Motivation....

is an interesting thing. Especially when it's your FRIENDS you are in competition with. For some reason, it's more fun to beat (or, ahem... lose to) them than strangers. The motivation factor is huge. For these reasons, the dogs and I are working our butts off now!! Hell, I've even started TIMING our runs, something I don't think I've ever done.

And it's amazing what just a little *push* will do to the dogs. I'm not asking them to kill themselves, rather, trying to keep up their motivation for keeping a nice, constant speed. Enough of this slacker attitude, we need to step it up a notch!! This new attitude worked amazingly a few days ago when we flew down the trail with an 8-dog team. We covered our 10-mile loop in 45 minutes, which I *think* was the fastest we'd ever done it. It sure seemed like it. So we're now training for a 4.5 mile 4-dog race in 1.5 weeks. I figure we'll do a few 5-miles, a couple 10-miles, to keep them going at a faster pace. And see what happens.

Of course, Kuna had to join us and kept up pretty good for a dog who outweighs the others by approx. 40lbs...

Now that dog has style: GREEN booties and a PURPLE harness!!! (blame it all on his owners Ukranian heritage...)

Here's the team, coming into the home stretch and looking fired up. Kate & Octane are leading and Kate is loping like a maniac, forgetting she is almost THIRTEEN years old!!!!! Jack's a bit of a leftie, likes running on the left. That's why he's so cozy with Harris at the back:


After this fantastic run, I was fired up to do a 10-mile skijor with Ripper and Rupert - try giving commands to just one of these guys: Straight ahead Ripper! No, Rupert.... ok, that's it Ripert... er, Rupper... arghh.... they usually just get a combination of the two - Rippert works well I find - I'm starting to feel like a mother who is always screwing up her kids names...


It took Rupert a bit to get into it, but it was his longest skijor session. You can really tell while skiing when a dog is slacking just a bit in his tugline. It's pretty obvious especially when there's only 2 dogs. So, I tried motivating him just by encouraging him, and *reminding* him how we LIKE to go fast and BEAT our friends. I also thought it might be because this whole running-while-a-flailing-lunatic-is-behind-you thing is sort of new to them, so I wasn't gonna give him too hard a time. But he got into it and was superb for the last half.

A happy Rupert actually allowing me to take his picture:


So we did this skijor in 55 minutes (3 minutes faster than our race pace), which I promptly told Darryl-the-competition later that night. I should really shut up and keep the competition in the dark eh?!? Doh!