Walking, bikejoring and honesty.

Had a nice first run of the season with the dogs today, they both behaved very well and for being Alphas first proper run he did great. 

Walked to the forest to let them warm up their muscles, this to reduce injuries and give them chance to pee and poo - want to reduce the risk of having sudden stops along the run. Also walked on the way home for a kilometer, gave them water mixed with salmon oil and blood powder an hour before training and they also had some more of this mixture once we were home again. 

Halfway through the run we had a water break and a cuddle in the grass for about 20minutes. That was absolutely lovely, just me and the dogs in good weather, beautiful landscape, sharing a moment while letting them cool off. 

When looking through my sports tracker logg the run +walking ended on 9,22km in total and out of that we walked 3km. 27km/h top speed with an average 19km/h. In hindsight and with some pointing out from an experienced musher I look up to a great deal I realized I ran them too fast, and for the youngster 1-2km too far as well. 

Hand on heart it is extremely valuable for me having someone who express concern, and actually care enough to do so. I think we need more of that in the world of running dogs, so if you have the experience do tell and give advice to rookies and if you are a rookie LISTEN to those more experienced than YOU! It really do make the difference between disaster or success. 

Running dogs is not all about pride and thinking you know everything and having all the answers, it is about the dogs and their safety, making sure they do have the time of their lives every time we take them out for a run. It's also about sharing knowledge, thoughts, reflections and learning from each other.

So be humble, listen and be honest. 

Damn temperatures

Seems like it became true, a warm autumn as some predicted. Not what I had hoped for and sadly the rain doesn't feel like paying any longer visits either otherwise I'm sure that would've occasionally brought the temperatures down.

So far we've had pretty much only sun with maybe some downpour during mid day (which doesn't help a lot), and I am constantly checking the weather forecast and the thermometer for decent morning temperatures and not too high humidity, to no avail. 

The youngsters energy level is becoming hard to cope with on a daily basis, and the long walks with or without harness doesn't seem to be quite "enough" for him. On the other side he's starting to become even better at taking directional commands now, trained this a lot on our walks. I have even walked off road a couple of times zigzagging between trees, rocks and other obstacles and he's done extremely well.

Starting to realize it might become hard to enter Skanedraget in November on a competitive level, so I'm more of thinking about entering the exercise class and aim for the spring version of the same race in next year. 

It would give both me and the dogs some well needed experience to better prepare ourselves for the "real deal" later on, without feeling the pressure from competition nerves kicking in, hehe.

Shin is still being picky with food, but it seems like I've finally might have found a kibble he likes - which I combine with salmon oil, blood powder and a Swedish produced fresh dog food for hard working dogs. This to up his body weight, he is still way too skinny even if it's better compared to last year. 

Oh and yeah, usually I type in Swedish but I've decided to change this into English mainly due to the fact that it's a universal language and I've had questions from non Swedish people on what I'm writing about. It's more convenient this way :-)