Monday, March 9, 2009

Training Report - March 5 & 6

I was off Wed and Thrus (Mar 4 & 5) and these were regularly planned training
runs. On Wed, I attended a going away lunch for one of the folks I work with. This was over at 1:30 and then I met Mary for one of her hospital appts. We also had handling class at 8PM. Not a lot of time to get a quality training run in, let alone 2 runs. What a shame to only get 1 training run in this week and let this beautiful snow go to waste. I decided I to take a day of leave on Friday.

On Thursday, I ran both teams 7 miles. This would give me enough time to get
both teams out, back to the house and fed, equipment put up, showered and then
off to the Iditarod Musher's Banquet. Mary and I are taking care of Blake Matray's (Bib #9) dropped dogs and in thanks he gave us 2 tickets at his table. Blake has re-built his kennel of Siberians since his scratch in 2003. This will be his last shot at seeing Nome with his dogs.

Thursday it snowed and snowed and snowed some more. Before I could run onFriday I had to go to my physcial therapy appt, then come home and shovel the snow out of the driveway as well as dig the dog truck out.

I managed to get the first team out and we had a very nice 14 mile run. Second team did good, but a little slower. Luna wasn't going very fast and the swing dogs kept catching up to her. She gave no indications of an injury. I decided to swap her with her sister, Zia. This worked out well. When I started the first run the temps were around 30 and dropped to 7F when I finished.

Mary was on her way home from work and stopped at the track to help me water and load dogs. This was a big help. My kindgom for a dedicated handler that can match my schedule.

Once we got back to the house, I off loaded the dogs and when it came time for Luna, we both noticed she was holding up her left rear leg and wouldn't put weight on it. She didn't do this during or after the run, or before she was loaded into the truck. Mary put Luna in the kitchen and put up a baby gate. After we got the rest of the crew put up, I checked out Luna's paw. Nothing appeared to be broken. Good range of motion. She would put weight on the bad paw when I checked the range of motion on the good paw. She didn't give an indication of being in pain. At this point we gave her an Arnica and put her into a crate and let her rest. After a couple of hours, she put a little weight on it. I will give her a week off and see how she does on Friday. If she is still sore, then we won't run her in the race on Saturday.