What a cold, wet, smelly weekend. This dryland race was anything but dry, as they so typically end up being. I'm exhausted just thinking about it. It’s been almost a month and the dog van still stinks.
It rained the entire weekend, from a steady drizzle to full downpour. We arrived at the race site late on Friday night, parked dead-center of the paved lot, and woke up completely surrounded by dog vehicles.
I went into this race with some experimental team configurations. Normally, I run my strongest dogs (the "A Team") in the 6-dog class and bike with the rest (the "B Team"). Since Kuiper is old enough to join in, I found myself with enough dogs to compete in both 6-dog rig and 4-dog rig (although I'd be short one dog, since I only have nine in my race pool). Eyeballing the competition, I thought it would be a good opportunity to run my purebred Siberian huskies in the 6-dog registered breed class. That would leave Sagan and Hopper to run in 4-dog all breed, with one remaining Siberian. I decided to put Atlas in as the third dog on that team, to give them more power.
The end result was probably one of our worst races (except when my bike exploded during the Fair Hill Challenge many years ago), but it was (mostly) not the dogs' faults.
Day one was demoralizing for both teams. The chilly rain added to the misery. In 6-dog, we were running quite well, but then Faye stopped short to poop. Since she was in lead, this resulted in her tangling up with the dogs behind her. I had to jump off the rig to fix everyone, but I didn't fully untangle her line and it ended up under Willow's harness, which made her less eager to run the final stretch. On the one hand, I'm grateful I have a heavy rig with a digger brake so I can fix tangles like this. On the other hand, the 4-wheeled Fritz was a huge disadvantage on deep mud.
The 4-dog run was somehow even worse. We were already at a disadvantage with only three dogs on the team, but my new (to me) 3-wheeled Fritz had a stuck brake for the majority of the run. The dogs did their best, but it was a slog.
Day two was only slightly better. We had more poops fly during the 6-dog run, but I managed to hit the brakes fast enough to avoid any tangles. Unfortunately, we didn't make up much time because the trail had gotten that much more muddy. We were one whole second faster.
I knew not to use my left brake for 4-dog on day two, so that team got to run about a minute faster, which felt good. However, we noticed in the start chute that the front tire was fairly low on air, so once again, we were not in great mechanical shape. Even though the 3-wheeled Fritz is lighter, it was tough for three dogs to pull through the mud.
We managed to get fourth place in the 6-dog registered breed class, 9th out of 13 overall. We were 9th in the 4-dog all breed class, 21st out of 25 overall.
I am not a super competitive musher, but I feel like I let the dogs down by having suboptimal (or just plain broken) equipment at this race. I’m hoping we can shine in some snow races this winter—and we might just have a new racing rig for our final spring dryland race, if things go well.
