We just returned yesterday from the Stratford Nighthawks Races up in Stratford NH. Considering the issues I've had going on with the team the past week or so, I guess we did ok. We came in 4th place with the Top Purebred Team award (and frankly, I wasn't trying to do anything but have a training run out there! I held the dogs back a lot on the runs.). But overall I didn't feel the team did that well and I finished the race on Sunday with a heavy heart.
To backtrack...earlier in the week I had taken the dogs up to Pittsburg to do some back to back runs. When we got to Pittsburg around 8:30 am the thermometer in my dogtruck that tells the outside temperature read -25 and I did a double take - I've never before seen the thermometer read anything that low. It was so cold out that it hurt to breathe (possibly it just affects me that way because of the asthma tho...)
The dogteam was running AWESOME! Trail was nicely packed, plenty of snow for sinking a hook, definately in far better shape than anything we ran on last year around here. Those dogs were just cooking. They averaged 10-11 miles an hour for the first 20 miles of the run. I was thinking, 'wow, here is the dogteam I've always dreamed of!'
Then Snickers started limping. Since Snic is the type of dog that would run despite pain and not show any signs of it, I figured something must be pretty painful for him to be limping, so I unhooked him and put him in the sledbag for a free ride home. Even carrying a 45 pound dog and a 40 lb bag of dogfood in the sled hardly slowed those dogs down much - we were still averaging 9+ miles per hour the remaining way back to the truck.
But in the last 8 miles of the run 2 more dogs started limping: Anthem, who had had a minor wrist injury at eagle lake started favoring his wrist again, and Jackson started favoring a front leg (for some unknown reason - I never did figure out what was bothering him).
I pulled back into the parking lot ready to pack up and head home and forego the second run. But I convinced myself it was worth it to hang around and take a smaller team out later for another run - those dogs that weren't injured needed those back to back runs to prep for the upcoming races.
By the end of that second run (which I cut short for various reasons), I had 4 more injuries: two that showed themselves when I checked the dogs over after the run, and two that appeared the next morning. Add to that the fact that Kadee is still favoring a leg from an injury at the Eagle Lake race and is probably out for the remainder of the season, and that makes for more than half the team favoring something or another.
Most of the injuries seemed very minor and any pain or limping was gone within 24 hours. I consulted with various other distance mushers on how long to rest the dogs, whether or not to head up to Stratford and run the race, or whether the whole team just needed a long rest. After two days of agonizing over it I decided to drop down to the 6 dog class at Stratford and run 6 dogs I felt were in good shape, and possibly go out after the races and run very short runs with some of the dogs exhibiting very minor injuries (which I didn't wind up doing, again for various reasons).
The 6 dogs I chose to run at Stratford were Magik, Snowy, Tristan, Maja, Dawson and Matsi. Both Snowy and Tristan had questionable injuries from earlier in the week - Tristan had seemed to have a sore wrist when I first examined him on Tuesday but then later was fine. He hadn't been limping or favoring the leg at all, and I wondered if it truly was a sore wrist or just him being a cranky yearling after a very long run. And Snowy had come out of the truck favoring a leg on Wednesday but after moving around on it she stopped favoring the leg so I attributed it to some muscle stiffness.
By halfway through the 26 mile race on Saturday I knew something wasn't right. Snowy wasn't being herself - she was working off and on, yet I couldn't seem to find anything wrong with her. Tristan seemed fine, but wasn't working as hard as normal, and same thing with Dawson. Unfortunately it was an extremely hilly race and having only 3 of the 6 dogs really working made for what seemed like an agonizingly slow run on those hills. After the race I discovered Dawson was apparantly still bothered by some healing pad problems, and Tristan whined when I checked the wrist that had seemed to bother him on Tuesday's run. I guess it wasn't yearling crankiness after all.
I tended to injuries, massaged alygval into Snowy's shoulders and legs (even though I couldn't figure out exactly what her problem was), wristwrpped the entire bunch, and decided to see how they felt the next morning. On Sunday I ran both Snowy and Tristan around on a leash to see if they showed any signs of being bothered - but they were fine. Tristan's wrist was not bothering him that morning, and Snowy wasn't favoring anything or showing any signs of pain at all. Still, I made sure to massage each of them prior to the race, and to boot Dawson and put on some ointment.
I hoped all of that would help, but Sunday's race went about the same as Saturday's did. I suspect our times weren't all that bad, and we certainly beat a few people on the race at least, but all in all I didn't feel we did even close to as well as we should have done if my team had been 100%. We were more like 50% out there, or less.
So now I have a decision to make this week: do we do the Greenville 100 on Saturday, or do I pull out of the race? I'm going to run the dogs on a few short runs the next few days and see how they do. Some of the dogs with minor injuries have now had a week off to recover, and hopefully they'll be recovered enough to run without reinjuring themselves. But if I feel based on the runs this week that they can't do 100 miles without making matters worse then we'll have to pull out and just concentrate on healing up for Can-Am, despite the fact that we could really use that Greenville race as a warmup.
It's discouraging to get to this point in the season and have this many injuries - and to feel like had I had a bit more experience at this I might have been able to prevent some of them. A lesson learned, the hard way. :(
