on the move), they are stopping to play with the Swing dogs behind them, etc, etc... Everything they can think of except going down the trail.

I was getting really MAD!

But then- thanks to some good advice from younger brother- I rembered to have fun!

So I have swapped some things around in the kennel so I can run my old main leader Goldden again (Pippin was running him but now he will run Beatrice instead and still keep Fluffy- the winning pair in last years Jr. Yukon Quest).

Andy is going to go back and run with Charlie and the puppies.

And we are going to take a week off "real" training!  The dogs that have sore feet will get a chance to heel up.  The ones that are good are going to go out on a bunch of short, REALLY fun runs.  And everybody is going to have fun and take it easy! (including me!)

Okay, so a few post back I started talking about Goal Setting.  I started by explaining about all the data I collect for my dogs.  Then I talked about a training run that went funny.

But what does this have to do with goals setting?  And why is that even important?

Well, mushing is a long term planning commitment!  It takes years to put together a good dog team, train them, train yourself, and be ready to compete.  You HAVE to set goals- long term, short term, and everything in between.

Then you have to monitor your progress and adapt to changes!  All the data I desrcibed in my last post helps me do that.  And the big picture goals help me determine what the goals for individual runs should be... and then I have to stay aware, because the world is fluid and dynamic, changing all the time...

So, I am blathering on a bit here, back to the basics.

This is what I have done.  It started in 2007 when I scratched from Iditarod.  That was a BIG goal that I failed at so I evaluated all the pieces that went right and all that went wrong.  I drew a line down the middle of a balnk piece of paper, on side was the "right" things one the "wrong." And across the top I wrote "How to be competitive in Iditarod" I did this right there in the checkpoint as I waited for the little plane to take me home!

I used that as a master document for my planning.  Set out a timeline based on the changes I felt I was going to need to make, then started braking that down into smaller and smaller junks.

For me it was a 5 year plan. 2012 race iditarod again, 2011 competitve in mid-distance, 2010 competitve in short (under 100 miles races), 2009 puppy training, 2008 breed faster team/get family involved...

With each year goal defined, I set out to define seasonal goals for each year. Then montly goals for each season, weekly goals for each month, etc, all the way down to individual training run goals!

Of course I didn't do it all at once! Each year I evaluate the seasonal goals, each season the montly goals, each month the weekly goals, each week the daily goals, each run the minute to minute goals!

All the data I mentioned 2 posts ago helps me.  And the big picture goals help me decide what to do on individual runs when things start to go wrong.

So what goals do you have?  How are you anyalizing them? 

Opps, is right!  Boy oh boy did we have a lousy run the otherday!  We were supposed to head out for a 2 1/2hr run but we needed to stop at a creek that we pass about a half hour out to fill up water buckets for feeding later that night.

I have never done this with this team, though my older team- the one my son is running this year- has done it bunches of times.  So I really didn't expect to have any trouble.  Wrong.

To get down to the creek we have to turn off the main dirt road and take a little trail to the river bank.  There I was going to turn them along the river, stop the atv, get off wade out and fill the buckets, get back on, turn the team around and head on down the road for another two hours.

The problem was I have no adult, experienced leaders, and to accomplish the above task requires about 7-8 new commands for the yearlings to learn (well really they aren't new, just applied in a different context than normal... it is stil "gee" for right turn, "haw" for left, "whoa" to stop, and "hup" to go.  Anyway...)

It turns out 7-8 commands in a new context was about 6-7 too many!

The short version is a 10min. stop for water turned into a 45min pain in the neck.  Both the dogs and I were so dispirited by the exercise I decided to cut the rest of the run short and home!

And that leads me right back into the Goal Setting post I started the other day...right where I will pick it up next.....