Reprinted with permission from "Uncle Elmer," TEAM & TRAIL Publishers & Printers, Center Harbor, New Hampshire, 1981.

A lot of people think training and conditioning is the same thing, but I don't see it that way. Having dogs in shape to run a long ways is not too hard to do. You can do it if you live in the middle of the Sahara desert or the Pine Barrens or the beach in San Diego, or just about any place where snow don't get in your way.

And, there is quite a bunch of dog drivers that feel that snow does get in their way. They will run like hell to avoid working their dogs in it because it spoils what they call training. This is the person who first thing in the fall hooks a string of twelve or fourteen dogs to the front of a car and runs them that way until he is just about forced to get out his dog sled for the first race.

Conditioning

There are some people that run dogs loose the same way, driving a car to keep track of them or riding a motorcycle. There is even one man I know of who rides a horse with his dogs, it will harden them up fast, happy and eager. A dog that has run loose, or near-loose (like when somebody's always running the motor so the dogs don't get to tighten up except only once in a while), will get in shape in the way that is most fun to the dog, provided he has got any natural "go." That is if he gets real miles on him, like after a month or so he is going fifteen or sixteen miles at a stretch.

For just putting muscles in the right places and building up the pack-running spirit, this kind of running can't be beat. The only dogs that don't get nothing out of it are the ones that just don't want to run anyway. Those are picked out very early in the game by the fact they slack off (if they are hooked as a team to a car) or they drop out and fall back (if they are running loose).

There is just one thing wrong with teams trained this way most of the time-they are not really trained and they will always show it eventually. And, though I have seen a lot of dog teams, including most of the best, I have never seen sled dogs that was trained by going with a dozen others, or by going loose with any number of others. Conditioned, yes - trained, no.

Training

There is no way to train a dog except by being right in contact with him, or in such close touch with him that he thinks you are at his personal back. Every dog team that is going to be called consistent, no matter what kind of conditions it runs on, is made up of dogs that have had the driver at their personal backs in just about every kind of going the trainer could find. That means that although they might have done a few hundred miles loping in front of a powered-up automobile, they have also done miles hauling uphill in slushy snow, crawling along over punchy crust, leaning together to skid over bare spots, running downgrade in deep powder snow, and other things like that.

I have read an article by a smart trainer who made the comment that where he lived, the training was too good, something that explained to him the losses he took in races outside of that area (Minnesota) where you couldn't count on the trails the same way. I sure do believe this. I have lived where in an average year you would run the dogs on country roads through the fall, then in December, just when it was getting hard to run with a gig on account of the ground freezing up, you would get a few inches of snow - enough to train on-and as the winter got deeper, you would keep running over the same trail with never more than half a foot of new snow at a time and maybe a few drifted places where you would convince yourself the dogs was learning to handle deep going.

Then, send the dogs out to some hill country race, or a lake course with a ground-up frozen slush trail, and watch that iron hard bunch come all apart. There are quite a few places in North America where dogs learn to run beautiful, but they don't learn anything else.

Easy Running Syndrome

There are a few places, as you have seen, where it is real rare to see a dog pulling. You will watch the local teams in a local race and no matter how many a driver has hooked up, at most parts of the trail there will be about half of them with lines up taut and the other half running a little bit slack. You figure that every dog is on the team for some reason but you also figure that you could take away half of them and the team would run just as good. That is not true when you get behind the handlebar. You find that the genuine pull put out by these dogs alternates between one and another all the time. No one dog (except for maybe two or three in the front end) is tight the whole distance. And, sometimes on a fast stretch of the trail, there is no tight line at all behind the front end. It takes human conditioning, mental type, to accept the idea that conditions can be so fast that one tiny occasional jerk on the towline can keep the sled running fast enough to practically catch up to the wheelers - that is, if you come from country where the snow isn't that good.

Now that plastic runners are the big thing with dog racers, you can find courses where you could go ten miles with five dogs and make damn near the same time as a ten-dog team.

The trouble is, if your dogs are never hooked except when it is like that, or when they can hightail it in front of an automobile, or run free with a motorcycle or a truck, you find out after a while that you can't run them any other way if you want to do good. And, quick enough, you discover that those perfect conditions are few and far between and you have nothing but a perfect-trail team. I have heard plenty of people say, "We don't worry about pulling, it comes natural to a good dog." But, I have also seen those drivers go down the tube when they landed on a sloppy trail.

Reverse Training

That gets me right back to the beginning. If it is always easy for the dogs, and they can depend on always getting a breather when they want it (by slacking for a while), or are trained so that every run is a ten-mile breather with a car pulling up on them to take out the tension if they get to the point of having to lug down, they will pretty soon have a kind of reverse training.

They won't put out unless everything is just the way they're used to it. If you train dogs long enough by taking the pull off them every time they begin to feel it and slow down, then pretty soon they quit any time there is a pull on them.

"Work" Training

I know how some of the big timers train their dogs and no matter what you hear from other people trying to justify their easy runs, there is nobody in the big time who don't make his dogs work from time to time. There is a lot more seven dog teams going out in the fall than most people think. There also is quite a group of drivers who take non-helping passengers and truck tires behind the sled and steel runners when they could take plastic.

Some good athletic men act like cripples the way they stay on the sled on the hills they can find during training. They aren't like cripples at all the way they can get up there to the front end if the dogs come up with that time honored break and start looking back with that "I can't do it" expression on their faces. Any place a man can walk up a hill at all, a small team can pull him up it if they have enough training as well as conditioning. Don't you think for a minute that the top winners don't expose their dogs to some of that kind of thing. If there isn't any other reason for it, one good reason is to make sure that when you holler, "Kiska! Hike!" Kiska is going to try to hike.

It is part of the make-up of a real racing dog, to run when he can. That is a temperamental trait that is bred into him. No matter what you stick him with, as soon as he can run, he will run. You don't have to teach him to run. It is natural to a race bred dog to want to run.

How many ways do I have to say that before people will believe it? But, if you only work the dog at a full run all the time, if he gets the idea that there is nothing to this job except running, he will not hold up when he has to work.

Dogs Need Both Conditioning and Training

You condition the dogs by running them and by working them both. But, you train them only by working them. And, you can't train them by the dozens-at-a-time method. You can't train them when they are running loose and you can't train them by taking all the work out of every run.

A lot of bad trails will look better to the fellow who has gone hunting for tough training conditions, even when that perfect trail is right in his back yard. You don't find out the real good qualities of your race bred dogs by just letting them run. You i;nd out the truth about them when you hit a nasty south facing slope where the bottom has gone. You ask them for some real effort and all those little guys built like a bunch of deer either buckle down into low gear and give it to you, or they drop back on the necklines and stick up their tails like "Unfair to Organized Racing Dogs" picket-line signs.

You can't take the run out of a running dog unless you beat him every time he runs. It is always there. He would rather run than anything else. So, if you are the right kind of trainer, you don't just run him, you train him as well, and you get a team that won't go to pieces on the kind of trails everybody has had this year or any other year -- well, at least everybody in the southern forty-eight.