But we plan to go at it with gusto! The dog's and Rich will be running at least two races in January to qualify for the Iditarod... and then the Iditarod itself in March. And many of the dogs will also be running the Jr. Iditarod at the end of February with Charlie.

So, many of the dogs in our small kennel will be racing nearly 2,000 miles this season! Wow, a far cry from hauling wood for our little cabin!

...and the number of miles we plan to race this year, we have adopted what we feel is a conservative plan for how we will race this season and corespondingly how we will train... the old saying "train the way you'll race, race the way you train," makes a ton of sense to us.

Our main goal is to limit injuries and keep as many of our dogs running as we can throughout training and then into the racing season with everything focused on having the dogs in peak condition for the Iditarod.

Our strategy is...

...to run the dogs slow (8mph) and long (10hrs), rest an equal, or almost equal amount of time... and do it all over again... and do that over and over again! Without any slowing down of the pace!

This is currently how we plan to run the race... but of course things will likely change as training moves along through the year. We figured this plan out by assuming a few things... First, that the race will start in Willow, as it has the last few years (we will soon make a plan with the start from Wasilla). Second, we used the trail description and distances found on the Iditarod web page. Third, we planned on the dogs maintaining their 8 mph pace throughout the race. The end result is a race finish on March 16, 2006 at around 2pm AST in 10 days 23 hours... That's the plan anyhow...what could go wrong? :)