January 24, 2007

raining Elena Day 1

Well maybe I should start with Training Elena Day 0.5. She arrived around noon with about a 12 hour drive with 3-4 hours of sleep beforehand. Last night we rigged up her beautiful handmade sled and made her ganglines and hooked up her brake ect. We shoved her on her sled twice down the driveway and then we instantly hooked her up with a team of 3 dogs. She got her very first experience to run dogs ever.... in the dark with a headlamp! It is amazing anyone visits me with the abuse I put them through.

New person. new sled. New rigging, dogs working in new positions.. it was the recipe for "Murphy's Law" . Every 5 feet the dogs had to be stopped and get untangled. The guys were packing trails for us, but did not realize half these dogs used to run with snowmobiles and kept following the snowmobiles, so it felt like we were on some frustrating gerbil wheel... which kept getting tangled. I tried to give Elena the more experienced lead dog, but "Tess" wouldn't work for her, then traded her leader for mine and then we had to do a few more dog swaps between teams and then within positions.

Then today. We were going to run one trail and due to "Teenager' needing his basketball gear for school pictures, we packed the dogs up and headed to an 11 mile trail along a beautiful river. Same scenario as last night and it was rather frustrating. Then.. like magic, everything started to click as everyone and everything got back into a teamwork scenario. We had a good run for 6 miles and then coming on the loop back, we found no snowmobiles or dog teams had been on the return route. Due to the several mile downhill we had just come, we did not want to climb that back up. So we waded though and broke trail through hip deep snow for several miles. It was go 25 feet.. stop and rest. Go 25 feet.. stop and rest. Go 25 feet.. stop and rest. It was tedious and all uphill. But we made it.

Just when both of Elena and I never wanted to see a dogsled again (joking), we got back to the main track on the main loop and Elena was looking like a pro. I was very proud of her working so hard on such a soft and deep snowed trail. She never complained once and she made it the whole way. She is ready to come back next year and she has never even finished this year or did the really fun stuff yet!!

Tonight for a dinner guest, we had the reporter who is following me all week for the event, over. We got to know her, and she got to know us. We fed her pork roast and Chickpea Chocolate Cake. She is very nice and I think we have alot of things in common.

For a first, I am letting someone else post on my blog. Here is Elena's take on her experience here...

Hello Everyone,

Let's see, where to begin? I was invited to come back up again for another visit and to help Tenzi out with this year's trail run. What started out is me coming for the sledding event and using her sled for the 6 mile dash at the end of the event which turned into me building my own sled and doing 20 miles of the event due to Tenzi getting more dogs. So, I had about 3 months to get my sled built, but of course waited til the last minute and was working feverishly in my basement for most of January.

I made my sled basically to my measurements, but I soon realized that maybe a little wider of a sled would be wiser to prevent tipping on corners. The upside to my sled being the way it is: I really have to "drive" it and be constantly aware of my body positioning and watching the sled and the dogs. Probably something every beginner should get comfortable with anyways.

A quick note on my first real trip out with Tenzi: OMG, she tried to kill me!!! Just kidding. We had a good time and it was a real "dog sledding boot camp experience." Anything that could go wrong did. Broken neck line, broken front bridle loop, broken hinge bolt on my ice brake. Since we were so far out and no one to help, we just "made it work." ie just tied the darn thing into knots and rig up a bungee cord to hold the ice brake on. Guess what? It worked!!!! Also, had to burn some major fat cells tromping up a incline for about 2 miles in knee to hip deep practically virgin trail. The dogs got a little frustrated at times with go, stop, go, stop, but I kept telling the dogs "Hey, I am helping you out by walking and pushing the sleds, and you don't really want to drag out all 200 lbs of my corpse's dead weight!!" I did feel at times like I may puke or stroke or have a heart attack. All I can say is that the bumpy, icy, cramped ride back in the pick-up felt like floating on a cloud after that experience. On a high note, I think the dogs have accepted me and the last 30 minutes of the trail went very smoothly and the dogs, my sled, and myself all functioned like a well oiled and tuned machine!!

Thank you Tenzi so much for this experience and I am already working out in my head on new designs for my next sled, and where the heck will I put a team of dogs in my standard city lot sized yard?

Elena :)

 

PS. Pictures to come later as we seem not to be able to transfer them from Elena's camera to tenzicut's computer